Christmas

My family is celebrating the non-religious holiday known as Christmas on December 24th this year, so I went to my grandparents' house and opened all my presents. I received assorted forms of chocolate in various containers, a $50 Target gift card, the CDs Back to Mine by the Pet Shop Boys and Another Green World by Brian Eno, and the following books:

• Heinrich Böll: Billiards at Half-Past Nine
• Italo Calvino: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount
• Lillian Faderman: Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir
• J. G. Farrell: The Singapore Grip
• Ellen Feldman: The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank
• Michael Frayn: Copenhagen
• Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist
• Masuji Ibuse: Black Rain
• Milan Kundera: The Art of the Novel
• Muriel Spark: The Bachelors and All the Stories of Muriel Spark
• Colm Tóibín: The Heather Blazing
• Elie Wiesel: The Gates of the Forest

I gave my mother the book What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger, my father California native plant seeds (Christmas berry, Cleveland sage, blue-eyed grass, and coyote brush), and my brother a clock radio and headphones. I gave Stardust scraps of wrapping paper to play with, and she squeaked excitedly in her usual mouselike way. I wonder whether she'll ever learn to meow like a normal cat?

I started reading Black Rain while at my grandparents' house, and now I want to keep doing that until I finish it. So I'm going to go do that now, and probably continue doing it every waking minute until I finish the book. It's no wonder that high-suspense books like J. K. Rowling's annoy me, when even extremely low-suspense books like Masuji Ibuse's (which is about the bombing of Hiroshima; I doubt that a plot based on that can get very unpredictable) are enough to make me drop all else in life and do nothing but read until I finish the book.