Christmas

[queerbychoice]

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.

Comments

[hansel25.livejournal.com]

I heard from unreliable sources that _If on a winter's night_ is a fantastic book!

I wish my friends would give me books for christmas.

And tell me how _The Singapore Grip_ is or what it's on when you've finished reading it.

Merry Christmas.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

The Singapore Grip is set in 1939 and seems to be in large part about the fall of the British government in Singapore. But I guess I'll know more when I actually read it.

I heard from the typically very reliable (and Singaporean!) rekraft that If on a Winter's Night a Traveler was awfully difficult to finish, despite being a neat idea. But I guess I'll know more about that too, when I actually read it (or try to).

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I have yet to make it all the way through If on a winter's night a traveler, but it's a well-written book. Just awfully frustrating.

Copenhagen, on the other hand, is flat-out brilliant--one of the rare plays that I find equally compelling on page and stage. Frayn in general is brilliant, really, and if you end up liking Copenhagen, you ought to check out Democracy.

Let us know how you feel about The Heather Blazing. I keep meaning to read Tóibín.