Reading the 20th Century discussion

Has anyone got any festive/Christmas themed books on the go, or any special books lined up to tackle over the holiday period?

So far I’ve read 3 mysteries with Christmas themes - not sure whether to indulge in any other Christmas reads. I’m also currently struggling to hit my reading challenge target after being very busy and then being hit by a bug!

I like a festive book but I am a bit up against it as I have other, non-festive books that have to go back to the library, and a book to read for my Book Group. That said, I notice that 'The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records' ends with 'Merry Xmas Everybody' by Slade, which is about as close as I'll get to a seasonally-tinged read this year.

I was just mulling this question further, and I was pondering how many genuinely great books there are with a festive theme? It seems to me that most festive books are not that great. So, I am interested in any books that you think have both a festive theme and are also great books. Over to you.

The only example I can think of, is the obvious Dickens classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ which has got the lot: profundity, an enduring message, and a wonderful plot.

Whenever Christmas comes around again I feel the need for a little Dickens... It doesn't have to be A Christmas Carol, any Dickens will do.

Mr Dickens and his Carol looks good, but I doubt that I will get time to read it this year.

‘Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a charming, comic, and ultimately poignant Christmas tale about the creation of the most famous Christmas tale ever written. It’s as foggy and haunted and redemptive as the original; it’s all heart, and I read it in a couple of ebullient, Christmassy gulps.’ Anthony Doerr, bestselling author of All The Light We Cannot See

'Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a novel of pure charm and humor, a terrific holiday tale. Samantha Silva had me haunting those dark streets alongside her inspired Dickens.' Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

Charles Dickens should be looking forward to Christmas. But when his latest book, Martin Chuzzlewit, is a flop, his publishers give him an ultimatum. Either he writes a Christmas book in a month or they will call in his debts and he could lose everything. Dickens has no choice but to grudgingly accept...

One of my favourite Christmas themed books, although it is not at all cheery, is Christmas Holiday

My review:

Without doubt, Maugham must be one of the most underrated authors in the English language. "Christmas Holiday" is perhaps not one of his best known novels, but it is certainly has interesting themes and characters and will give you much to think about. Written in 1939, it concerns a young man called Charley Mason, expectant and excited about a visit to Paris. The trip is a reward for Charley working with his father for a year and he intends to meet up with his old friend Simon Fenimore, who spent a lot of time with his family as a boy in school holidays, being on his own in the world. Although he filled Charley's mother with a sense of unease, Charley considers him his closest friend and looks forward to spending time with him; but when he arrives in Paris he finds Simon much changed.

Charley, open hearted and unsuspicious, is hoping for an uncomplicated visit - seeing some pictures, visiting with his friend, getting out and about on the town. Instead he finds Simon less eager to see him than he hoped and then his old friend mischieviously links him up with Princess Olga in a high class bordello. Her real name is Lydia and Maugham uses Charley to unfold her story - a refugee from the revolution who falls in love with a murderer. Although war as such is never mentioned, there is a real sense of unease and despair about the book. Charley and his family are clinging to a way of life which, we are aware, will soon end forever and politics are clearly on the mind of everyone. Before long, Charley's attitudes are being challenged and his holiday is to test his comfortable beliefs.

Many books with the word "Christmas" in them are either saccharine sweet or overly sentimental. Many of them are, frankly, pretty awful. If you, or your reading group, are looking for something darker, edgier, with more to discuss, this may be a good choice for you. It is not a traditional Christmas read, but unlike many on the market, you will certainly want to keep this one to read again.

Maugham's Christmas Holiday is the only one with 'Christmas' in the title which I would read again, but I do have a couple of cold weather books lined up if that counts: Under a Pole Star and Winter.

I like a Golden Age mystery and recently read A Christmas Party which I enjoyed.

I really enjoyed Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford. It's not the most Christmassy, but it's a lot of fun. From my review, "Christmas Pudding reminded me of Vile Bodies or Decline and Fall where everything is so ridiculous and twisty but fun. The whole premise of the tutor who's not really a tutor, and the serious book that wasn't taken seriously were just too funny and worked out about how you expected. Add in people who are in the country but hate the country, frivolous parents who don't seem too concerned with their child, and pretty young girls and you have a great bunch of characters. " (My copy is Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie. I didn't care for Pigeon Pie as much, which is why I don't usually care for volumes with multiple titles.)

I confess: I've never read A Christmas Carol... [ducks]

Roman Clodia wrote: "I confess: I've never read A Christmas Carol... [ducks]" I have never read a word by Dickens (unless you count radio adaptations)!

Roman Clodia wrote: "I confess: I've never read A Christmas Carol... [ducks]"

You know, I don't know that I have either... I've seen so many productions of it over the years that I know the story, but... yeah, I don't know that I've read it.


Another, completely different in tone than my first mention, is Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris.

I only read A Christmas Carol as it was a book group read about 10 years ago.

Over familiarity cannot diminish it though. It's magnificent. Highly recommended.

Val wrote: "Maugham's Christmas Holiday is the only one with 'Christmas' in the title which I would read again ..."


I agree. It is very good. I wasn't sure I'd read it though. Until I checked. I have - and I liked it.

Here's my review from 2012...

A clever, readable and entertaining book. Deceptively simple. W Somerset Maugham uses the contrasting personalities of Charley and Simon to highlight some of the profound and disturbing changes taking place in mainland Europe during the late 1930s (when he wrote the story). W Somerset Maugham was remarkably prescient about the horrors and inhumanity that was about to unfold. And, despite this, the book is very readable - giving the reader insights into Russian refugees living in Paris, convicts, and a lower middle class French family adapting to the death of the father during World War One. The characters of Simon and Robert Berger are particularly interesting and well drawn, and Lydia makes an enigmatic, complex cypher for the book's more philosophical points.

This is only my second book by W Somerset Maugham. The first was Ashenden. Both share the same qualities: beguiling, well written, insightful, intriguing, informative, entertaining, and quietly profound.

Hugh wrote: "I have never read a word by Dickens (unless you count radio adaptations)!"

OMG Hugh, how is that possible?! I especially love Dickens' late, big books: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend - though I still have a soft spot for A Tale of Two Cities after our French teacher at school took us to see the old Dirk Bogart film when I was at an impressionable age!

I spent an entire Christmas holiday, when I was about ten, reading Oliver Twist. I haven't read all his novels, but I've read a few of them and I know Judy is a huge fan.

I bet ten is the perfect age to read Oliver! I didn't come to it till I was at university and it paled beside the later books.

I think it was a great age to read it. I'd seen the film, so I had some idea of what it entailed, it was about a child and I just remember loving it and being totally swept away.

Scary, too, I bet!

Susan wrote: "Mr Dickens and his Carol looks good, but I doubt that I will get time to read it this year.

‘Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a charming, c..."

I would be interested to read this - I made a note of it when you recommended it previously, Susan, but haven't got to it yet. I am indeed a big Dickens fan and always aim to read A Christmas Carol and/or at least one of his other Christmas books over the season. I also like watching films of the Carol - the Alistair Sim version is a favourite but unfortunately they tend to inflict a hideous colourised version where everyone is bright pink on TV viewers in the UK.

I also started with Oliver Twist when I was 10 or 11! I remember sitting in the school library and reading a big yellowing hardback which had good reproductions of Cruikshank's illustrations - this then led me on to all the other novels, many times over, and much more!

I've always been so put off by the sentimentality of TV A Christmas Carol that it might hang-over the book - mind you, I sobbed through Little Nell's death so I'm clearly not completely immune to sentimentality!

I think Edwin Drood's being adapted for TV - I keep meaning to read it - wonder what the TV version will do about the ending?

Some adaptations are much better than others, R.C. There was an adaptation of Edwin Drood for TV in 2012, which I thought started well but then got increasingly ridiculous as the scriptwriter made more and more up... just don't get me started on the ending! It looks as if this version has just come out on DVD but I'll give it a miss...

Not sure if the book Susan highlights above is connected to the new film The Man Who Invented Christmas....


A new film, The Man Who Invented Christmas, shows that how Charles Dickens wrote was just as important as the great works he penned

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Includes....

A Christmas Carol was a book for reading aloud, composed for that time of year when a family might share the thrills of a ghost story. Stevens shows Dickens composing, speaking the lines and the voices, as apparently he did. We hear fragments of the text itself, but not enough to catch Dickens’s most remarkable gift: the fizz of his sentences. Only Dickens could have begun a novel with something so ominous yet facetious as the first sentence of A Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” So, indeed we begin, with the dead awakening, a joking pun and surely the most expressive colon in English fiction. Soon the narrator is reaching for what a proper literary writer should avoid: a cliche. “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” The dead poetry of colloquial English revives....

"Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin‑nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile …”

It's a great article

Val wrote: "Maugham's Christmas Holiday is the only one with 'Christmas' in the title which I would read again, but I do have a couple of cold weather books lined up if that counts: Under ..."</i>

I just finished this as well although the version I read was titled [book:Envious Casca. Definitely a fun Christmas mystery.

Bronwyn wrote: "I really enjoyed Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford. It's not the most Christmassy, but it's a lot of fun. From my review, "Christmas Pudding reminded me of Vile Bodies ..."

Definitely a fun read. It's been on my Christmas wish list for the last 2 years but my husband still hasn't bought it for me. Been wanting to reread it so I'll probably have to buy it for myself.

I liked Christmas Pudding, but it wasn't very Christmassy. Still, I do like Nancy Mitford. I read all her novels a couple of years back and must read all her non-fiction and her letters.

I think there are quite a few great Christmas works but they often tend to be short, like A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas or the short story The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry.

My family tends to dip into an old Penguin anthology called The Christmas Reader (I can't find it in GR) which contains a lot of short stories, essays and poems etc.

Judy, there is a programme on BBC4 which might interest you (and other UK members of the group, of course!), Mrs Dickens Family Christmas, Sunday, 8pm. It was previously shown on BBC2 a number of years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018nt6m

The Mystery of Edwin Drood follows it.

Thanks Susan! That Mrs Dickens programme is presented by Sue Perkins - I saw it a few years ago and remember that it really annoyed me for some reason (presumably there was some information or commentary which set my Dickens purist hackles rising!) so I will give it a miss. It might well appeal to others though and I think a Victorian feast is served.

As I've also vented my spleen about the Edwin Drood adaptation, I'm now sounding very grumpy, so apologies to all... I will try not to turn into Scrooge. ;)

For fans of Laurie Lee, Derek Jacobi will be reading from his collection of short pieces, Village Christmas And Other Notes on the English Year , as Radio 4's Book of the Week next week, at 9.45am each day from Monday to Friday.

This will also be available on the Radio 4 website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kdhy2

I read this last Christmas and found it an uneven collection, but the pieces about his childhood and some of the others are lovely - hopefully they will have picked the best ones for the radio.

Great news Judy. Thanks. We should probably have a Laurie Lee thread.

Thanks Nigeyb - I will set one up.

Judy, having watched, "Mrs Dickens' Family Christmas," I can see why you didn't like it. Not that I am without sympathy for his wife (I am a wife, and mother, after all, and my sympathy tends towards the female!) but Sue Perkins is very hard on Dickens and looks at his marriage with very modern eyes.

He was certainly a very interesting man, If you were to suggest a Dickens biography, which would it be?

Thanks Susan, I think that might well have been what annoyed me! I also have a lot of sympathy for Catherine Dickens, who suffered so much and was deserted for a much younger woman, but it annoys me when people seem to get so angry about their break-up, because after all we never really know what goes on in anyone else's relationship - let alone one from a previous century.

Sadly we can't really "know" Catherine very well because so few of her letters are available - there was a biography of her a few years ago but I found it a disappointment because it was heavily based on Dickens's letters, which I had already read, and hardly seemed to quote her own words at all!

I don't think there has been a really great biography of Dickens to be honest but Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin was pretty good and I think it is the most up-to-date one, so that is probably the one I'd recommend. It does go over some of the same material in her previous book The Invisible Woman about his secret relationship with Ellen Ternan. I've read quite a few bios over the years...

I saw Dickens: A Biography Dickens: A Biography which was later than the Claire Tomalin one. Just wondered which, if either, you would go with. I have read The Invisible Woman and I also enjoyed Girl in a Blue Dress which is fiction, but based on Catherine Dickens life.

Susan, the Fred Kaplan biography is much older than the Tomalin one. I remembered buying it in the 1980s - just checked and it first came out in 1988. He might have updated it since or this might just be a reprint. It's a long time since I read this but I do remember it is quite readable but goes over some things very quickly where other biographies go into more detail. Out of the older biographies, I liked the ones by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Johnson more than the Kaplan one, but the Ackroyd one is very eccentric!

P.S. Another fairly recent bio is Charles Dickens by Michael Slater - this is a literary biography so it is mainly about his books and doesn't have so much about his life. I enjoyed this one too.

Oh, OK. New edition, perhaps. I actually have the Tomalin one on my kindle, but I think I need to tackle the Woolf one first - which I am really looking forward to. I actually really enjoyed, "Mrs Dalloway," when I re-read it and I think knowing some background about the novel from The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature really helped. I also have Tomalin's autobiography, which I recently downloaded when it was on sale.

Have you read, Girl in a Blue Dress?

Susan, just edited my earlier comment as I realised I'd forgotten to mention the Edgar Johnson and Peter Ackroyd biographies - can you tell that I've spent a lot of time reading Dickens biographies? ;)

I haven't read Girl in a Blue Dress, but will make a a note of it.

Goodness, I have the Michael Slater one on my kindle too, Judy!

I find Peter Ackroyd a difficult author. I have tried a couple of his books and, while I like the sound of the book, when I've read them, I have found them fairly boring. I think I struggle with his writing style.

Don't worry, by the way. If you have read a lot of Dickens biographies, I have read far more Beatles biographies! The thing is, if you are passionate about something, or someone, there is always a new nugget in each book and it is worth reading just for that.

Susan wrote: "The thing is, if you are passionate about something, or someone, there is always a new nugget in each book and it is worth reading just for that...."

Very true. With Dickens, I've read the 12 volumes of his letters, and most biographies tend to be largely based on those - but there are still always other revelations in each new book, and it's often interesting to read one which focuses on a particular aspect of his life or work. And I will now get off my hobby horse...:)

There are three volumes available free on kindle, Judy.

The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 1, 1833-1856
The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 2, 1857-1870
The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 3, 1836-1870

Are those abridged versions of the 12 volumes? I can't find those on Amazon.

I am exactly the same. You start out reading a Beatles biography. Then, you are reading individual biographies. Then you are reading a whole book on a week they spent in Scotland, or the biography of their manager, or a book about a tour... It is only when you read a lot of books about a certain thing that you recognise the discrepancies as well.

Susan wrote: "There are three volumes available free on kindle, Judy.

The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 1, 1833-1856
The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 2, 1857-1870
The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 3, 18..."

I believe those are the original 3 volumes which were abridged/censored by his daughter and sister-in-law. The 12-volume Pilgrim Letters include all the bits they cut out and a lot more letters discovered since - they are mega-expensive but luckily my local library had them all.

Interesting, Judy. Thanks for clarifying.

I found them now you mentioned Pilgrim letters and those are expensive! Your library is better than mine, which is worse than useless now it is run by 'volunteers,' and the local council have taken away most of the space and cut the opening hours...

I did find The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

I’ve read Charles Dickens, by Jane Smiley. I gave it 3 stars at the time and I also read, a Girl in a Blue which was very interesting. A fictional Dickens and Catherine is created and the story unfolds. How they first met and the start of the relationship. How she was sidelined. I thought it was good.

It’s fascinating reading biographies and different accounts about an author that you read. That, obviously, they were real people with issues and emotions, but it’s a bit like when we were children and thought teachers were just teachers and didn’t have lives outside of that.

I love reading biographies about writers.

I have the Kaplan book. Haven't read it yet but I have had it for several years.

I have London: The Biography by Ackroyd.

I am reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Never actually read it before. In fact, I've never read anything by Dickens before. Always mean to but never do so now I am. If this sounds a little loopy, it's because I'm fighting a nasty cold and feel loopy.

Fair enough, Lynaia :) Hope you are enjoying it.

Jan, I did read London: The Biography when it came out and I think it was one of Ackroyd's better books.

Susan wrote: "I found them now you mentioned Pilgrim letters and those are expensive! Your library is better than mine, which is worse than useless now it is run by 'volunteers,' and the local council have taken..."

Well, my local libraries bought those books a long time ago - not sure they could afford to do so now, sadly, as they have also been hit by cuts in funding. They do still provide a good service though.