Kicking off #Booksgiving for 2025

I keep doing this in celebration of the joy that books, stories, and reading bring me all 365 days of the year. You'll see if you follow the link just how much pleasure this annual event brings me.

The Icelandic Jólabókaflóð is an annual custom of giving to, recieving from, and reading with, a book to your loved ones on Christmas Eve. I'd love to believe that custom is spreading in 2025 because books are some of the few items inexpensive enough to make sense as gifts in this recession. Even the expensive illustrated books are, comparatively, cheap when tariffs are biting budgets. Over $100 added to the average Yule shopper's 2025 expenditures just for tariffs.

It makes sense to emulate Miss Dolly Parton in giving books to children, every chance you get but particularly when their attention is so highly fractured by everything going on in their world. I've picked some of the most fun-for-me to read and look at picture books as ideas for you to gift to the niblings/grands in your life. Starter links:

Juvenile non-fiction
Juvenile books in total
middle-grade literature.

Their older sibs need reading material, too: YA across genres including our queer youth.

Need something for a guy? A stereotypical gift for a man you don't know well, or one you do and know what lind of STEM reaging he does? A few jumping-off points:
Cars.
Booze/drinking.

Always thinking of the entertainment world? A giftee on your list a music/film fan? Plenty of illustrated gift books to give, ranging from single-song treatises to film-genre studies! Or is there a petrol/gearhead among those you want to spoil? Bet they'll like the single-make studies or the industry-segment overviews on this #Booksgiving list. Celebrity culture.

I'm pretty sure we're all united by our love of The Book, the object that carries stories and information into our heads. Pretty illustrated books about books there are here. Books about books.

Pretty books about the natural world, about the cultures we don't know we don't know about, about gardens, food, drinks, about history...entering a topic in the search box will get you a ton of ideas:
Art books.
Gardens and gardening.

Of course most everyone loves them a mystery, or a thriller. Got y'all covered on those fronts, too: Mystery series.Thriller.

None of these are exhaustive...exhausting, up to you to decide, but incomplete and with the expected enshittified results that our tech masters think are good enough for the likes of us. There are a lot of reviews here, so think of a category, search for it, and very possibly it will turn up useful results. I have tried hard to do that over the past twelve and a half years of reviewing.

RAGNAR JÓNASSON'S PAGE: The Criminologist Helgi Reykdal three-book series

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING CRIME WRITER
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One winter evening bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing.

There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective, Helgi, to crack the case before it's leaked to the press.

As he interviews the people closest to her—a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge—he realises that Elín’s life wasn’t what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than her stories.

As the case of the missing crime writer becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of a very unexpected life . . .

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Three timelines again: 1965 (investigated by Hulda, whom we see but all is not what it seems), 2005, and book-present, 2012. Dirty deeds done in each. It is now a Ragnar trope. While each one was, in fact, required to resolve the crime Helgi's investigating, the book-present ends on a cliffhanger...but not the one you're expecting. Still, the phobic about such things should know that before committing to the read.

Elín S. Jónsdóttir seemed to me to be Over It All before she disappeared...her 2005 interview (with Kristin, fellow series-readers) was, shall we say, adversarial and quite insinuating. I was left with an impression that this would go somewhere more central than it did...still played its part in a different way. It is not presented anywhere in its entirety, but is broken into chunks...I saw why, but it took time.

I think this might be the thing I enjoy most about Ragnar's storyverse. Everything does always connect up, only sometimes not where you thought it would. Helgi is a listener first and foremost. He comes across to more action-loving procedural readers as a bit passive. He's a thinking machine. (Anybody remember Futrelle's character, or am I the sole survivor?) Only better-looking....

It's a series, and it slots into other series written by Ragnar; the storyverse must needs be left a bit baggy at the knees in individual cases to work the way they must as a unit. One consistent factor that appeals to me is Helgi's explicit love and reverence for Dame Agatha Christie. It is obvious to me that Ragnar wants the Icelandic love of reading and its astonishing book culture to be on display in this series. Fine by me! You go, reader-boy! "That's what books are for: they help you travel to places you wouldn't otherwise be able to visit, journey through worlds that don't exist." I'd have that tattooed on me if I could think of a place to have it where I wouldn't have to explain who "Helgi" was every five minutes.

Lastly, let me just say that I hate Bergthora even more now. And Helgi needs to get that mess sorted by professional means. He's a cop faGawdsake!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DEATH AT THE SANATORIUM
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1983

At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There, they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested following false testimony from one of the nurses, but subsequently released.

Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician, is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir, rules his death as suicide and assumes that he was guilty of the murder as well. The case is closed.

2012

Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal, a young police officer, has been studying criminology in the UK, but decides to return to Iceland when he is offered a job at the Reykjavik police department—the job which detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from.

He is also a collector of golden age detective stories, and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past, and starts his new job, he decides to try to meet with the original suspects. But soon he finds silence and suspicion at every turn, as he tries to finally solve the mystery from years before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: At last we really *meet* Helgi. He does appear in Whiteout, though not very prominently. I say this with all the love in my heart...I like Helgi more than Ari Thór as a lead character. He's still got the bookishness, the clear love of puzzle-solving; he is a bit more of a distinctive character to me because he's explicitly an Agathan. It comes through in this resolution to an unresolved murder ("cold case" just feels on the nose for Icelandic crimes somehow) previously worked by Hulda Hermannsdottir, whose retirement he is enjoying by being brought home to Iceland from the UK to replace her.

One of humanity's great achievements, largely undersung about, is the reduction of TB from pandemic to chronic disease. As John Green reports in his Everything is Tuberculosis, an excellent book and a must-read for those in need of heartening, it's been a partial victory but still a very significant one. This murder took place in a TB asylum in 1983 as its use case was disappearing. In the novel's present day, 2012, the asylum is empty of patients and used as a research facility. As Helgi assumes his duties, he uses retired Hulda's involvement in the unsolved murder as the topic of his dissertation; so now he is in the same country as the scene of the crime, he determines to find out what really happened in 1983. This does mean we spend more time with Hulda. That's not a bad thing for Helgi or we-the-reader. Old wounds are not healed, it would seem, and another murder occurs that needs solving as Helgi's poking around picks up steam.

Vintage Ragnar-style, the setting is spooky and cold and full of bad energy or haunted by ghosts or something like that...it's never really explicit just what it is, which leaves room for we-the-reader to decide what works best. The limited pool of suspects for the original killing is still alive, so no problems of needing a medium to conduct interviews. It might've been safer that way. Helgi goes about studying the crime, the building a case for the new crime, with the same calm, assured demeanor. His doubts, like his very murky personal life...I hate his partner Bergthora a LOT!...are present in the story but not very foregrounded. I appreciate Ragnar offering us a sleuth-centered procedural that does not feel the need to make it indistinguishable from a domestic novel.

It was, if anything, a bit gothic in its TB ward in snowy conditions, an unknown killer stalking the place, whose identity I genuinely never expected to know...I thought this would remain an unsolved case...but when revealed became inevitable and so very sad. There is a brief excursion from 1983 back to 1950, that while necessary is definitely a pacing-killer. Ragnar's books aren't tearaway action plots. In this dual-timeline story, the pace is of necessity slower as there is much to relearn about the old killing. Helgi is a character who listens more than he talks. That won't work well for all readers but does for me.

Why I'm missing a star from the review is simple. There's a kind of coda on the ending that...annoyed me. You'll see, but maybe won't agree with me that it was an unnecessary add-on to a really absorbing, involving read.

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WHITEOUT
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Quentin Bates)
Orenda Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When the body of a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted Icelandic village of Kálfshamarvík, police officer Ari Thór Arason uncovers a startling and terrifying connection to an earlier series of deaths, as the killer remains on the loose...

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík.

Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop?

With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier.

As the dark history and its secrets of the village are unveiled, and the death toll begins to rise, the Siglufjordur detectives must race against the clock to find the killer, before another tragedy takes place.

Dark, chilling and complex, Whiteout is a haunting, atmospheric and stunningly plotted thriller from one of Iceland's bestselling crime writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ari Thór is very much the center of the action here; I tell you that because this page is dedicated to the latest series-starrer Helgi Reykdal. He appears in this book, so I'm not just being capricious.

Ari Thór is asked by Tómas, now a superintending detective from Reykjavík, formerly Ari Thór's boss, to be on the team investigating this crime. Helgi, as a UK-trained criminologist, is on it too, in a less visible capacity than Ari Thór. The basic mystery is why the young victim, raised in this now-abandoned village, is there dead in the same place her mother and sister were each found dead not all that long ago.

Family secrets, societal ills, the usual suspects...and speaking of suspects you'll know who committed the crime quite soon, if you're at all experienced in the ways of crime fiction. That said, the real reason to read the story is the wonderfully evocative writing, a setting both familiar...what genre reader hasn't read at least one Icelandic mystery in 2025?...and foreign enough to give one the frisson of difference from one's surroundings. The seasonality is very much a part of the appeal as well. It's close to Yule, and cold...Iceland, remember...and full of little sidebars about rituals (Jólabókaflóð!) and legends that both inform the action and involve the reader. This reader, anyway. I'm not sure if I like Ari Thór as much as Helgi from the later books, but they're both unrepentant bookwyrms: “The usual magnificent tree stood in the center of the Town Hall Square. The people of Siglufjordur were quietly getting ready for the holiday...with evening mass at the old church and then dinner and unwrapping of presents, followed by what in Ari Thór’s mind was one of the most important Christmas Eve traditions of all—the reading of a book well into the night.”

My homie, is Ari Thór. Yours too, I suspect, if you're reading this. I haven't seen Ari Thór since I took up with the more cinnamon-bun-y Helgi, but both are deeply convinced readers, so either is welcome. There's a condign resolution to this tragedy, and there's the satisfying sense of ma'at being served in faraway Iceland that now feels more like a home-from-home than a strange Norse myth of a country.

Starting your acquaintance with Ragnar's world right here is no bad thing. What you don't already know is gently explained to you. The ending might be a bit...pat...for some readers, including me, but be patient and pursue the series. It does make sense. Remember Ragnar is writing in a storyverse that just happens to be set in a real country, and enjoy the tidbits.

It's #Booksgiving again...a version of the Jólabókaflóð Iceland loves!

As we slide into another Turkey Day, I'm supposed to feel thankful for things by US custom. 2024 hasn't showered me with news or events or trends I feel at all accepting of, still less thankful for, and has taken away from me some comforting illusions about how resistant to manipulation, and how vigilant against lies and incitements of base urges, people are. Apparently all y'all gotta learn the hardest way there is to believe Them when They tell you what the plan is.



Apparently 2024 is going to be a year where, in my struggle to find some hope if not happiness, it's going to be in pursuing a program based around #ReadingIsResistance...again. So I'm grateful for the beauty and the abundance and the variety of experience that lives in the books we have such a smorgasbord of available to us. (If we vigilantly protect our right to access it, of course.) The year had so many top-flight reads for me, in so many categories, that I didn't think I'd be able to squeeze them all into the few weeks between Turkey Day and Yule.



Jólabókaflóðið is, this year, a more important holiday tradition to start than usual. I'm very distressed at how little books mean to modern kids. The best way I know to make books meaningful to these impressionable minds is to show them your own interest in the art of reading. Share books with kids every way you can. Buy them for your own kids and grands and niblings. Don't have the means, or the kids? Donate what you can afford to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library! In this era of crowdfunding, I really shouldn't need to explain the multiplicative effect of small donations.



The Icelandic tradition began as a response to privation, as Lauren Oster wrote in Smithsonian Magazine:

The Jólabókaflóð traces back to Iceland’s transformation in World War II. In 1944, Iceland was a newly independent nation with a beleaguered wartime economy and 15,000 occupying Allied troops. {Per Heiðar Ingi Svansson,the president of the Icelandic Publishers Association:} “Because of the bad economy and depression, there were quotas or very strict restrictions on many things you could import...that limited very much the selection of commodity goods that you could choose as Christmas gifts. But paper was one of the few commodities not rationed during the war—so paper was imported to produce books that were written and then printed in Iceland.” That fortuitous supply—and an infusion of occupation-related money—dovetailed beautifully with Icelanders’ literary leanings.

Their tradition of reading together on long winter nights without any other entertainment is, of course, very much not the media landscape we in the West now inhabit. There's no denying, however, that the looming economic threats presented by the incoming administration's stated goal of raising tariffs on consumer goods bids fair to make books a vastly more appealing and affordable gift for all your giftees, of all ages.



I'll focus #Booksgiving, as has been my habit, on books as gifts in the first part of the lead-up to Yule. I hope the books I'm excited about will excite you, too, and suggest themselves as gifts for your circle of loved ones.

As the delivery times begin to bite, though, I'll shift to those things you can gift yourself as supplies to hoard against what my old friend Stasia contends is the imminent "Worldwide Book Famine" that looms over every librocubicularist's nightmares. My very first suggestion, and my 2024 pick for the six-stars-of-five peak reading experience, can't be anything other than the unforgettable, thrilling GLORIOUS EXPLOITS by the Irish debut novelist FERDIA LENNON. He took the absolutely grim fate of defeated Athenian soldiers in the quarries of Syracuse, infused it with hope and a kind of energy not usually found in Classical stories retold, and made it fresh thereby. I have thought about this story, in its oddly fitting Irish intonations, as the year has unfolded very, very much against my preferences and needs. I felt ever-greater kinship with these beleaguered, even doomed men as they sought respite from their hopeless circumstances. Even among the victors their belief in the power of creative storytelling to alleviate misery and offer what comfort there can be in the darkest of times found resonances.

There is always hope for our shared humanity to come through, and come together.


Still missing my dear, departed Dutch friend Anita.

This #Booksgiving, then, is unusually relevant to the need we as readers should all feel to make a positive difference in our world. The best way, bar none, to do this is to model values that are crucial to the mental health of the world: tolerance, kindness, communication, and acceptance. I'll say to the inevitable complainer that tolerance does NOT include the intolerant in its circumference. This is called the paradox of tolerance, and it is a refutation in fact of "both-sides"ism. During this Holiday-rich season, you're going to face someone (quite possibly someone you love) who will trot out this long-disproven fallacy with the triumphant air of one who has struck a killer blow. This is the moment where #ReadingIsResistance shows its worth. Read up in advance; the list of books I've reviewed includes stuff from the technocratic through the popularized to the expanded listicle, all replete with rejoinders to that entrenched bunkerized ignorance.


This #Booksgiving review blast being a standing tradition on my blog, I'll suggest that you browse your way through past reviews, looking at the books I've included under the tag since 2017. The list is self-updating, and can be accessed here.


An author book reading in December at Gunnarshús, the home of the Writers’ Union of Iceland.

In a world of Lady Bracknells, strive instead to be Cecily Cardew.

The annual #Booksgiving reviewing season starts today

#Booksgiving is my own interpretation of Iceland's Jolabokaflod. As holiday celebrations go, few rival Yule (Christmas, Noël, Wiehnacht...Solstice celebrations all) in economic reach and effect. The reason today, the Friday after US "Thanksgiving", is called "Black Friday" is not just an acknowledgment that retail workers are in a justifiably horrible mood today but because their corporate masters are "in the black" with the sales rung up today. Later additions, like "Cyber Monday" and the like, are also based around the consumers of the country getting their shop on.



This year, I'm going to be posting the usual couple of weeks of book reviews...the things I've read this year that I particularly liked. I'll be using the hashtag #Booksgiving. At first I'll focus on things I think you'd give as Yule gifts, then switch to things you can feel good about gifting to yourselves. The idea's to make your own lists and your own versions of the "Yule Book Flood" come together in your minds. This being the fourth time I'm doing this you can get my recommended gift purchases for yourselves and others by clicking on any of the tags at the bottom of the post.

Adopt/adapt this lovely gemütlicht custom for your own!

That's a wrap on DELIVERIES for 2022!

It's the time of the season where it's not very likely you're gonna get stuff you haven't already ordered...and I'm hopeful you wouldn't add to the problems of the season by trying!

Now is the time to alter focus from the gifts to the givers. Jólabókaflóð...the "Yule Book Flood" from Icelandic custom I talk about every year...is about the giving and reading of books to yourself, your loved ones, and heck why not chuck a few at random strangers?

It's next week, for most of the Western countries, this formerly sacred holiday. Think about the pace-slackening idea of setting an evening aside to read your special book chosen for just this purpose, all together in one space. Start a new tradition, and even if it's you by yourself with a book...it's always you, the author, and all the characters spending quality time together.

From here on through the 24th, I'll be reviewing some books I hope you'll want to give yourself the pleasure of reading for the first time. You're done buying for others, or if you're not you're so stressed out, and need something...just...so.

Enjoy the bells from a comfy distance with your brand-new self-gifted pleasure read! Happy Yuletide festivities!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: #BOOKSGIVING!

As holiday celebrations go, few rival Yule (Christmas, Noël, Wiehnacht, Solstice celebrations all) in the economic reach. The reason today, the Friday after US "Thanksgiving", is called "Black Friday" is not just an acknowledgment that retail workers are in a justifiably horrible mood today but because their corporate masters are "in the black" with the sales rung up today. Later additions, like "Cyber Monday" and the like, are also based around the consumers of the country getting their shop on.

Gift-giving is a joy, at least when it's done from a full-hearted and heartful place. I enjoy giving people things whenever I'm able to. I'm far from alone in that. It's a solid chunk of the reason we have a gift-giving holiday in the first place, after all. what's so delightful about the Jólabókaflóð is it's *not* about ritual exchange of stuff, property; it's about the community-reinforcing act of sharing companionship, being together, and reading instead of staring at moving images. You can make the moving images in your brain! Isn't that what a story is when it's in a book? It's words that create images and feelings and evoke the reader's full participation! (Ideally, anyway.)

There are regional variations all over the world now. There are starter kits. There are explainers and, of all things, a Jólabókaflóð Kickstarter!

I've used the hashtag #Booksgiving because, at least to my own eyes, it's easier to scan than the Icelandic version. I do love the idea of the Yule Book Flood, whose origins are in wartime scarcity, but realistically if *I* can't say it, who not fluent in either Icelandic or Old English could?

What I do for the rest of the giving season is tag reviews "#Booksgiving" all over the blog. They're the books I think merit your consideration for giving purposes...books I especially like, I found extraordinarily compelling, or simply know that there's a reason someone would love to open up as their celebratory reading.

At the bottom of this post, you'll see the "#Booksgiving" tag...click on it, and the latest reviews tagged with it will show up. All of them, from the six years I've used this custom, will appear...anything I've reviewed...and I heartily recommend them.

May the Jólasveinar, Iceland's thirteen Santas (known in English translation as the Yule Lads), leave you books in your stockings or shoes or other present-receiving receptacles and not an old potato or lump of coal (where would they even find one of those nowadays?).

#Booksgiving time...your new annual treat

#Booksgiving, y'all, is my translation of Iceland's Jólabókaflóð (yo-la-bok-a-flot)—the annual tradition, most of a century old, of giving your gifting circle books for the long winter's nights ahead. As Iceland is a far northern country that straddles the American and Eurasian geological worlds, let's adopt this idea with more than usual glee. A country like Iceland has a lot to teach us quarantine-prone global plague survivors about how to spend a lot of time indoors whether one wants to or not.

What's so different about the idea of giving books for the holidays, I hear you ask. And rightly so, as most US, Canadian, and UK publishers rely on the gifting season for most sales...but the focus of #Booksgiving as I'm calling it isn't just the buying. It's mostly the reading. On Christmas Eve, Icelandic families exchange their gifts, and then...wait for it...settle in and read their new books! This is the beauty of the custom. "Thanks for the book, Aunt Lurlene," as it hits the shelf behind the laundry-room door. "I bet it's a corker." And fire up the terabyte-stuffed Xbox! But...and this is crucial...can you *get* the Xbox? The supply-chain problems around the world aren't easing quickly...the factories are struggling to find their rhythm...and while tree-books are having this issue too, your phone or your tablet's a Kindle at your command. Or, half-bit fruit company dupes, your iCrap connects to Apple Books.

Maybe try this new idea, this read-on-a-device-you-already-have in a group idea, in this straitened, inflationary, second pandemic holiday season. There maybe won't be a big gathering this year either; there might not be much electronic bling; but instead, a room full of people who love each other enough to stop fighting and be still in their own company...and read! If it works in snowed-in Iceland, it can work is bottled-up Birmingham, can't it? You'll never know without trying.

A formally organized holiday observance celebrating the immersive, escapist pleasures that reading offers is ideal to adopt in a crazy climate of lockdowns, easings leading to skyrocketing infections, and the general insecurity and instability of this second plague year. Icelandic publishers, like publishers across the world, depend on Holiday sales to fuel their activities for the other ten and a half months of the year.

The Icelandic book industry, however, benefits from the unique, government-sanctioned and supported "Bókatíðindi" or book catalog containing listings of the titles Icelandic publishers are hoping you'll fall in love with and give as gifts. It is mailed free of charge to every household! And, in case you're thinking "well, how many publishers can there be in a country with fewer residents than the Upper West Side?" the fact is that Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country on Earth: 3.5 per 1,000 people! Add to that the fact that one in ten Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime, and the effect and the appeal of this long-standing custom are made clear.

So in this weird, off-kilter year, this holy-goddesses-is-THIS-normal-now Christmas, I'm suggesting that you add this relatively inexpensive and supremely easy gift-giving strategy to your list. It's always been easy to order someone a book online, well since 1995 and the launch of Amazon anyway; and the idea of spending another socially distanced Christmas Eve in your jammies with cocoa, warm socks, and a book you got (or gave yourself!) as a gift sounds pretty darned good. Let's make cranberry juice out of those cranberries that Fate lobbed at us! (Okay, the "lemonade-from-life's-lemons" metaphor doesn't translate to Yuletide very well. Don't @ me.)

So what I'm going to do, not for the first time!, is review only the books I believe will make wonderful gifts for yourself and your readerly loved ones. Click on one of the tags at the bottom of this post, you'll get everything that has that tag served right up. You can also use the search box at the top left of the screen to find "#Booksgiving" suggestions from all four of the prior years I've been yodeling this idea into the internet's vastness. This year's reviews, all of which are recommendations, will happen between now and Yule. Signing up for emails of new posts will make sure you get inspired...and will be able to follow the links to procure the books or ebooks. (As a reminder, I do not use affiliate links, and you do not see any advertising on this blog. I am unpaid except in free books...and believe me that's enough for me!)

Happy ending for 2021? We're not out of the woods yet, we've got vaccine resisters and COVID deniers galore. But we also have hope, with new disease-management medications coming sooner than ever before in history thanks to Science. So why not try a new slant on our Western consumer-society's wretched excess-fest. One that privileges the quiet, intimate pleasure of reading with someone you care for. I guarantee it can't hurt to try.

It's #Booksgiving again!

#Booksgiving, y'all, is my translation of Iceland's Jólabókaflóð (yo-la-bok-a-flot)—the annual tradition, most of a century old, of giving your gifting circle books for the long winter's nights ahead. As Iceland is a far northern country that straddles the American and Eurasian geological worlds, let's adopt this idea woth more than usual glee. A country like Iceland has a lot to teach us quarantine-weary global Southerners about how to spend a lot of time indoors whether one wants to or not.

What's so different about the idea of giving books for the holidays, I hear you ask. And rightly so, as most US, Canadian, and UK publishers rely on the gifting season for most sales...but the focus of #Booksgiving as I'm calling it isn't the buying. It's the reading. On Christmas Eve, Icelandic families exchange their gifts, and then...wait for it...settle in and read their new books! This is the beauty of the custom. "Thanks for the book, Aunt Lurlene," as it hits the shelf behind the laundry-room door. "I bet it's a corker." And fire up the PS5!

Maybe try this new idea, this read-as-a-group idea, in this straitened economic holiday season. There won't be a big gathering; there might not be much bling; but instead, a room full of people who love each other enough to stop fighting and be still in their own company...and read! If it works in snowed-in Iceland, it can work is bottled-up Keokuk, can't it? You'll never know without trying.

A formally organized holiday observance celebrating the immersive, escapist pleasures that reading offers is ideal to adopt in a crazy climate of lockdowns, easings leading to skyrocketing infections, and the general insecurity and instability of this unique year. Icelandic publishers, like publishers across the world, depend on Holiday sales to fuel their activities for the other ten and a half months of the year.

The Icelandic book industry, however, benefits from the unique, government-sanctioned and supported "Bókatíðindi" or book catalog containing listings of the titles Icelandic publishers are hoping you'll fall in love with and give as gifts. It is mailed free of charge to every household! And, in case you're thinking "well, how many publishers can there be in a country with fewer residents than the Upper West Side?" the fact is that Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country on Earth: 3.5 per 1,000 people! Add to that the fact that one in ten Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime, and the effect and the appeal of this long-standing custom are made clear.

So in this Plague Year, this completely abnormal and hopefully never-to-be-repeated solitary-confinement Christmas, I'm suggesting that you add this relatively inexpensive and supremely easy gift-giving strategy to your list. It's always been easy to order someone a book online, well since 1995 and the launch of Amazon anyway; and the idea of spending a newly socially distanced Christmas Eve in your jammies with cocoa, warm socks, and a book you got (or gave yourself!) as a gift sounds pretty darned good. Let's make cranberry juice out of those cranberries that Fate lobbed at us! (Okay, the "lemonade-from-life's-lemons" metaphor doesn't translate to Yuletide very well. Don't @ me.)

So what I'm going to do, not for the first time!, is review only the books I believe will make wonderful gifts for yourself and your readerly loved ones. You can always use the search box at the top left of the screen to find "#Booksgiving" suggestions from all the years I've been yodeling this idea into the internet's vastness. This year's reviews, all of which are recommendations, will happen between now and Yule. Signing up for emails of new posts will make sure you get inspired...and will be able to follow the links to procure the books or ebooks. (As a reminder, I do not use affiliate links, and you do not see any advertising on this blog. I am unpaid except in free books...and believe me that's enough for me!)

Happy ending for 2020? We're not out of the woods yet, but try a new slant on our Western consumer-society's wretched excess-fest. One that privileges the quiet, intimate pleasure of reading with someone you care for. I guarantee it can't hurt to try.

TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER, an old-school (read: No effin' majgickq!) Alternate History by John Brunner

TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER
JOHN BRUNNER
Gateway Essentials
$1.99 Kindle/ebook edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: If the past is tampered with, the present might be totally transformed. So the whole fabric of reality depends on the watchful efforts of the Society of Time. Don Miguel Navarro is a junior officer in this force dedicated to defending the Spanish Empire and the mother church from the results of meddling in history by time-travellers.

But he begins to wonder just how dedicated the Society really is when he has to deal with a case of corruption involving fellow officers...

After he has to rescue the entire court from death at the hands of Amazon warriors brought through time, his greatest trial becomes unavoidable. Facing a threat to the most vulnerable event in his world's history, can the young Don prevent catastrophe?

Or will the glorious triumph of the Spanish Armada never have occurred?

My Review: That was a nice ride. It took me several days to read its 156pp due to a 2017 siege of thrice-damned migraines. Loaded onto your device, however, it's a long-post-office-line's worth of interruptable reading.

The ISFDB entry on the book describes it as a collection of three stories, only loosely interconnected. I don't feel argumentative, so I'll stipulate that the book started out that way and, in the 1969 edition I read, was made into a reasonable stitch-up.

Brunner wasn't the best-loved British SF writer of his day but he was popular in the US because of Stand on Zanzibar (1969 BSFA Award for Best Novel as well as the Hugo that year), and The Sheep Look Up (1972). It appears to me that the UK readership liked his third famous book, The Jagged Orbit, which won the 1970 BSFA Award for Best Novel best of all, as the US reviewers simply chewed it up for continuing the typographical trickery of its elder sibling. Something got up their collective British nose, mutterings about Brunner being too American. For what, one wonders; his writing was at the peak of its development and uniformly of high quality; that seems to me to be without a nationality. What do I know, I like good wherever I find it from Gwyneth Jones (criminally underknown-to-US Welsh author) to Jo Walton (Canadian by way of Wales) to Elisabeth Vonarburg (Francophone Canadian also criminally underknown and seldom translated).

This book is a minor entry into the Brunnerverse, it's true, but it's one I'll treasure now that I've read it because I*AM*MORTALLY*SICK*OF*ALT*HIST*ABOUT*WWII (this from a big fan of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, whether PKD's novel or his daughter Isa Dick Hackett's TV series) and/or the US Civil War. Good Kleio above us! History contains so incalculably many stories with so incalculably many potential outcomes! Get y'all's heads outta Hitler's stinkin' ass and away from fuckin' Gettysburg! It. Has. Been. Done. To. Death.

The Spanish Armada succeeding is a wonderful, refreshing change of PoD. I suspect that the idea occurred to Brunner when he needed something to fulfill a deadline, because he does not do anything like justice to the potential for the story's effects. The ending of the third part feels as though it was in his mind from the moment that the idea was born...it's a true ending, in other words, not a stopping point...but the immense amounts of fatty, yummy, bacony story left cavalierly on the butcher's block...! The merest hints of the Northern Native American nations's development without a United States resulting from Protestant pollution of these shores alone could fill a trilogy.

Well, anyway, I read it, I liked it, it's O.P. in print though not on your ereader platform of choice in the Gollancz SF Gateway series. Hunt it up, alt hist fans. Civilians...well, it's got the virtue of being short, so maybe it's a good quick intro to the idea that History isn't A Story but really and truly His Story.

It's #Booksgiving again! A combination of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Advent and Jolabokaflod!

As 2019 wanes, taking with it another in an apparently unending annual flotilla of boatloads of misery, trouble, strife, and negativity, let's focus on something much more fun: #Booksgiving! Between Black Friday and Christmas Eve, I'm here to suggest some literary delights whose (not always) joyful tidings will make the Night Before Christmas a bit less frenetic: Give everyone in your gift-giving circle a special book to read right then and there, in the midst of life, all together.

Wikipedia gives us a wee bit of background on the Icelandic custom of giving a book as a gift to your family and friends at Yuletide. Like here, at least among those I call my friends and family...the difference is the Icelandic friends and family like the custom. Decidedly not like many, many people I know.

Iceland isn't like the US in any way that I can think of: no mass shootings, low poverty, socialized medicine, but most importantly the fact that, in a lifetime, one in ten Icelanders will write and have published at least one book. Appearances and Kindle sales to the contrary, that can't happen in the US or there would 35 million writers getting their stuff published. Think of the deforestation implicit in that thankfully unrealized statistic. Agents and publishers will sigh exasperatedly and moan "there already ARE 35 million Americans writing books and they all have MY address!"

I promise that it only feels that way.

Iceland also has an annual book catalog, according to a 2018 Books from Scotland article, which explains the idea as follows:

Every year since [the end of World War Two], the Icelandic book trade has published a printed catalogue – called Bókatíðindi (‘Book Bulletin’, in English) – that is sent to every household in the country in mid-November during the Reykjavik Book Fair. People use the catalogue to order books to give friends and family for Christmas.

During the festive season, gifts are opened on 24 December and, by tradition, everyone reads the books they have been given straight away, often while drinking hot chocolate or alcohol-free Christmas ale called jólabland.

I got nothin' on the (appropriately named, IMO) non-alcoholic ale. I mean, why bother? But hey, that's just me.

But is the US actually so different? Most books in our market are published around gift-giving holidays, too. Look up any statistical source you can think of and you'll see the jaw-dropping surge in sales in each and every segment around Yuletide. Black Friday got its name from more than the salesdroids' moody misery on the horrible, horrible day; it's the day that almost all retailers stem their losses and go into black balance-sheet ink. And at least one organization in the US is is setting out to move the Book Flood tradition Stateside.

And it's not like there are no initiatives to encourage the bookish to share their addiction in the Holiday season. Take Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which is described in this here piece. An initiative that Dolly, fourth child of twelve, began to give children in the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia one book of their very own each month. It's curated carefully to be age appropriate, and it's an admirable extension of a program she began in 1995 for kids in her home patch of Eastern Tennessee. I suggest that you all put some money into this, or any other, outreach for underserved children to get books. After all, the Jesuits' founder, St. Ignatius Loyola, famously said, "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man." Knew his onions, did that old guy. He stole from the best, seeing as Aristotle said it first. You can tell because there's neither hide nor hair of "woman" in there, nor any sign that either of those old white men even sensed their absence. I'd recast it as "...I will give you the adult," but purists would be as vocal as feminists in their scorn. One cannot win.

But let's dream big. The tradition of giving a book as a much-desired present...the encouragement to read it that very night...there are some of us who want that family life and now we have a model for how it should look.

Why shouldn't we, book lovers, embrace this vaguely distasteful-in-the-aggregate behavior of being good little consumers? Let's repurpose it. Let's take one tiny facet of Iceland's excellent book culture and bring it here. The Christmas Book Flood isn't directly translatable, and anyway focuses on the end of the process, the gifting that's always so fun.

Let's celebrate the process, shall we? Let's have Booksgiving! Starting on *shudder* Black Friday, let's think about what books we'll flood the tree skirt with on Book Flood Eve. I'll give you some ideas from my 2019 and earlier reading to include in your purchases. Simply click on the tag #Booksgiving" below and the entire list from all years will magically appear...in chronological order, never fear.

Happy Booksgiving!