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.
