Archive | December, 2011

Make Reading Part of Your Christmas Tradition

5 Dec

The holidays seem to have crept up on us this year, the unseasonably warm weather masquerading the approach of December.  Yes, there’s lots to do, between gift shopping and making travel arrangements and attending holiday parties, but I’ve been slowly learning and relearning that it’s not the doing that matters most.  It’s the people we’re with and the moments we share.

Instead of rushing from mall to mall, pepperspraying each other, what if we slowed down and carved out quiet moments of reflection with the ones we love most?

I have so many great childhood memories associated with the holidays.  My parents really knew how to make the holidays special.  It wasn’t all toys and games.  We had special rituals, decorations, foods, and traditions.  One of my favorite was when my mom would read to my sister, brother, and me Barbara Helen Berger’s The Donkey’s Dream.

Later this special Christmas story tradition continued when I went to college.  I had a wonderful pastor who read us Angela Elwell Hunt’s The Tale of Three Trees: A Traditional Folktale.

There are so many great Christmas stories out there for people of all ages and interests, and I truly believe that staying in with a hot cup of cocoa and a good book is more memorable than rushing out to get the latest Tamagotchi, Tickle Me Elmo, Cabbage Patch Kid, Poggs, Wii, or whatever this generation of kids is into.

Here are my Christmas book recommendations:

For the little women in your life, there’s Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas Tales and Stories

For anyone who could use a good laugh, there’s Laurie Notaro’s An Idiot Girl’s Christmas: True Tales from the Top of the Naughty List

For someone who loves twisted tales of holidays run amuck, there’s David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice

For anyone who loves a classic, there’s Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

For the nostalgic, there’s Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales

For those who love the South, there’s Truman Capote’s Christmas Memory

There are too many great children’s Christmas books to list.  What are your favorite Christmas books?

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Do the Brits Love Kerouac More than the Yankees?

3 Dec

 

Jack Kerouac is the Tupac of the literary world.  Even though he died in the infamous year of 1969, new works of Kerouac’s keep surfacing.  Recent years have seen the publication of Orpheus Emerged (2002) and When the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008), for which he collaborated with William S. Burroughs.  Around Thanksgiving The Sea Is My Brother came out.

Sort of.

The Sea Is My Brother was published in England on November 24, 2011, but it won’t come out in the States until March 6, 2012.  I know this because I’ve been stalking the BN.com product page and was confused when all of a sudden I started getting news that the novel had come out.  I thought maybe it had been released early.  Okay, for any of you who work in publishing, you know that I was really taking a wild leap with that one.  Pub dates shift out further.  Books rarely come in earlier than expected.  So what gives?  Why is a quintessential American author – the author that hitchhiked his way across the United States – being published overseas before in the States?

The good news is if you go to Penguin’s website, you can have the book shipped to you from the UK.  (The rights for the ebook are restricted to the UK.)  You just have pay a whole lot more than if you wait until spring.  Dear Santa….

Here’s the synopsis from Penguin:

Described by Kerouac as being about “man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies”, the 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac’s first novel, but was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the characters were “the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes”. The novel follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a man who Kerouac said “loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down.”

Jack began this work not long after his first tour as a Merchant Marine on the S.S. Dorchester in the late summer of 1942 during which he kept a journal detailing the gritty daily routine of life at sea. Inspired by the trip, which exemplified Jack’s love for adventure and the character traits of his fellow shipmates, the journals were spontaneous sketches of those experiences that were woven into a short novel soon after disembarking from the S.S. Dorchester in October of 1942.

The book also contains correspondence between Kerouac and his Greek childhood friend Sebastian Sampas, with whom he grew up with in Lowell, Massachusetts.  Sampas died while serving in World War II, and Kerouac married his friend’s sister, Stella Sampas.

The BBC’s interview with Dawn Ward quotes the editor as saying Kerouac “‘opens up and shows a side to him that we don’t normally see in his books.'”

The top image is from the hardcover edition published by Penguin the UK.  Below is the cover image being used by Da Capo, an imprint of Perseus Books, which is publishing the book in the States.

 

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