Books like The Dead — picked by fans

This is a quintessential read for any Christmas bookworm. I read it every year at the holidays. It’s a quick read but such a fun way to immerse myself in the magic of that era. I recommend reading the book as it takes on a totally different feel in the mind than just watching the films.

What I find striking about this story is that Faulkner’s depiction of Abner Snopes—the barn burner—is so uncompromising. He’s an angry, disaffected man who, when he can’t find his footing in society, reacts with violence. The reader is given no reason to sympathize with him, just asked to understand that he has a code: Integrity through vengeance. If that’s hard to understand—(it is for me)—that is, I think, the point. For a story published in 1939 about Mississippi in the late 1800s, it feels dishearteningly relevant. 

The 1958 film adaptation, The Long, Hot Summer, chops this story up and tosses it in with a few other Faulkner works. It’s far less edgy, but it stars Paul Newman.

The Elephant Vanishes includes two of my favorite stories by any contemporary writer.

Set in the forested vicinity of a factory that makes elephants, “The Dancing Dwarf” follows the adventures of a marvelous dwarf who once danced for the king, alas, now pursued by soldiers of the revolution. The other side of the spectrum, “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” partakes of the fantastic only by osmosis. The care this teenage boy takes mowing and trimming his assigned lawns feels so real it reminds me of myself.

This range keeps the reader slightly off balance and full of expectation, which might not be so exciting if we weren’t in the hands of one of the finest practitioners of the craft anywhere in the world.  

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this story. It’s set in Yalta, a resort town located on the Crimean Peninsula—territory that has been caught up in the Russian/Ukrainian war. Chekhov, who suffered from tuberculosis, had a home there, where he wrote much of his last and best work, including this—his most famous—story. It’s a simple tale about normal people—lovers who are married to others—and thus bucked the Russian trend of big societal themes. Chekhov’s political leanings changed so often, he said, that the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature” became the first of his six principles for a good story. (The others: objectivity, truthfulness, brevity, originality, and compassion.) Still, lately I’ve been wondering what this story would be like if Chekhov were writing it today.

Part of the allure of Chekhov’s story is the unanswered question, Will they, or won’t they? The answer, I think, may depend on where you are in your own life when you read it. Michelle Herman’s novella, “A New and Glorious Life,” reworks and expands the story, letting you linger a while longer with the lovers before they part. I think this gives them a better chance, but who knows? Joyce Carol Oates also reimagined this story in her collection Marriages and Infidelities. Vintage Oates, it reads like a fever dream.

The first film adaptation, The Lady with the Dog, made under the Soviet censor’s watchful eye, is an almost literal translation of the story. Dark Eyes, a later Soviet-Italian coproduction, stars Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni and strays pretty far from the source.

Another children’s book, but one that I first encountered in adulthood, and have wished ever since that some aunt or uncle or grandparent had known to give it to me as a present back when I was ten.

Masefield’s vein of fantasy makes this a strangely uncentered and whirling book, incorporating gangsters and fairies, spy planes and Roman legionaries, saloon bars in winter afternoons, and snowbound cathedrals. Through it all, it holds steady around the meanings of Christmas, and more than any other book in this list, it draws equally upon the Christian and pagan roots of the season. There’s a taste of old England in the snow that settles on the tongue.

As a dad, I’ve spent every December for at least the last dozen years returning to read out loud once again a set of children’s Christmas classics. With no slight to Dr. Seuss and the Grinch, it’s Judith Kerr’s Christmas story that I am most happy to read again. I asked my youngest daughter this morning why it’s the best choice, and she simply said, ‘Because it’s got Mog in it.’

Being a creature of habit, Kerr’s anti-heroic cat rather dislikes the Christmas celebrations, and opts out, as the Grinch would too. But as the Christmas story means new life in the dark of midwinter, then it's only appropriate that the books end with reconciliation and pleasure. And the aunts and uncles who stay with Mog’s family bring back to me relatives who were young in the 1930s and who visited us for our own family Christmases.

From 1927 to 1931 (and again in 1954), T. S. Eliot would send out a short poem as a Christmas greeting. There are only six of them, but they encapsulate the mystical and religious side of Christmas in ways that yearly move me.

From The Journey of the Magi to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, Eliot reflects on the spiritually unsettling aspects of Christmas, where the cozy clashes with the necessity to change, and where reminiscence comes up against the mystery of our future, and we see how life brings up moments of spiritual vision.

When most people think of noir, they think of a cynical fedora-wearing, trenchcoated detective wisecracking his way through a mystery, and while that is part of the genre, it isn’t the whole of it. Noir can be funny, but that humor needs to be dark, and cynicism is a definite component. All of that is included in this book and it’s delivered with an Irish twist. Bruton’s hitman, Patrick Callen, who rides a bike through the streets of Dublin, is a man who likes lists: To-Do List: Kill Henry O’Neil, Meet the Bronze Man, Buy Food, Sleep with Olivia, Bike Shop, Visit Ma. But when he finds a baby on the job, it interrupts both his list and his life. A hitman and a baby—if that doesn’t make you want to read the book, nothing will.

In Dublin Hanged, Henry paints an evocative picture of the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Irish capital collapsing under rising property crime, food shortages due to series of particularly inclement winters, and political unrest. He also vividly captures the events that led to the organisation of the first metropolitan uniformed police in the British Isles, which came to be widely unpopular. Henry shows, the organisation of the force was costly and in order to fund the new police, the household tax ‘skyrocketed’ virtually overnight. Henry’s analysis reveals there was a marked decline in the frequency of rape and violent assaults in the years following the introduction of the police in October 1786, indicating a degree of effectiveness of the new police despite the lack of its popularity.