The Gift of Books
Each Christmas, Kit and I make this pledge. No new, redundant, unnecessary or expensive presents. We shop the house, re-gifting and recycling from our own store of possessions—vintage clothing, tchotchkes from travels past, and favorite books that we love reading again and again. As I wrap them in festive paper and ribbons for mailing to family and friends, I am surrounded by glorious classical Christmas music that sings out to be heard again.
On trips to the Lodge to visit Kit, I sometimes pop by Hospice Gift and Thrift in Grass Valley or the Friends of the Library aisle at our local Nevada County library where the perfect book often miraculously makes itself known from amidst all the others. What a joy it is to give books a new life by regifting at Christmas time or any time of the year. And when I learn of a favorite book from a fellow reader, I peruse local bookstores until the perfect book speaks to me.
There is a wonderful Icelandic tradition called Jolabokaflod where people exchange the gift of books on Christmas Eve and then spend the night reading them and drinking hot chocolate. With that idea in mind, here are a few books gifted on Christmas Eves past and three I’m sharing this Christmas season.
On route to Switzerland a few years ago, Kit and I had a brief layover at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport—long enough to visit a bookstore where I was drawn to The Outlander, a novel by Gil Adamson. Pictured on the cover is a woman with long, disheveled auburn hair. She’s wearing an ankle-length, burgundy velvet coatdress and leading a chestnut horse through a dense forest blanketed in snow.
A quote by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion—two novels that I’ve gifted many times over the years—caught my eye. “A remarkable first novel, full of verve, beautifully written, and with all the panache of a great adventure.” Turning to the back jacket, I learned the story is set in 1903. The woman fleeing alone is nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton, a widow said to have killed her husband, now pursued by his ruthless twin brothers. Fleeing ever deeper into the wilderness where Canada borders Idaho, she retreats evermore into the wilds of her own mind, relying only on her primitive instincts for survival.
“Remarkable, lyrical and startling,” wrote the Boston Globe. “A page-turner of the highest order,” wrote author and independent bookstore owner Ann Patchett. How could I resist? By the time our Zurich flight landed, Kit had finished The Outlander, and I immediately picked it up. At a chalet in the Swiss Alps during the visit, early morning and evening hours of reading by a cozy fire were the perfect bookends for days spent hiking alpine trails as the novel’s heroine fled deeper and deeper into the snowy Idaho wilderness.
Back in Zurich days later, Kit and I stopped at a bookstore on the Bahnhofstrasse where I was drawn to Remarkable Creatures—a novel by Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. In both works of fiction, the author weaves actual historical figures with events she imagines might have taken place in their lives. On the book’s cover, two women in long black coatdresses are walking along a narrow stretch of sand separating steep limestone bluffs from an encroaching tide. A gilded, Jurassic period, spiral-shaped, sea fossil hangs above the author’s name. The two women are at water’s edge in Lyme Regis, England. They are Mary Anning, England’s greatest fossilist, and Elizabeth Philpot who championed her young friend by challenging the scientific world’s (males-only) debate over human origins in the early decades of the 1800s.
Another Christmas, I gifted a copy of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—an epistolary tale by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece Annie Barrows—told entirely through correspondences. I loved it so much that I bought an additional copy at a used bookstore where I found the novel resting next to Fred, the bookstore’s resident cat. “I wonder,” the story begins, “how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect reader?”
And so, dear reader, that is how each of these books found me. This holiday season, I have books to recommend in case you decide to follow the Icelandic tradition of exchanging the gift of books on Christmas Eve. There are others that I’ve written about recently in my weekly blogs, but here are three—The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown; This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing: A Memoir, by Jacqueline Winspear who is the bestselling author of the wonderful Maisie Dobbs mystery series; and Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter “Letters From an American.”
Over the long winter months ahead, I’ll read them aloud to Kit at the Lodge. For in books, we find light and hope, even in the darkest times.
There are two kinds of light—
The glow that illuminates,
And the glare that obscures.
James Thurber, writer and cartoonist
- 1894-1961