What, you may ask, is my favorite thing about the holidays? It isn’t the banquets, it isn’t the presents, and it certainly isn’t the darkness. Every December I diagnose myself with low-grade depression. And so does everybody else I know.
So it’s a good thing we have the long-distance book club. We live in different towns, but we do try to get together once or twice a year.
This year we had a holiday meeting in central Iowa. Seven of us made it. Pretty good. We gossiped about our relatives’ bad behavior—why aren’t our Christmases like the ones in The Bishop’s Wife or A Christmas Carol?—and the latest news about old friends from college. Fascinatingly, our friend Don, a doctor, “is living in a leaky geodesic dome, for God’s sake.” And Melanie, who worked at the co-op, just finished her Ph.D. at 50. She had to wait till the mad professor who blocked her retired.
After the gossip, we moved on to books. And instead of discussing a single book, we each talked about our own favorite books of the year.
How can I choose just one book, I wondered. Finally I picked Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale, a neglected Victorian classics. Ward portrays a stormy relationship between Laura, an atheist who has recently lost her father, and Alan Bannisdale, a strict Catholic who has given most of his fortune to a Catholic orphanage. The two are unsuited, but fall in love by proximity. But can they have a successful interfaith marriage? This brilliant, fascinating, complicated novel has been compared to Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, one of my favorite books.
My friend Janet, a poet who lives in a small town near Iowa City, has been reading—surprise, surprise!—poetry. “I stay up late reading Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems. They are a joy: the early poems are formal, then she becomes more experimental. She digs deep emotionally, and is also very political.”
My cousin Megan, a librarian who boasts that she doesn’t like to read, belongs to our book club “for social reasons.” Her secret is that she does read most of the selections, and she slangily explains why she does not finish those she dislikes.
“I have to say my favorite is an old book by Georgette Heyer, Venetia. I love her comic romances. They’re a bit like Jane Austen. Venetia lives in the country and gives up the idea of marriage. Then Lord Damerel, a neighbor who’s a libertine, returns home and the witty repartee flies.”
Our friend Linda, home from the East coat for the holidays, was very taken with Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, the award-winning 1,000-page novel which is written from a housewife’s perspective, in one long sentence. “The secret is to read the e-book so you don’t have to carry that heavy book around. It’s very witty and accessible. You can like Alison Pearson and still enjoy Lucy Ellmann. It’s a surprisingly fast read.”
Sue, who describes herself as “a stressed-out administrative assistant who likes to read in the bathtub,” rediscovered Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street this year. “My reward for going to college was this crappy administrative assistant job, but I still identify with Carol Kennicott, who left Minneapolis for a small town. I wonder, What am I doing in Gopher Prairie? Why don’t I live where there’s culture?”
Sue’s daughter Paula, a part-time server and a full-time student at a community college, says good books distract her from “wasted opportunities.”
“I wish I hadn’t gotten into drugs. I’ll never get my brain back. I can’t do what I used to.” But she is off drugs and on books now. Her favorite of the year is Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, which she read after watching the DVD of the movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis “I love the concept of the travel writer who hates to travel. The book is witty and poignant, quirky and never corny.”
Carla, a hospice nurse in Omaha, used to be our mortal enemy. Long ago in school she yanked my long hair (ouch!) when she passed me in the hall, and reduced Janet to tears by mocking a poem she wrote and read aloud in English class. After many, many years, we ran into Carla at a party. She is kind and witty now. A bit depressed, though.
“I’m divorced, everyone in my family is dead, and I’ll never be in another relationship.
“It sounds morbid, but my favorite book this year was The Undying by Anne Boyer. It’s a memoir about being diagnosed with breast cancer1. It is poetic, but kind of raw. It articulates the hell of cancer.”
On this solemn note, we dispersed to a department store, where we all bought flannel nightgowns with coupons. And then the book club dispersed.
Deo volente, we’ll see one other again next Christmas.
Ellen couldn’t get this to post so emailed me. She says,
“Of these I concur on the Rich poems, the Sinclair Lewis, and Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist. There is a good review of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newbry Port in the 5 December issue of London Review of Books: Jon Day says it is not just one sentence, though there are some mighty long onces. Another article I read said it should have won the Booker but it was felt would not be the big seller the booksellers and publishers wanted (nowadays the publishers and booksellers shape and control the Booker choices; that’s why the double win this year: Testaments is a big seller. I did not know about Anne Boyer’s The Undying. Thank you for describing it.”
People read such a lot of good books. The Ellmann is now higher on my list, and I had never heard of “The Undying.” Often the books on the shortlist are better than the winners.