All I Want For Christmas Is Books, Baby
please read the title like Mariah Carey singing All I Want For Christmas Is You
Wait a hot second, is this a second serving of hot mushrooms in one week? You bet your hot ass it is!
Question: how many different book wish lists do you have? I have four. I have a list of favourites on Vinted, I have a small list on Amazon I’ve shared with my family this Christmas, I have another on Amazon that has about fifteen more on it, and I have one in my notes app. There is almost no overlap between lists. No, I do not find this crazy or excessive. I just really want to read. A lot. I want to catch up on classics, I want to read the latest New York or London buzzy writer novels, I want to read more poetry!
Your question for me is: why a wish list and not a Want To Read list?
And my answer: well, to be perfectly honest, I am not interested in the bureaucracy, the language barrier, and the airborne virus risks of signing up for a library here in Barcelona. I’d love to shop anywhere that isn’t Amazon, but as the UK is no longer part of the EU any purchase over €20 euros (like an English language book) incurs import fees. I do attempt to find the books I want from second hand shops, but sometimes I need my hobby to be easy. Easy like buying a book from Amazon.
So, just for funsies, just because it’s December, I thought I’d give you just a little taste of what’s on my book wish list and why.
Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin — I’ve got a lot of different flavours of imposter syndrome and one of them is all the classic books and authors that “everyone” has read. I’ve read a lot, but not all, and I would never be the type to feign having read something I haven’t. Not that I often find myself in the kind of low-lighting, warm white wine party where I would be called upon to lie about this. Anyway, given my recent fixation on ancient Greece and Rome I’m ashamed that I didn’t know Le Guin, whose writing style I LOVE, had written a book set during the founding of ancient Rome.
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut — should have read this one fourteen years ago after visiting Dresden for the first time. The city is a strange mix of old and new, with some buildings being built from the rubble of the bombing. I’ve been to Dresden so many times. Tom and I knew a couple who lived there for a while. Strange, to think about what happened to Dresden, while buying husband a trendy new watch for Christmas in the city centre. I also adore Vonnegut’s style of writing and I am really looking forward to reading how he described his experience in Dresden.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker1 — I read this book a long time ago, from a tiny English-language fiction section of the library at the language school where I worked. I’d like to read it again and to have the book to reference when it comes to the craft of writing. The whole novel is a series of letters, which sounds like an annoying way to read anything, but I want to analyse what makes this work so well.
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships, Stone Blind, and The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, all by Natalie Haynes — Yes, you read and counted correctly, five books from one author. I own one of her books already and this is nearly all the rest she’s written. Why so many from one person? Because this woman referenced a line from the Buffy musical episode, Once More With Feeling, while telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She does stand up comedy about ancient Greece. She speaks my intellectual love language fluently. She is my Oh Captain, My Captain.
Every time I open a book I hope it will tell me something about the world, something about being alive. Something about being me. Most of the time I am not disappointed, which is probably why I have so many lists. There’s just so much to learn!
If you, dear reader, have any books on your holiday wish lists I’d love for you to comment what they are. And if not, maybe my little list excerpt will inspire you.
As always, thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this little hot mushrooms snack post — see you next week for a reading journal post about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway!
I am afraid I may have misrepresented myself with this excerpt because Stoker and Vonnegut are two of four male authors on all my lists. The other two are the ancient Roman poet Ovid and a still alive dude called Brandon Taylor who wrote a book called The Late Americans, and who is an excellent follow on Twitter.