Bookish Holiday Traditions

The holidays are the time for sharing, for caring, and—yes—for reading! Seriously, what's better than curling up with a blanket, a mug of your hot beverage of choice, and a lovely book (perhaps one that Santa brought) while it's snowing outside? I can't think of much.

The holidays are also the time for traditions, and we want to hear about yours! Specifically, what are your bookish holiday traditions? I personally don't have any, and I'd really like to start one...or more!

My husband, for example, always read The Night Before Christmas aloud with his parents on Christmas Eve when he was growing up, each reading a portion of the story in turn. (This is a lovely tradition, but I'm glad I haven't yet been wrangled into participating because the only thing I hate more than listening to people read aloud while trying to follow along in the text is reading aloud myself. Sorry, honey.)

Another delightful tradition that always makes the rounds on social media this time of year is Iceland's jólabókaflóð, or "Christmas Book Flood." Icelanders traditionally give and receive books on Christmas Eve, and spend the rest of the evening enjoying their new treasures. This is something I'd love to have as a tradition someday, but most of my family members probably wouldn't be interested, unfortunately. (Maybe when my husband and I have kids and start spending holidays in our own home rather than traveling, we can start enforcing this tradition!)

Something I would love to start, but would be difficult to make an in-person tradition since we move so much, is a holiday book-swap. Set a date and time for people to bring, say, five books they love (their own copies or new copies) to share with others. Everyone gets to sit and hang out and drink wine and eat snacks and then, at a specified time, you can go decide which books you want to take home.

As I'm thinking this through, I'm considering two options: 1) you bring (for example) 5 books, but you can only take home 3, and all the extra books are donated, or 2) you bring however many you want, but you can only take home the same number you bring. This might be tough to enforce, though—maybe you'd get a different colored bracelet depending on how many books you brought, or a badge, or a punch card. Hmmm. Any ideas?

Of course, I'd also love to start the tradition where people stop saying "but what else?" when I tell them that I want books for Christmas, but...

What are your bookish holiday traditions? What traditions do you want to start?

Let’s Make A Deal!

Yesterday, I (Bridget) talked about deal-breakers when it comes to the books I read. Now let’s talk about some dealmakers! Like I said yesterday, I’m pretty picky with the books and genres that I read, but there are a few things that will always inspire me to pick up a book!

1. Comparisons to books I like. I’m not proud of this, because I think comparing every new thriller written by a woman in the past few years to Gone Girl does everyone a disservice for a variety of reasons, but dang does it make it easy to pick books. I requested Above through NetGalley for its comparisons to Room and The Lovely Bones; I picked up The Glittering World in part because of its comparisons to TheOcean at the End of the Lane. I picked up The Never List and The SilentWife in part because of their comparisons to Gone Girl.

2. Published by a certain author. We all have auto-buy lists; mine, until recently has been pretty short, only consisting of Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. But in the past few years, I’ve added Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and several other authors to my auto-buy list. In the case of most of these authors, I’ve read several of their books and enjoyed them all; the only exception, currently, is Ms. Hawkins, whose debut novel The Girl on the Train was nothing short of amazing. I’ll definitely be first in line to buy her next novel, whatever it is!

3. Horror/thriller elements. I’m not going to buy every horror or thriller novel ever, of course, but having those elements definitely adds a lot of points in a book’s favor. It’s hard to say exactly which of these elements and in what combinations will always make me pick up a book, but here are a few that come to mind:

- disease pandemics a la The Stand
- “Race against the clock” type stories, a la Tick Tock, Ready Player One
- Man versus wilderness/impossible survival, a la The Martian

There are a lot of others, but they’re a little bit too nebulous to put into words. It’s sort of like that judge said about obscenity: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.

4. Good reviews by bloggers I know and trust. That’s not to say I’ll read every book any blogger I read ever likes, but blogging as part of a community means learning your fellow bloggers’ taste in books, and there are definitely a few whose reviews I almost always trust—especially because there are so few bloggers who review primarily non-YA, so when I find one, I almost immediately follow them. (Sorry, is that creepy?) I have a smaller pool to choose from than most bloggers, but it’s sort of nice because it’s not as overwhelming.

(I’d like to note that, at this point in writing, I was having trouble coming up with a fifth dealmaker so I asked my husband what he’d look for in a book if he was buying me a book that wasn’t on my wish list. After I shot down a few things he suggested, he got frustrated and said, “I don’t know why you like the books you like!” Me neither, friend. Me neither.)

5. Good covers. I know you should never judge a book by its cover, and I don’t usually judge by a cover on its own, but a good cover can definitely increase a book’s odds of ending up in my bag. Similarly, a bad cover can kill a book’s chances of ever ending up on my shelves. Again, it’s hard to quantify exactly what makes a good or bad cover, but I know it when I see it!

What are your deal-makers?

Bridget Talks Deal-Breakers.

I’m a picky person. I’m a picky eater (getting better, though); I’m a picky music-listener; and I’m incredibly picky about what I read. Blogging has really helped me expand my horizons, particularly through things like year-long reading challenges and getting to read ARCs. I also love getting to see reviews of books I probably would never have heard of if not for this amazing blogging community!

Though I certainly read more diversely now than I did a few years ago, there are a few things that have remained deal-breakers in my reading life. Here are some of the worst offenders, and let me know what yours are in the comments!

1. Fragments, fragments everywhere! Fragments, though not something you’d want to put in an essay, are often acceptable as a stylistic choice for creative writing. They particularly make sense in dialogue, because real-life dialogue is rarely ever grammatical the way writing is. But when there are more than two fragments in a row, or more than three or so to a page (on average), it gets a little tiresome. I’ve particularly noticed this in YA series like The Hunger Games and Divergent, but it’s also come up (and bugged me severely) in adult novels like The Silent Girls.

2. Love triangles, or really any superfluous romance in general. There’s a reason I don’t read romance novels: they’re full of clichés, they’re unrealistic at best and harmful at worst (looking at you, Fifty Shades), and frankly, they’re BORING because you know exactly how they’re going to end. (Okay, I guess there are several reasons I don’t read romance novels.) I don’t need books to have absolutely no romance whatsoever, because that’s almost impossible to find these days, but I quite appreciate when romance takes a back seat to whatever else is happening in the story.

That’s not to say that I don’t like stories about love, because I do, and I’ve read a bunch of books recently that focus on love greater than that between two people (The Ocean at the End of the Lane and The Glittering World in particular come to mind). But romance is something I’m much less interested in.

3. Bad or nonexistent editing. I’m not talking about in ARCs, either; I’m talking about actual published works. A typo here or there is excusable—I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where I haven’t found a typo at some point—but willy nilly errors in tense or forgetting a verb in a sentence is totally unforgivable. I just read The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad and while the story was okay the writing was unthinkably bad, so this particular deal-breaker is sort of close to the surface of my mind at the moment.

4. Pretension. Ugghhhh this has got to be one of the worst things to deal with as a reader: an author’s unstoppable pretension. Of course, everyone interprets writing differently, so our definitions of pretension might differ. I’m thinking along the lines of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose every word just oozes “look how smart I am!” Similarly, James Joyce and his utterly incomprehensible (except to the elite few, of course) writing make my blood boil.

Something I’ve never understood is why writers write if they don’t want people to understand what they’re saying. What was Joyce’s goal in writing Ulysses so that it was absolutely inaccessible to anyone at all except himself (and eventually Joyce scholars who studied every minute aspect of his life in order to understand it)? I can’t help but think that he must have thought so much of himself for publishing this impenetrable novel that scholars have puzzled over for decades. Either that or he’s been punking us for almost a hundred years now.

5. Character-driven stories versus plot-driven stories. Don’t get me wrong; great characters make a book. But I want a plot, too. I want exciting things to happen—the scarier the better (I’m a huge horror junkie). I think this is maybe why I didn’t like The Virgin Suicides as much as I wanted to or as much as I expected to based on what I’d heard about it; it’s mainly a character study of the five Lisbon sisters by a group of boys who lived in the same neighborhood. Things happen, but it’s not exactly exciting.

The one exception I’ve found to this rule so far is J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. There wasn’t a whole lot of plot there either, but the characters were just so incredibly drawn that, after a while, it was impossible not to be invested in their stories. (Of course, it took me about 200 pages to get invested, so I don’t blame you if you quit before that.)

6. Getting hit over the head with the author’s morals or politics or anything that I didn’t actually pick up the book for. Like I said above, I read primarily for plot; I don’t want to be proselytized to. All stories have morals, of course, and all authors have biases. But if your bias is glaringly obvious, I’m either not going to read your book or, if I do read it, I’m probably not going to review it very well. 

What are your deal breakers when it comes to books? 

How September 11th affected books

I was in the middle of another review when I realized what day this review would be posted on. September 11^th. Anywhere you go there are reminders. Online. Newspapers. Fliers in the mail. That got me thinking, what else has been affected? I sat looking at my book shelves for a while, then I realized how much even books have changed. The first example that came to mind was one of my favorite book series, “So You Want To Be A Wizard”. The series recently was updated and republished. (The first book was published over 20 years ago, but only a few years pass from the first book to the most recent). In the original version the main character is on a train in NYC and makes a comment about the World Trade Center, and how many people are in the building and in Manhattan itself. In the new version she instead comments on the hole in the New York skyline.

Other books that have been published since that take place in NYC take more time to mention Ground Zero. Depending on when it was written it'll talk about the clean up, others talk about the construction of the new World Trade Center.

Of course the other change is that of the reader. It's always something of a shock when you come across a book that casually mentions the twin towers, you remember again what is missing.

What about you? Have you noticed changes in books you've read? Tell me about it in the comments!