The Night Before Christmas by Nikolai Gogol

I'm going with the one trick pony approach to blogging this week and reviewing a book from the collection I posted the giveaway for on Tuesday.  Oddly enough, I cracked open the Christmas books even before breaking out the Christmas music that I've diligently been avoiding despite my inclination to start listening to it a couple weeks ago.  I always peak too early with my Christmas music love, and by the time the holiday rolls around I'm kind of over it.  As for Christmas themed books?  It's probably never too early for a busy person who reads at a snail's pace to start reading them, so here I go!

First, another moment of honesty. This, of course, is one of the five Penguin Christmas Classics I was sent for review.  I may or may not have chosen this one at this early date because A.) it's the shortest (clocking in at a brief 65 pages) and B.) I kinda thought I wouldn't like it as much as the other ones.  I'd heard it's a little offbeat and not quite Christmassy enough for the Christmas club, if you know what I'm saying.  Neither thing that I'd heard is necessarily false, but in all actuality, I quite liked this short tale of Christmas Eve in a small village in Ukraine.

The day of Christmas Eve ended, and the night began, cold and clear.  The stars and the crescent moon shone brightly upon the Christian world, helping all the good folks welcome the birth of our Savior.  The cold grew sharper, yet the night was so quiet that one could hear the snow squeak under a traveler's boots from half a mile away. Caroling hadn't yet begun; village youths weren't yet crowded outside the windows waiting for treats; the moon alone peeked through, as though inviting the girls to finish up their toilette and run out onto the clean, sparkling snow.

Gogol's story opens on Christmas Eve with the scene of a witch and a devil who are up to no good.  The devil has in mind to foil the plans of devout local blacksmith, Vakula, to pay court to the village beauty, Oksana.  Oksana is as dreadfully vain as she is beautiful, and has chased off all her many suitors, mistreating them and playing hard to get, not to mention spending  more time with her mirror than with them.  Frustrated by the continual rebuffing of his advances, Vakula has nearly given up on Oksana and life itself, when he comes up with one last risky gambit to win her affections. 

I'll say no more for fear of giving away overmuch, but I was thoroughly charmed by Gogol's remote village where carolers traverse the town on a cold, crisp Christmas Eve, singing for treats from the townspeople.  Besides the witch and the devil and the unfortunate Vakula, the town is populated by a cadre of important men made laughable by their foibles, a crowd of fierce housewives, and gaggles of laughing girls.  Despite the less than traditional Christmas content, I found Gogol's story to be a delicious and humorous little folk tale of his own creation and a welcome departure from the Christmas norm.

If you'd like to read this book plus four more holiday classics from Penguin, the giveaway is open until Monday evening, so stop by the post and enter! 

(Disclaiming: Yes, I received this book for free from the publisher for review consideration.)

Do you have a favorite Christmas story to read around the holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year! (Giveaway)

Greetings one and all!  The holidays are very nearly upon us, as you may have noticed.  I know there is one place my blog very often comes up short of late, and that would be giveaways. (If you said "content," I'm scowling at you right now, even though it's funny cuz it's true).  Since the season of giving is arriving, I, with great enthusiasm, have taken up Penguin on their very generous offer to let me give away a set of all five of their super-pretty (!!) Christmas classics.

They're compact, short on pages (long on Christmas spirit!), and (I may have mentioned with many exclamation points) super-pretty!

See?

Anyhow, they're great quick reading to get you in the spirit during a busy holiday season, probably most excellent for gift-giving (if you're not going to totally hoard them for yourself like yours truly), and they're also good for cuddling with creepily (if you're that weird book lover - don't forget to quietly murmur to them how pretty they are while you're at it.  I don't do that, though.  Okay, yes I do).

Here, we'll let Penguin do a better job of describing them, you know, minus the Ghost of Christmas Creepy thing I've got going on in this post.

Penguin Christmas Classics honor the power of literature to keep on giving through the ages. The five volumes in the series are not only our most beloved Christmas tales; they also have given us much of what we love about the holiday itself. A CHRISTMAS CAROL (Charles Dickens) revived in Victorian England such Christmas hallmarks as the Christmas tree, holiday cards, and caroling. The Yuletide yarns of Anthony Trollope popularized throughout the British Empire and around the world the trappings of Christmas in London (CHRISTMAS AT THOMPSON HALL: And Other Christmas Stories) . The holiday tales of Louisa May Alcott shaped the ideal of an American Christmas (A MERRY CHRISTMAS: And Other Christmas Stories). THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (Nikolai Gogol) brought forth some of our earliest Christmas traditions as passed down through folk tales. And THE NUTCRACKER (E.T.A. Hoffman) inspired the most famous ballet in history, one seen by millions in the twilight of every year.
 
Beautifully designed—with foil-stamped jackets, decorative endpapers, and nameplates for personalization—and printed in a small trim size that makes them perfect stocking stuffers, Penguin Christmas Classics embody the spirit of giving that is at the heart of our most time-honored stories about the holiday.

Enough talk, it's time to enter to win the lovely books.  If you want to win and have a US mailing address (sorry international friends), fill out the form below.  One entry per person, please.  No hoops to jump through, and I promise not sell your e-mail address for extra holiday cash.  Flattering comments will get you somewhere, but probably not closer to winning.  ;-)  Get your entry in by Monday, November 24th before 10:00 PM EST. 

Merry Christmas!

 

 

Merry Christmas! 

 

Hope your day is filled with fun, family, peace, joy, and maybe a few good books!

Having Myself A Merry Dystopian Christmas

Happy Day After Christmas everyone! I hope everyone that celebrates had a good time with family and friends, and I hope you found some good bookish plunder under the Christmas tree, too. I know I did on both counts.

As you can see, my Christmas bookishness came with a bit of a theme. I just finished Patrick Ness's excellent dystopian The Knife of Never Letting Go a few weeks ago, only to find it has a wicked cliffhanger of an ending (How rude!). Luckily, I had just enough time to slip the other two books in the Chaos Walking trilogy onto my Christmas wish list, and, thanks to my parents, I'm now the proud owner of The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men.

In other news, I'll soon be able to hang up my "I'm the last living human who hasn't read The Hunger Games" t-shirt for good. My aunt provided me with a lovely box set of all three of The Hunger Games series, so now I can enjoy that trilogy at will, too. In still further good news, I am the lucky owner of one new comfy rolling desk chair, so, as soon as we can get it put together (and you can pull me out of my dystopian YA haze), I will be able to enjoy my blogging in comfort, having cast off the threadbare chair that's been serving as our seat for about 2 years too long.

Of course, I had to make sure that my family members had some books to unwrap, too. My mom had been wishing for The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein and The Help by Kathryn Stockett, so both of those made an appearance among the Christmas plunder. I've heard so many good things about both that I hope she'll let me have a go at them when she's finished! For my dad, I initially just got him the newest John Grisham title, The Confession. Then I was skimming my Shelf Awareness newsletter and saw that Tom Clancy had a new book out, and knowing that my dad was always a huge fan of Tom Clancy's from way back, I couldn't help picking up a copy of Dead or Alive for him, too.

How about you? What good books did you give and receive this year?

Christmas Redux

Greetings! Hope you and yours had a Merry Christmas!

We made lots of merry here at our house, and I'm wholeheartedly satisfied with my gift haul, and more importantly how much everybody else liked the gifts I bought them. Or, at least, how good of a job everybody did of acting like they really enjoyed the gifts I bought them.

I made a concentrated effort to buy at least as many books for gifts as I do most years and quite possibly more. For my mom, who loved Wally Lamb's previous two books, I grabbed a copy of the newest, The Hour I First Believed which she's already started to read. For my dad, we had the old standby, the yearly Odd Thomas release from Dean Koontz, Odd Hours, which he always enjoys. He's badly in need of a new author to love, so I'm trying to get him hooked on Neil Gaiman with a copy of Neverwhere, too. My grandmother, who almost never wants books, kept bringing up the good things she'd been hearing about Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, so naturally, I had to pick up a copy of that for her. Lastly, and my crowning achievement of the year, for my cousin who has just begun learning to read, I grabbed a copy of one of my very favorite childhood books, Animalia and made a severe annoyance of myself until my mom bought her a copy of Mo Willems' The Pigeon Wants a Puppy. It's so much fun picking out cool books for new readers. I hope she enjoys them as much as I do!

As for me, not too many books under the tree, but the quality was definitely there. The first gift I opened was a copy of Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome which I've been dying to have since I knew it existed. I loved Peace Like a River, so I'm quite excited about this one. I also got a spiffy new copy of the new ESV Study Bible which the people at my church are simply rabid over, if indeed, it's quite correct to be rabid about a Bible.... Anyhow, it's full of awesome stuff, so I'm quite excited about that, too. My ever-thoughtful 10 year old cousin got me a book light. Now does that kid know me or what?

Another gift I consider to be quite bookish that I'm wildly excited about is my hunter green SLANKET! This is a great gift for when I want to read in my arctic temperature bedroom. As a matter of fact, cozily tucked into my Slanket I devoured the end of How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff last night after the holiday merry making had come to an end (and a few re-runs of House had been watched). Believe it or not, I've actually already written the review, but I'm going to save it for sometime over the next few days because I predict that next week is going to be pretty harsh on the old blogging time because some folks at work are taking some vacation which means that I get pressed into service at all kinds of weird hours. After which, I'll definitely need to drink some of the !wine I won in their mystery holiday giveaway drawing! which is doubly cool because I'm going through a real wine phase right now, which sounds kind of bizarre because I'm not much of a drinker at all.

All in all, a very satisfying holiday. The planets aligned properly allowing everybody to be in a fairly good mood on the holiday. Children were relatively well-behaved. Great gifts were given and received, and a sense of humor prevailed. Can't ask for much more than that. It's about time for me to leave for the matinee of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which will be, hopefully, as good as it looks.

So, what good stuff did you get for Christmas?