The Reader Travels

If you’re like me, and your Decembers are filled with planning and shopping and cooking and singing and parties and exhaustion, then it’s never a good idea to start reading Ulysses in December. It’s just a crazy undertaking, and you’d be causing yourself an unhealthy amount of stress.

To this day I have not read all of Ulysses; but I was awed by the writing; and I will return to it one day. But I made the mistake of picking it up in December, and I think it made me physically ill with chills and back pains and all that.

So what did I learn? I learned that reading in December must be an escape. It must be relaxing and light hearted. If you want to read Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway or Moby Dick or Lolita or Crime and Punishment, just don’t do it in December, unless you don’t have school or a job or children or volunteer commitments, or you live in a culture that doesn’t turn December into a consumer hell.

This December I’m rereading an old favorite - Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire. It’s a wonderful story in a magical world with sing-song dialogue. It’s no wonder they made a musical out of it.

Here are some other recommendations for December reading:

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Naked by David Sedaris

Flying Dutch by Tom Holt

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg

Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry

The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank by Erma Bombeck

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 4:00 pm and is filed under meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.