A trip! A book! A Christmas miracle! (again)

Last night I had a chance to re-read Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, and I'd forgotten what a wonderful book (novella? short story?) it is. I read this book with my family when I was a kid, and it's funny and simple and sweet and also published in the 1970s, so it has a bizarrely traditional-nuclear-family kind of bent. Children's books from the 1970s are weird. The moms (even the "wacky" ones) always cook and clean, and the dads never do anything. On the other hand, you are allowed to have a family of utterly neglected, horribly behaved children who are abusive to each other and keep their baby sister in a drawer, and it's funny instead of controversial. I don't really get it. Anyway, I read it quick like a bunny last night, and I highly recommend it, if you are the kind of person who is even remotely interested in the religious aspect of Christmas. If you're the kind of person who's offended by the religious aspect of Christmas, well, lucky you. I'm sure there's a mall somewhere that can give the holiday some meaning for you.

I'm also in the midst of the Massey Lectures book this year which is Alberto Manguel's The City of Words. It's good, if somewhat daunting. I've read a number of Manguel's other books, and I think he's a terrific, obviously widely-read, writer. But sometimes I have trouble following exactly what his argument is, because his writing is so dense and cerebral and littered with allusions to other books. In an average paragraph in one of his books, if you've read Gilgamesh, Thurber, Joyce's Ulysses, and some obscure French author neither you nor I has ever heard of, you'll catch his meaning. Otherwise you may flounder a little. And since of those four I only have Thurber covered (and then, only because his books always have pictures), you can see my problem. It took me a long time to get going on City of Words but it's a short book and I'm halfway through it now, and I've even dog-eared a few pages. Hooray for progress. I may finish it before I leave for Washington, which would be good, because cerebral books about ethnic hatred do not really spell "Christmas," to me.

The next three books I need to read over Christmas are the short story anthology The Burned Children of America (which I just bought today because I realized I am not going to have time in between now and when I leave on Saturday to go pick up the copy that's on hold for me at the public library, bad Jocelyn), Weisman's The World Without Us and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In other words, the usual blend of pretentious fiction and guilt-inducing non-fiction. Hooray for that, too. I'm feeling a little too secure and high-spirited for my own good, today.