Yahoo Lifestyle Making the case for a thoroughly bookish Twixmas this season
Christmas with my family is an unexceptionally chaotic affair. We love each other madly but old habits die hard. Too much wine. Too little exercise. Siblings refusing to let each other finish a sentence (a love language cultivated from decades of sharing a dinner table together, attempting to out-joke, or out-smart, the other). Dad’s record player on full blast. Fighting over what to watch on TV or whose turn it is to nap on the sofa. Eating bowls of Twiglets and calling it brunch. Truly, I love the loud, the excess, the being-togetherness of it all. I also crave the calm after the merry storm: ‘Twixmas’. That slightly feral period between Boxing Day and New Year, where time takes on a new, slower, slightly surreal texture. Time which is, for the most part – if you’re lucky – yours.
Since my late teens, it’s been a period almost entirely dedicated to books. A reading holiday if you will. One of the few times of the year I can enjoy uninterrupted days being both a prying observer and part of someone else’s story.
I'm not alone. “Over Christmas I often feel quite socially burned out,” Amy Key, author of the Joni Mitchell-inspired memoir Arrangements in Blue, tells me. “Reading is one of the loveliest ways to be alone, together. Curling up with a book, while sharing a sofa with my sister or my mum, is a way to feel cosy and companionable with them, but it also grants me an escape. I’ve bought myself Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium to read, and Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, which seems very fun.”
Happily, this appears to be a collective appetite. I’m not often emotionally attached to trends, but what a joy to witness this year’s biggest luxury was neither a micro bag nor a comically expensive treatment that promises Botox-like results, but books! Plural! We've seen the unstoppable rise of #BookTok, celebrity book clubs and lit-fluencers (see Natalie Portman's Instagram community, Kaia Gerber’s Library Science, Dua Lipa via her digital platform Service95, Emma Roberts’ Belletrist, and so on); the term ‘Romantasy’ being a finalist for Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year; Saint Laurent opening a bookstore in Paris; and Miu Miu’s ‘Summer Reads’ popping up across eight cities (celebrating ground-breaking feminist texts hand selected by Miuccia Prada herself, such as Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman); all topped off by Gen Z’s feverish passion for the written word (this generation are now believed to be the biggest readers of fiction, estimated to buy around 61 million books per year). To quote Miss Gerber, “reading is so sexy”.
Of course, Twixmas is not the time to be rushing through words. Or feeling pressure to share them. Far more important is that you savour them. Read in the same way you would if you were speaking on stage: slower than you think you should. Pause. Virginia Woolf, in her essay How Should One Read a Book? (originally a speech given at a girls' school in the 1920s), recommended waiting for the dust of reading to settle after turning the last bittersweet page. “Walk, talk, pull the dead petals from the rose, or fall asleep,” she said. At some point, unwillingly, “the book will return, but differently… It will float to the mind as a whole.”
Orbital
“Our phones are always a distraction, but if you can put it in another room and sit down with a book, I never regret doing that,” says Alex Holder, the co-founder of Salted Books, an English-language bookshop in Lisbon. Length is inconsequential (in case you were feeling inadequate for opting out of A Little Life, or any Really Big Book). “I love a short book!” Holder adds. “Tiny books are doing really well [in our bookshop], from Recognising the Stranger by Isabella Hammad to The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, which are both so beautiful and transportive. I’m also so excited that the Booker prize winner this year is less than 200 pages – Orbital by Samantha Harvey – which I’m going to read over Christmas, [along with] Wellness by Nathan Hill.” One of my favourite writers, One Day author David Nicholls, recently shared that his most enjoyable read this year – Helen Dewitt’s short novella The English Understand Wool – took him a little under an hour to finish.
Perhaps you’ll return to an old classic (after collecting dust on my bookshelf, I re-read Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary recently and spent three blissful, sofa-bound, evenings snorting with laughter). Or you could dive into the fraught friendship of two literary titans in Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz. Left your Twixmas book shopping until the last minute? Support your local indie store. Or buy second-hand (I’m excited to dive into Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter, procured from the World of Books). For the distracted reader who needs a sprinkling of writerly fairy dust without picking up a book? Combing through Desert Island Discs’ author archives (personal favourites include Hanif Kureishi, Lynn Barber and Nick Hornby), or listening to Fran Leibowitz on the infinitely comforting Talk Easy podcast, while making a leftover turkey curry, is never not a good idea.
Bridget Jones's Diary
Though I do hope you pick up a book or two. Short stories, big fiction, a poetry collection, memoir, bound singular essays… anything. We live in an age where more stuff is increasingly screaming for our attention. Reading, however, forces us to be still. It gives us permission to get lost in another world and in the process hopefully find a little piece of ourselves.
Earlier this year while mooching around a bookstore in New Orleans I happened upon a first edition of one of my favourite books, Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections. Mostly I love it for the last section which includes a list of things she’ll miss when she’s gone — including “reading in bed”. If there is only one thing you bookmark this season, let it be this.
I Remember Nothing and other reflections
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