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“We have things to discuss” the Christmas tree says to Billy in the dark of the living room after bemoaning its fairy light binds. Billy’s mother is sick in bed, his father is missing, and the pine tree he was given by the charitable proprietor of his local stand is about to thrust him into a magical adventure which will color forevermore how he thinks about family and what it means to be an adult. Hear Mark A. Pritchard dramatize this important scene from his novel, Billy Christmas.
Read MoreGift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
Read MoreWell, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.
Read MoreThis is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.
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