Some Christmas reading
Dec. 23rd, 2020 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemadamLast week, (or was it the week before? Something has happened to time), I went shopping. Not just a quick trip to the village shop but actually going into town and in and out of shops, looking for books. As it turned out, I absolutely hated it and won’t be doing it again in a hurry. I did, however, come home with two bags full of books, mostly from charity shops. One (so heavy!) was this Norman Rockwell book, which I later found was a great bargain.
(Pic on LJ, where you can also see my completed jigsaw, an achievement for me.)
American artists are particularly good at Christmas (Susan Branch, Tasha Tudor), so the Rockwell looked promising. The pictures are lavishly produced but the rest of the contents are strange. There are Christmas stories (quite dull, the ones I’ve read), carols printed out with the music and so on; quite a hotchpotch. I was surprised by how many pictures included black people, which seemed a good thing until I saw that a story mentioned ‘the coloured maid, Alice’. Eew! It reminded me of The Help and put me right off. This book should have been revised before it was reprinted.
I also got: a book by Monty Don, Christmas novels by Jenny Colgan and Trisha Ashley (both now read), Sissinghurst by Adam Nicolson and Great Britain’s Great War by Jeremy Paxman, all in very good condition. I’m hoping these will last until at least after Christmas. I shall, of course, be reading A Christmas Carol as usual, even though everything feels so un-Christmassy.
(Pic on LJ, where you can also see my completed jigsaw, an achievement for me.)
American artists are particularly good at Christmas (Susan Branch, Tasha Tudor), so the Rockwell looked promising. The pictures are lavishly produced but the rest of the contents are strange. There are Christmas stories (quite dull, the ones I’ve read), carols printed out with the music and so on; quite a hotchpotch. I was surprised by how many pictures included black people, which seemed a good thing until I saw that a story mentioned ‘the coloured maid, Alice’. Eew! It reminded me of The Help and put me right off. This book should have been revised before it was reprinted.
I also got: a book by Monty Don, Christmas novels by Jenny Colgan and Trisha Ashley (both now read), Sissinghurst by Adam Nicolson and Great Britain’s Great War by Jeremy Paxman, all in very good condition. I’m hoping these will last until at least after Christmas. I shall, of course, be reading A Christmas Carol as usual, even though everything feels so un-Christmassy.
