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Reading from the Shelves: Thanksgiving Reading Plans

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because there is no pressure, no religious observation, and no compulsory shopping for gifts. It’s all about the turkey, mashed potatoes, and  green bean casserole.  As the hero of Mary McCarthy’s novel, Birds of America, hilariously observes, it is basically just a harvest fest.  (I enjoyed this satiric novel and wrote about it here.)  I do love a good harvest fest.

But, alas, we may not have a good holiday this year. Every happy family is alike, and we have identical bad colds. One gets the cold, all get it.  As the least ill person in the house, I bicycled to the box store to buy cold pills–and had to show my ID.  At first I thought I was being carded by a moron,  but it turns out they scan the ID, presumably so you don’t go home and make meth.  Although meth is a problem, I wonder if the lawmakers watched too much Breaking Bad.

Oh, well, at least we have decongestants so we can breathe and plan our holiday reading!

Yes, the “Best of” lists are already showing up, and  I pore over them with fascination, but I plan to stay peacefully at home and read books off the shelves.  Often on  holidays I’ve read old potboilers like Edna Ferber’s Giant (loved it!) and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (liked it!).  They’re page-turners, pretty well-written, and distract you from obnoxious relatives.

This year I’m going for something different, possibly short, not necessarily by women, and not necessarily a blockbuster.  Here is my stack of books.

1. The first books follows my usual holiday blockbuster M.O.   I have started reading the Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber’s 1929 novel, Cimarron, an intriguing novel about the Oklahoma “land rush.” The main characters, Yancey Cravat, a lawyer and newspaper editor, and his wife Sabra, the pampered daughter of a wealthy Kansas family, are very believable and likable.   Yes, this book is a blockbuster, but it is so much fun. Ferber won the Pulitzer Prize for  So Big, a remarkable novel about a woman farmer.

2. I’ve long meant to read Saki.  And so I picked up this Dover edition of The Chronicles of Clovis, a collection of his short stories about a witty socialite named Clovis. The book is blessedly short, and it even has an introduction by A. A. Milne.

3. Violet Trefusis is best known for having been Vita Sackville-West’s lover, but she was also a writer, and her novel Hunt the Slipper is a romantic comedy with a twist.  I am looking forward to reading her 1951 novel Pirates at Play, which also looks very witty.

4. D. J. Enright’s Academic Year, a satire about three expatriate Englishmen teaching in Egypt, has been on our shelves for years.  I only know Enright as a reviser of Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, but I love academic satires.  My  husband is sicker than I am, though, and he pounced on it and said, “Maybe I’ll read it on Thanksgiving.”    Okay, he can read it first.

5. l am a great fan of Enid Bagnold’s books, and especially enjoyed The Loved and Envied, a bold novel about a group of aging upper-class friends. I  am not particularly horsey, but I did love the Elizabeth Taylor movie of National Velvet, so picked up this paperback for 90 cents (a weird price) at the Planned Parenthood Book Sale.

 

Do let me know what your reading plans are for the holiday!

14 thoughts on “Reading from the Shelves: Thanksgiving Reading Plans”

  1. No holiday here but I have a slightly less intense weekend than the last one, so I’m planning to have the great big not so fun bio of Angela Carter finished by then, and be reading the history of the Olympics, or maybe a few lighter books. Happy reading. National Velvet is a bit weird, to be honest, and I say that coming from a place of pony book obsession …

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    • Oh, it’s always good to read nonfiction books! I have a couple on the go, too, and I do love Angela Carter (I wonder if that’s available here). Maybe I’ll skip Natl Velvet. Not sure about horse books anyway!

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  2. I hadn’t realised that Trefusis wrote novels. I am definitely going to keep this in mind when I get round to 1951 in my years of my life project. Have a wonderful holiday (colds permitting). As usual one of the local Stratford pubs will be putting on a Thanksgiving dinner for our American students but other than that it’s a working weekend for us.

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  3. Jim got a great kick out of Saki. He used to read aloud to me the mocking (they are) send-ups of these family holiday dos.

    I come a little close: I’ll be reading Vita and Virginia, an excellent biography of Woolf and Sackville-West’s friendship amid books. It includes a section on Violet Trefusis — also covered in Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Vita.

    Thanks for this holiday blog. I tried for one too Autumn Nights.

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  5. Just now I’m rereading Jane and Prudence, one of my favorite Barbara Pym novels, having finished The Old Capital (Kawabata) and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Bassani). I’ve also spent an ultimately unsatisfying couple of days rereading two P. D. James books: A Taste for Death and Devices and Desires. I don’t seem to be able to recapture the enthusiasm I once had for her novels.

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    • Happy Pym! Great reading for any tine It has been a while since I read James, and I’m not sure exactly which I read, though I did like her books in the ’90s.

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