The Lightness of Holiday-Reading-to-Come

The air nips at your nose and makes you wonder where last year's winter gloves have gotten to.  The store shelves are rife with pumpkin spice products in forms you never thought you’d see (Pumpkin Spice Red Vines?!!).  With any luck the snowtires are on the car (somehow, magically?).  The weather is promising to be cold and/or messy soon, and the lure of curling up indoors with a good book glows in the back of your mind.

If you (like me) are regularly distracted, now is the time to start snagging a few fun titles for your holiday reading list, so you don’t get caught empty-handed.
 

My holiday reading usually includes a continuing thread of mystery and horror books, lashed with some purely wintry reads, because who actually finishes books in a reasonable amount of time?  Not me. 

I didn’t "do" Christmas reading until I spent the holidays north in Aroostook County.  Winter up there is a whole other thing than in southern Maine – all-encompassing, buried in snow and fierce cold.  Patty, my mother-in-law, was all-in on Christmas.  To walk into their house was to be surrounded by Christmas magic I hadn’t experienced since I was a kid.  

It was once upon a time ago, back when I worked at the Portland Public Library, that inspiration hit on the eve of our annual Aroostook pilgrimage – what better way to eat, sleep and breathe Christmas than to also read Christmas???  And so I went out to the stacks in search of wintry fiction, and came back bearing Van Reid’s Daniel Plainway: Or The Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League. 

Oh, happy day!  I had never read Van Reid before, and boy was I in for a treat.  Historic Maine fiction set in and around many places I knew, with the irascible crew of the Moosepath League -- good company on the journey to solving whatever mystery presented itself each time.  And while the Moosepathian sense of humor is dry, Reid’s writing never is.  

That one book set me off, and to this day, I always try to set aside a few good candidates for holiday reading each year (sometimes more ahead-of-time than others, sometimes a title or two lingering from the prior year’s seasonal TBR pile).  AND as the years went on, I read all of Van Reid's Moosepath League books, too.
 

With the pleasures of holiday reading in mind, I will be posting some recommendations for you in early December.  There should be some really fun stuff in the stack, and a smattering of magical unknowns to look forward to.  Happy holidays!
 

May your season be full of nice people, great books, interesting conversations, and tasty foods.