One of my favorite holiday traditions is our yearly book club cookie exchange, one night in December in which we choose the 11 books we’ll read together over the next year. It feels like my personal version of Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic “Christmas Book Flood” in which people exchange books on Christmas Eve and spend the evening reading by the fire.
I did a radio segment a few years ago about how we choose the books – and it’s still the same – people bring books to pitch and we make all the choices that night, including who is hosting and leading the discussions each month. We are an organized and of course book-loving group, and by the next day many of us have started tracking down a copy of the January book. This year, it’s “God of the Woods” by Liz Moore, which I have just started and pulled me in right away. It’s about a mysterious disappearance that takes place in 1975 and I won’t say too much more.
We’ll read “James,” a re-telling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Percival Everett in February. We usually leave an extra credit spot for the still-to-be-announced spring speaker of Lunch for Libraries from the Wisconsin Book Festival/Madison Public Library Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Go Big Read of the year.
In another beloved holiday tradition, I take my (now adult) daughters to Bookstore Brunch Day between Christmas and New Year’s. We all pick out books at our local independent bookstores – we visited Mystery to Me and A Room of One’s Own in Madison. I picked up two more book club books there – “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar which follows an Iranian-American poet through levels of grief, and “The Extinction of Irena Ray” by Jennifer Croft, about translators lost in a forest.
In thinking about books I read in 2024, two of the ones that affected me the most are “Bee Sting,” an Irish family epic by Paul Murray, and “Aflame” by Pico Iyer. In the next few months we’ll air a conversation I had with Iyer about his book and his search for meaning through silence and retreats (he’s made more than 100 retreats over the past 30 years to a Benedectine Hermitage in Big Sur, California).
Happy holidays to you all and wishing you a year of wonderful books. Let me know what you’re reading at listen@ttbook.org.
– Shannon
Oh and, PS - I made Molly O'Neill's Pistachio-Lemon Bars this year.