a Christmas reading list.

I'm glad Christmas lasts for eleven more days after the day itself, mostly because I'm never very excited about before the day. This is mostly because I'm a student. It's very difficult to be jolly when you've got three papers and a presentation and a test and all your exams to deal with. No one has ever been put into a festive mood by the theme of corpse mutilation in Herodotus, especially as the deadline draws in. At the beginning of December I've already begun to keep strange hours; when I write by hand I do it in a random combination of the Greek and Roman alphabets. Every day closer to Christmas is a day closer to having to prove I understand Foucault, and can read Latin, and besides that I have grading to finish. Karl Barth and Roland Barthes have both physically manifested in my apartment. If there's ever a time of year I'm in favor of quiet, preparation, and repentance—not to mention looking forward to the end of all things—it's the weeks leading up to finals. Even after finals I'll have to clean for break, and pack—

This year I channeled the stress into being "person who's extremely concerned about proper Advent observance," which is a very specific person to be. For a while I even held to the insufferable position that no carols but "Veni Veni Emmanuel" and "Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus" were appropriate until the 25th. It's all part of growing up and turning into your dad. You develop a taste for oatmeal and Peter Paul & Mary, you start voluntarily reading Tolstoy, and you become obsessed with the church calendar. Of course I always get much more relaxed about the whole thing once I get home and put on the Mediæval Bæbes, and especially once I get started on my Christmas reading, which (because it's mixed up with all the other reading I'm always doing) stretches through all the twelve days. I reread the same few things most years, and you can probably guess most of them if I tell you straightaway that Christmas always puts me in a medieval mood.

The Pearl Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Which Dad and I read aloud. In original text, not in translation. We read it because it's set at Christmas; it's the story of how the Green Knight came to Arthur's Christmas dinner to challenge one of the knights to a beheading contest. This is exactly what Arthurian legend is meant to be like. The magic is alien and whimsical, and Gawain is a pure and courageous hero overcome by nothing other than his own ruinous weakness, and nobody ever recognizes their own relatives or bothers to find out what anyone's name is. I always forget just how brilliant this poem is, and just how long and dull the descriptions of hunting and armor are, but mostly I forget how funny it is. Not just funny because of the different conventions, deliberately funny, clever. There's one stanza early on, the long one quoted at the beginning of this post, which is the first description of the Green Knight. The narrator explains that everyone is amazed to see him, and that he's very tall, and very hot, and then right at the end, almost in passing, we get the note that also he's all over green. It's brilliant comic timing, and I always cackle to come to it. The whole thing's like that, always turning in on itself, right till the end turns back on the beginning.

The Wakefield Master, The Second Shepherd's Play. The which is also anonymous medieval verse, and the which we also read aloud, but at least on the face of it it's infinitely less high-minded. It's about the shepherds who attend the Nativity, who here are ordinary English shepherds, moaning constantly about the weather and their wives. There's sheep-stealing, and jokes about cannibalism. There's tennis balls. It's slapstick. But it's not only wonderful because of the cannibalism and the tennis, it's wonderful because like a lot of medieval work it's really believes in the Incarnation. The angel bursts in right as the shepherds are debating what to do about Mak the sheep thief; Christ's born into this whole solid and ridiculous world. When it begins to be about Christ it starts being much more solemn, but it's not a cheap whiplash thing, and it's not sentimental. It's only the natural response when something happens that's quite different from anything else.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Exactly the same thing as the Shepherd's Play, the Christmas story made contemporary and immediate, but for the 1940s instead of the fifteenth-century. And not so funny. This is a long poem, and it's designed for reading aloud although we don't and never have. It's very dense and melancholy and high-church; I've always thought of it as a festive answer to Eliot's Four Quartets. It's also got two long prose sections, which are my favorite bits: "The Meditation of Simeon" and Herod's complaint in "The Massacre of the Innocents." Herod's speech really is a complaint, a sort of sustained whinge against the absurdity of the whole situation: "O dear, why couldn't the wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can't people be sensible? I don't want to be horrid. Why can't they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd?" Auden's theme is that absurdity of Incarnation, the hard fact that even now "Nothing can save us that is possible." Really the only thing I don't like about For the Time Being is that I can't read it if I'm planning on doing any of my own writing anytime soon. Auden (in this mode, at least) does so exactly the writing I want to do, and does it so well, that he makes me feel almost unbearably small.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. Well, look, mainly this one's harrowing, but it's set at Christmas, and it's a comfortable read if only because Willis writes prose that you can just melt into. She's not just compulsively readable, she's compulsively rereadable, which is rarer. This one's science fiction, about Oxford historian-in-training Kivrin Engle, being sent from 2164 to 1348, the plague year. At Christmas! And Christmas isn't just window-dressing, the whole book is concerned with issues of theology and Incarnation. A lot of that happens in Kivrin's relationship with her advisor, Dunworthy. Kivrin isn't straightforwardly a Christ figure, but the theme of sending a loved child to go and be helpless in a place of great danger has some unavoidable theological overtones. Especially at this time of year. But it's not just that, it's that Willis is very good on Christmas generally. There's some real gems in her Christmas collection Miracle, although that one's missing my favorite, her first-contact novella "All Seated on the Ground." But none of those talk about the Slaughter of the Innocents nearly as much as Doomsday Book does, and it is to their detriment.

In that same science-fictional vein I've often read Terry Pratchett's Hogfather at Christmas—the tl;dr is that it's a fantasy novel about Death taking over Santa Claus's job—but this year I didn't think of it in time to get a library copy out, and it's just as well. It's an excellent book, but I've found that this year, part and parcel with becoming Insufferable About Advent, I've had little to no interest in secularized approaches to Christmas. (Outside, that is, of watching the Doctor Who Christmas special and complaining about the dreadful theology of the Doctor Who Christmas special. We get it, you think the Doctor's Jesus. He's still really not.) Hogfather's got a lot to say about the (UK) cultural trappings of Christmas, mall Santas and the Little Match Girl, and a lot to say about storytelling and the imagination, but a book so indifferent to the religious festival doesn't have much to say to me.

Speaking of Doctor Who, the book I feel more inclined to turn to is the Doctor Who novel Timewyrm Revelation, by Paul Cornell. I'm not proud of my bizarre Doctor Who novel habit, but this really is a better book than anything with the word "Timewyrm" in the title has any right to be. It's set at Christmas, mostly in a church, and only a bit on the moon, and a lot in the Seventh Doctor's head. Of course you oughtn't to read it if you are the sort of well-adjusted person whose interest is not immediately pricked by the phrase "journey into the mind of the Seventh Doctor." You'd be better off reading Cornell's Christmassy Lost Child of Lychford (the sequel to his Witches of Lychford, but they're both so short there's nothing to stop you reading them both), or his short story "The Ghosts of Christmas." For myself I'm also thinking of rereading Dorothy Sayers' play cycle The Man Born to Be King. Which is suitable for Christmas in the same way Handel's Messiah is—i.e. it's not, it's for Easter—but I read it for the first time at Christmas, and the Epiphany play is marvelous and, anyway, it's not as though you can have Christmas without Easter. Or would wish to. Merry Christmas.

brief bookblog & linkblog.

Over the last couple of years I've gone through several very frustrating times—which I like to attribute to schoolwork but which actually have much more to do with ill health—during which I've been more or less unable to read prose at length. I can always read short fiction and listen to audiobooks, and I can generally cope by playing text-adventure games, inasmuch as that counts as reading (watch this space for the long-delayed posts on 80 Days and Open Sorcery), but the inability to sit down with a novel is a painful thing. I seem to be finally coming out of one of those periods now, having this past week finished in the space of two days two awesome new books.

One of them was My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, which just came out this February. It's a big, weird comic about growing up in Chicago in the late sixties, presented as the spiral-bound notebook/sketchbook/diary of narrator Karen Reyes. Karen wants to be a monster and draws herself as a wolfgirl; I loved the ins and outs of that obsession, and the horror comic covers that signaled the chapter breaks. I loved even more the scenes set in the Art Institute, especially the sequence when Karen's older brother Diego is teaching her how to look. Like a lot of the books I like best, it makes me want to write academic analysis; unfortunately the second volume is yet to be released, and until then there's a lot left unresolved.

The other book isn't only new, it's not even out yet: it comes out this coming week. A few weeks back I won an ARC of Weave a Circle Round, by debut author Kari Maaren, from a Tor.com giveaway, and this weekend I finally managed to read it. It's very, very good. It isn't from Tor's YA line, but it's about teenagers, and (partly because the protagonist, Freddy Duchamp, is only fourteen) it reads less like an adult novel or modern YA than like really good children's fiction. Early reviews have been comparing it to Diana Wynne Jones, which is more or less right (the way Maaren plays with memory reminded me a lot of Fire and Hemlock in particular). It's fun and absorbing, all about stories and time travel and growing up. The thing it's most like is Pamela Dean's novel Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. That's a frustrating comparison to have to make, because almost nobody's read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, but I can't think of a better pairing. They're both YA-ish fantasy about time travel and strange neighbors and difficult siblings; they're both deeply interested in poetry and folklore, and they both pay a close and careful attention to the mundane worlds of the characters. I think of JGR as a darker and more frightening book, and the central thematic concerns are different, but even so I want to read them side-by-side. I'm glad people are still writing books like this.

At the moment I'm reading A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar, a gorgeous and worldbuilding-dense fantasy novel that reminds me of what I love about Calvino, and I'm also reading Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys. Winter Tide is one of those revisionist takes on Lovecraft that we get so many of now, and although Lovecraft-qua-Lovecraft isn't all that interesting to me it's a genre I tend to enjoy. This one is a continuation of the short story "A Litany of Earth," which I've loved for years, and I think anybody who likes that story will like the novel too. I'd also point the curious to this interview with Emrys, from the podcast Cooking the Books, which interviews sf/f authors about food. The page at the link includes a recipe for honeyed saltcakes, which the characters in Winter Tide eat. I mention it here so as to note that I've already made the recipe twice. They're very good crumbled into oatmeal.

A handful of other links. I hardly ever play games that aren't text-adventures, but after reading this review I immediately bought and played Yorkshire Gubbins, a really good game that I'll probably write about eventually. This video is unaccountably hysterical to me. This article on sandwiches is unaccountably fascinating. This profile of a Japanese roboticist is accountably fascinating, as is a charming short story in Uncanny about a robot writing fanfiction. I'm sure everyone's already read about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, but I haven't stopped being excited about it. And this is a very good essay about one of my favorite comics, which I link as much for my benefit (so I don't lose the link) as for yours.

by no means!

Image from Amazon.

Grace makes itself abound. There is no need—and no way—of forcing its hand.

Which is why, then, the Apostle begins verse two with God forbid (mē génoito). There is a problem of translation here. The "God forbid" of the King James Version catches the urgency of the Greek, but the word God simply isn't in the original: that just says something like "Let it not happen!" Other versions render it in various ways. The Revised Standard Version says, "By no means!"—which catches Saint Paul's meaning better, but sounds far too relaxed. And the Vulgate translates it Absit, which means, literally, "Let it be absent!"

I propose, therefore, that we cut our losses, capitalize on the distinctive merits of each of these several versions, and combine the result in one new rendering. Let us keep the urgent negativity of the KJV's God forbid!, the almost Yiddish nuance of It shouldn't happen! in the original Greek, the refreshing note of Get out of here with that jazz! from the Latin Absit, and the sense of simple, literal impossibility in the RSV's By no means!—meaning, there just isn't any way. The locution that seems to me best suited to combine them all is the phrase No way! as it came to be used in the sixties and early seventies (Would you vote for Richard Nixon? No way!). Accordingly, my version reads as follows: Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? Baby, there just ain't no way! How shall we who are dead to sin live any longer therein?

—Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three.

To be filed under: things my Greek professors this year would definitely not have let me get away with in my translations. This book is delightful—intelligent, self-aware, shocking, funny, kind. I'm not nearly finished with it, but I loved (of course) The Supper of the Lamb and Fr Capon is proving to be just as eloquent here on law and grace as he was there on onions and puff pastry. Further updates forthcoming.