The Guardian's Blog, page 27

Tenth of December by George Saunders – a book to make you love people again

The fond and funny human details of these stories will restore your affection for the significant others you may have tired of over Christmas

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

The first time I finished Tenth of December was in a cafe in Notting Hill over a quite ordinary breakfast, and I cried. This is the only time, apart from childhood scrapes and relationship woes that I have ever wept in public – and this time, it was over a 30-odd page short story. In amongst the clash of prams and the chaos of jammy-fingered children, I sat with my ignored breakfast, a little wobbly-eyed, and thought about people.

The 10 stories in Tenth of December, by George Saunders, are all about people. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are a great status symbol – Saunders’s stories are always about humanity and the meaning we find in small moments, in objects or gestures. He paints painful portraits of domesticity, of families, of death. It could be described as melancholically happy, each story full of little truths that make us both amused and very uneasy.

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Poem of the week: The Three Rs by Kelly Grovier

A consideration of changing worlds, personal and planetary, with appropriately shifting registers

The Three Rs

The world always begins
with a phrase – instinctive,

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2015 in books news: tragedies and triumphs

Harper Lee returned, Marlon James took the Booker and Terry Pratchett made his final bow. The year also saw literature drawn into shocking violence in Paris, fierce arguments over diversity … and a colouring-book frenzy

The year opened in tragedy, as two masked gunmen opened fire at an editorial meeting of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, launching a wave of attacks across Paris that left 17 dead. For a while it seemed almost as if the attackers had a particular author in their sights, as Michel Houellebecq published his latest novel, Soumission, that very morning and appeared on the magazine’s front cover. This dark satire, which imagined an Islamic government winning power in France, was so timely that a faked “extract” from the book that seemed to show Houellebecq had predicted the atrocity swiftly went viral. With his publisher’s offices under police protection, the author cancelled his publicity tour and headed for the country leaving his bestselling novel to keep on selling.

January came to a close with Helen Macdonald’s Costa award win for her memoir exploring grief, love and nature, H Is for Hawk, while February brought news that 55 years after her debut, To Kill a Mockingbird, the novelist Harper Lee would be publishing a second novel. And not just any novel: though it was written first, Go Set a Watchman picks up the story of her Pulitzer prize-winning classic 20 years later, offering generations of readers the tantalising prospect of finding out what really happened to Jean Louise (Scout) Finch and her saintly father, Atticus. As soon as the announcement came, some questioned if a novel that had been set aside on the advice of Lee’s editor 50 years ago was fit for publication, and whether the 88-year-old author was in a condition to give her consent. An investigation by Alabama state authorities concluded that while she was profoundly deaf, Lee was “quite clear, quite emphatic” that she wanted the book published, and a huge book world event got under way. On publication in July, readers were shocked to discover Lee had made the angelic Atticus racist in his old age, while critics judged that it fell far short of its predecessor. The novel set tills ringing nevertheless, and sold more than 1m copies alone in the US and Canada in the first week of release.

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

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Food in books: crystallised ginger from The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s novels are a Christmas staple for Kate Young, inspiring a recipe to warm the heart and hearth through the festive season

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

She smiled to herself. ‘All the same old things, the Christmas tree and the stockings hung up and the oyster soup and the turkey – two turkeys, one boiled and one roast – and the plum pudding with the ring and the bachelor’s button and all the rest of it … all the old desserts, the Elvas plums and Carlsbad plums and almonds and raisins, and crystallized fruit and ginger. Dear me, I sound like a catalogue from Fortnum and Mason!’

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, Agatha Christie

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Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans – bright mischief, quiet melancholy

The small, brave heroine of these sweet tales is full of infectious fun, but adult readers can sense the sadness behind the fun

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines …” If you know these lines at all you cannot help but know more of them; the rhythm practically defies you not to continue: “lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. In two straight lines they broke their bread and brushed their teeth and went to bed.”

And the smallest of them all, of course, is Madeline. When I started reading the Madeline books to my daughter it was well over 30 years since they had been read to me by my mother – and yet all the lines were there in my head, waiting. Before my daughter was three, we were batting them back and forth on car journeys: “She was not afraid” “…of mice!” “She loved winter, snow?” “… and ice!”; “To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said?” “… pooh-pooh!”

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Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin – a gothic matryoshka

The chilling nest of stories within stories within stories in this novel is as enduringly chilling as its shadowy central personality. Share and scare!

I first read Melmoth the Wanderer more than a decade ago, after stumbling across a battered copy I picked up for a few pounds in a secondhand bookshop by the sea. Although its author, Charles Maturin, might not be as well known as his near contemporaries – Shelley, Bram Stoker – he succeeded in producing a gothic horror so mind-bogglingly sophisticated that he certainly should be. I was staying in a bed and breakfast in Suffolk at the time, and in the day I walked along the beach, while my nights were spent in an armchair in the corner of my room, reading the book. I remember it was a warm December, and in the evenings I would sit with the windows open. The curtains would flap and a salt breeze would blow into the room, and as I read I could hear the whisper of a name on the wind.

Maturin was a protestant Dubliner and an eccentric priest, prone to sermonising and fond of dancing. In 1820, he wrote to his friend the author Walter Scott, to say that he was working on a novel so terrifying that it would succeed in “out-Heroding all the Herods” of the German school of gothic authors – Schiller, Hoffmann, Goethe – who were enjoying popularity at the time.

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Translation Tuesday: Hedgehogs by Amanda Michalopoulou

A troubled couple see hedgehogs as a metaphor for their sexual problems, in this short story by Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou, the latest in our translated fiction series

By Amanda Michalopoulou and Patricia Felisa Barbeito for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

They could hear them in the night. From the communal garden came a rasping, booming sound like an electric coffee maker empty of water.

“What the hell?” Martha said.

When he spoke to her like that, angrily and loudly in German, she punished him by increasing the distance between them

How do hedgehogs do it? She imagined them upright, then lying down, going at it all aquiver

Theirs had been a great love, and great loves don’t go out with a whimper, they go out with a bang

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The Gift by Lewis Hyde – the book that keeps on giving

In the season of rampant materialism, this classic exploration of the value of giving over receiving has lost none of its power

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

I’ve often thought of books as a gift and the act of reading as opening that gift: the sense of the unexpected, the feeling of having been enriched by something priceless. Rummaging in the local library as a child felt like rootling through a treasure chest, not knowing what jewel of a story I would come across next. By borrowing and returning books, I developed a strong sense that stories were meant to be shared.

So what a delight to read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, and find it unfolding into gifts wrapped within gifts. Hailed by Margaret Atwood as a masterpiece and a “classic study of gift-giving and its relationship to art”, this passionate paean to creativity has been acquiring fans ever since it was published in 1983. When I recently bought a copy as a Christmas gift, the bookseller’s eyes lit up.

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Which books cheer you up?

Today is Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year – so we’re on the look-out for books to beat the winter blues. Here are some that warmed us over at the Books desk. But what are yours?

It happens once a year, but the Winter Solstice – the shortest day of the year – got us thinking about books that we resort to when feeling slightly gloomy with the weather. Here are the choices of the Books desk, but which books make your life better when your spirit needs a lift? Share them in the comment thread below.

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Andrea Levy's Jamaica has vivid colours, but many shades of grey

The Long Song provides a sharp picture of the cruelty and injustice of slavery, but it is always nuanced

Early on in The Long Song, the narrator promises that this will not be a book that dwells on the Caribbean landscape. She says she has “little ink” and that:

Waxing on the nature of trees when all know they are green and lush upon this island, or birds which are plainly plentiful and raucous, or taking good words to whine upon the cruelly hot sun, is neither prudent nor my fancy.

Related: Andrea Levy's The Long Song gives the silent majority a compelling voice

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