What to read over Thanksgiving

It’s the time of year when you might want to disappear into a book – and especially one about families even more dysfunctional than your own

Thanksgiving is a holiday of hidden meanings. It pretends to be about mutual respect, specifically that between the settlers and the indigenous people of North America. But of course you can only sincerely celebrate that if you ignore the way the former subsequently killed off large swaths of the latter. Similarly, the sweet experience of family togetherness promised by the holiday is a lie, for most people. Get stuck in a room with your family and, well, even family love is a battlefield.

I have, therefore, books to recommend both as psychic preparation and coping mechanism for the holiday. These books are mostly about families, unconventional ones. To read them is to feel the satisfying superiority of one who knows that things could always be worse.

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