Book of the Day Roundup: December 23-27, 2024
The Book Lover’s Almanac
A Year of Literary Events, Letters, Scandals and Plot Twists
Alex Johnson
British Library Publishing
Hardcover $29.99 (296pp)
978-0-7123-5424-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The Book Lover’s Almanac is a delightful daily compendium of literary facts and anecdotes.
The monthly sections open with a rundown of prominent authors’ births and deaths and the dates when famous works were first issued or performed. Their concise entries recount notable events from their particular dates. Most vignettes draw on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. In fitting valedictory fashion, the chapters close with writers’ reputed last words. Frequent photographs, engravings, and handwritten extracts punctuate the text.
The details are striking for their randomness and synchronicity. Ulysses was published on James Joyce’s fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922. On May 3, 1810, Lord Byron swam the Dardanelles strait in 1 hour 10 minutes—or so he claimed; in 1984, it took Patrick Leigh Fermor 3 hours. May 4 marks both the beginning of Gulliver’s travels and Sherlock Holmes’s apparent death.
The mixture of high-brow and popular culture is amusing. Lee Child starts writing each Jack Reacher thriller on September 1. One January entry lists a demanding set of books that Charles Darwin borrowed from the London Library in 1845; another remembers when Joey and Rachel swapped their favorite books in an episode of Friends.
Full of enjoyable trivia and lush illustrations, The Book Lover’s Almanac is perfect for bibliophiles.
REBECCA FOSTER (October 14, 2024)
Don’t Invite a Bear Inside for Hanukkah
Karen Rostoker-Gruber
Illustrated by Carles Arbat, illustrator
Apples & Honey Press
Hardcover $19.95 (32pp)
978-1-68115-642-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Jewish tradition, it’s considered a mitzvah (a good deed) to warmly welcome guests, but what if a guest becomes difficult to bear? This picture book leads by example: when a child invites a bear in for Hanukkah, its appetite becomes a “beary big” problem; the child kicks the bear out, but follows it after seeing its distress. After learning the bear will now be celebrating alone, the child devises a compromise that brings “a beary big smile” and a new friend.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 14, 2024)
Yoke & Feather
Essays
Jessie van Eerden
Dzanc Books
Softcover $17.95 (212pp)
978-0-9842133-6-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Jessie van Eerden’s glittering essay collection Yoke & Feather is a work of exquisite longing marked by keen reflections on biblical tales.
Beginning after van Eerden’s divorce, these intimate essays trouble through relationship shifts, unrealized goals, and connections between people across time. A foray into online dating becomes an opportunity to reconsider how we present ourselves to the world; van Eerden notes the limitations of digital checklists when it comes to capturing a person’s whole being. A rafting trip down a desert river just after a snowstorm solidifies a developing relationship alongside sightings of hieroglyphs on cliff walls and a felled mountain lion. Magic abounds, found in ordinary prayers, everyday practices, and ongoing growth; the very act of being becomes a symbol of deep religiosity.
Among the book’s throughlines are reconsiderations of the stories of women from the Bible, their lives reimagined in contemporary Appalachian contexts. Mary and Martha adopt a child, loving and forming her in their individualized ways; Elizabeth longs for the child she has not yet had. These are exercises in empathy, reconstituted stories of melancholy and desire in which the “currents” of the present can be “sense[d].” They run alongside van Eerden’s own confessions: she, too, dreams of the daughter she never had, envisioning the girl dancing along her porch and wondering if it’s too late to start.
Prayers run throughout the book, too, taking the form of panging love for neighbors and strangers and dreams unrealized. “We are defined by the unwritten, the unpossessed,” van Eerden writes, “by this that we want which we did not know we wanted because it is unseen.” Herein, such “blessings do not lead you out, but lead you in,” toward spiritual transformation that makes space for new possibilities.
The essays in Yoke & Feather are gorgeous exercises in faith-filled, interconnected being.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (October 14, 2024)
Uri and the King of Darkness
Nati Bait
Carmel Ben Ami, illustrator
Kalaniot Books
Hardcover $19.99 (32pp)
978-1-962011-98-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The rhyming text and bright, contrasting watercolor illustrations enliven this holiday picture book about being brave. It’s the first night of Hanukkah and Uri’s father is not yet home; as the winter night marches toward them, Uri realizes it’s up to him to face the King of Darkness. Uri’s story echoes the story of Hanukkah, which is detailed at the book’s close, and the clashing yellow and blue tones of the illustrations further reflect the victory of light over darkness.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 14, 2024)
Mendel the Mess-Up
Terry LaBan
Holiday House
Softcover $14.99 (208pp)
978-0-8234-5680-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A boy in a village plagued by Cossack soldiers battles a curse to help his family and friends in the excellent graphic novel Mendel the Mess-Up.
Mendel, who is approaching his bar mitzvah, lives in a remote Jewish village, Lintvint, where the main economic product is kvatch, a drink made from goat sweat. Although Mendel tries to help out, he always seems to make situations worse: A curse cast on him before he was born causes his best intentions to backfire. When the Cossacks invade, Mendel’s mistake leads them right to the village. After a crisis of self-confidence, Mendel uses daring, perseverance, and ingenuity to send the Cossacks back where they came from and save his village.
Mendel’s village is based on early twentieth-century shtetls, but his home is in a fictional country, Nahsovia, cushioning audiences somewhat from the tragedies that accompanied Cossack raids. Its approach is also comedic thanks to Mendel, who is savvy and appealing as he doubts his abilities and still nurtures his indomitable spirit.
The artwork is a tour de force of cartooning, evincing a keen eye for period details. It uses heavy black lines and a wide color palette and has a penchant for exaggeration, combining the styles of punchy comic strips and longer narrative comic books. The pages demonstrate casual mastery of techniques like sweat drops pouring off of nervous characters, “stink lines” wafting from the source of a bad odor, and other classic emanata.
Balancing action, suspense, and humor, the wonder-filled graphic novel Mendel the Mess-Up is about a boy who faces danger in order to save his family and friends.
PETER DABBENE (December 17, 2024)
Kathy Young
