CRP's Blog

Inspired by the myriad year-end roundups that are popping up all over our social media feeds, we asked authors of books we’ve published this year to share a favorite memory of giving or receiving a book for the holidays.

Tom Acitelli (American Wine): My story is less about giving a book or getting one. One Christmas Day a few years back, while walking on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I found a second-edition copy of Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer that a sidewalk vendor was selling used. It has been a reference go-to ever since.

Cory Franklin (Cook County ICU): My father, who was a doctor, took care of Nelson Algren for a while before the author moved to New Jersey. I still remember when my dad gave me a copy of The Man with the Golden Arm. I couldn’t put down the story of Frankie Machine.

Tea Krulos (Monster Hunters): When I was young, I was in love with a juvenile mystery series, The Three Investigators. It starred Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, three youth with a headquarters hidden in a junkyard and a knack for getting into trouble. I always opened the presents shaped like paperbacks first!

Aidan Levy (Dirty Blvd.): For Christmas 2012, I gave my partner, Kaitlin, the first edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems: 1927–1979, which I got from P.S. Bookshop in Brooklyn. She is a doctoral candidate with a focus on Romantic poetry at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Bishop is one of her favorite poets. We got engaged earlier this year.

Amy McCullough (The Box Wine Sailors): A couple of Christmases ago, I received a copy of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from my partner (and former shipmate/fellow “Box Wine Sailor”), Jimmie. It was the first “grown–up” book he’d ever read, and I was always enamored with the idea of reading it while imagining myself to be a grade school–aged Jimmie. I was preemptively impressed that he’d read a fairly challenging book at such a young age—and even more impressed after reading it myself (especially considering there are some admittedly slow sections amid the more exciting descriptions of sea monsters, coconut-sized pearls, and Captain Nemo’s fantastic nautical ingenuity). After quitting our “normal” lives to live aboard a 27-foot sailboat for a year, it was especially fun to unwrap the Bantam Classic edition he gave me and marvel at its beautiful cover illustration of men walking on the ocean floor with giant jellyfish and bull kelp floating above. A word to the wise, though: read the introduction last—Ray Bradbury totally gives away the ending!

Chantal Martineau (How the Gringos Stole Tequila): Reading my daughter How the Grinch Stole Christmas of course! It’s no coincidence my book ended up with an homage as a title!

Pate McMichael (Klandestine): One Christmas someone gave me a 50-pound book called We Interrupt This Broadcast. Whoever gave me this must have doubted my future as the next Tiger Woods. I guess I showed them!

Michelle Morgan (The Ice Cream Blonde): My best holiday memory of receiving a book was in 1986 when I was 16 years old. I was still at school but worked part-time in a shoe shop to boost my pocket money. On Christmas Eve I worked in the store all day, and when my parents picked me up, they gave me an early Christmas present. I am a huge Marilyn Monroe fan, so imagine how excited I was when I opened the gift and it was a book called Marilyn Monroe: A Never-Ending Dream by Guus Luijters. My parents had just found it in a local bookshop and I was absolutely ecstatic! As if that wasn’t enough, when we got home, my parents told me they’d videotaped Marilyn’s film, The Seven Year Itch for me. To this day, the book and the film both remind me of 1986, and I still class it as the best Christmas Eve ever!

T. Frank Muir (Life for a Life): Four years ago, I remember wakening on Christmas morning with childlike anticipation, knowing my wife had bought me The Fear Index by Robert Harris. By Boxing Day I had it finished, and by New Year’s Day, had it read again. Every now and then, when I want to remind myself how a brilliant thriller is written, I pick it up and read it again.

Michael Elsohn Ross (She Takes a Stand): Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker was given to me on Christmas 1964 when I was 12 years old by my artist aunt. It was autographed not by the author but by Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon), one of the cartoonists profiled in the book, and it inspired me to continue drawing cartoon-style art, which I still do.

Constance Sublette (The American Slave Coast):  The year before I started school, our parents acquired a set of encyclopedias, accompanied by a set of volumes entitled Lands and Peoples massively and gloriously illustrated with photographs and maps, another set of books about the sciences, and a set of The Book of Knowledge, which concentrated on history, art, music, and literature, with many amusing side trips into such matters as the history of forks and how they were made. From then on, until we left home, through many a dreary-weather day, my brother and I spent hours with these books, transported to other worlds and times.

Michele Weldon (Escape Points): The Literary Journalists: The New Art of Personal Reportage, edited by Norman Sims. I had recently started to work as a feature writer and columnist at the Dallas Times Herald when a writer friend gave me this collection of outstanding narrative journalism for Christmas in 1984. I was intoxicated by the graceful phrasing and reporting as art from my idols, including Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Tracy Kidder, Sara Davidson, and John McPhee. It’s a trade paperback now yellowed and bent, a treasure I have moved from Texas  to Indiana to Illinois, but refer to as a reminder of the possibility and tangible inspiration to produce well-crafted literary journalism.

Laura A. Woollett (Big Top Burning): Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin. My father loved to give me the Newbery winners for Christmas, but sometimes he forgot which ones I already had. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d given me this one three times!

Check back for Friday’s #CRPreads, when our staff answers the same question!