The festive season can get a little busy. It makes a good book the perfect escape from all the shopping, all the wrapping, and then all the Boxing Day turkey sandwich preparation.
One classic tale told so many times over the decades is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Not only is its Victorian yuletide imagery represented in our seasonal celebrations, but it’s also become a favourite in cinemas and theatres when December rolls along.
It got BBC Bitesize thinking. If you couldn’t choose A Christmas Carol as a top read with the festive season at its heart, which other one would you recommend? Here are the picks of members of the English Literature department at the University of Birmingham.
Christmas comes to Camelot
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 2009 translation by Simon ArmitageRecommended by: Dr Emily Wingfield, senior lecturer in English Literature
Arguably one of the first Christmas texts in the English language, and one of the finest texts from medieval England, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is readily accessible in Simon Armitage’s modern English translation.
The story begins at Camelot, where Arthur, Guinevere, and their knights have gathered to enjoy the merriment of Christmas. All of a sudden, the hall door bursts open and in charges a larger-than-life knight - ‘a half-giant’ - whose whole body, skin as well as clothes, is ‘entirely emerald green’.
This Green Knight challenges the court to take part in a game: he will allow the ever-chivalrous Gawain to strike him with an axe on condition that he can return the same stroke the following year. However, to everyone’s horror, the beheaded Green Knight survives, and rides off to await Gawain’s arrival at his Green Chapel next year.
What follows is a remarkable account of Gawain’s terrifying physical and psychological journey through a wild and wintery landscape of serpents, wolves, and wild-men, and of his stay at Bertilak’s castle. Will Gawain make the right choices? How will he fare when he finally re-encounters the Green Knight and his deadly axe?
As Armitage says, this poem is ‘a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale’. It’s also one of the first eco-texts, encouraging us to think about our relationship to the animal and natural world.
If you want to turn the pages of the original 600-plus year-old manuscript, you can do so on the British Library website.
Dash-ing through the Big Apple
Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David LevithanRecommended by: Dr Amy Burge, associate professor in popular fiction
In the opening scene of Richard Curtis’ 2003 Christmas film Love Actually, the UK Prime Minister (played by Hugh Grant) says “If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.” Twenty years later, it seems like the PM’s message is still true – especially at Christmas.
Millions of us watch romantic Christmas movies every year, finding comfort in the familiar a common (or sometimes overused) theme or device in literature, settings, and happy endings. These movies borrow from popular romance – the most globally best-selling of all literary genres. Hundreds of Christmas-themed romance novels are published every year, in which one or more individuals meet, fall in love, overcome obstacles, and live happily ever after (or at least happily for now).
One example are the Dash and Lily books by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.
Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares follows Christmas-hating Dash and holiday-loving Lily around New York in the lead-up to Christmas. Lily hides a red notebook full of dares between books in a bookshop – which Dash picks up. The novel has a classic romance structure – two opposites-attract characters, a series of mishaps and misunderstandings and, of course, a New Year’s Eve happy ending – blended with a Christmas setting.
Christmas romance has been criticised for its lack of diversity, although this is changing; the 2021 film Single All the Way, for example, featured a romance between two gay men. While many read Christmas romance for comfort and entertainment, readers can also think more critically about the genre, questioning the way these books represent the dreams, desires, and values of a particular society.
A most festive kind of mystery
Mistletoe and Murder by Robin Stevens
Recommended by: Professor Tom Lockwood, professor of English Literature and head of School of English, Drama and Creative Studies
‘It was Christmas Day, I remembered. Christmas, in Cambridge, with snow on the ground – and two murders at Maudlin.’
Hazel Wong – who as well as being the narrator of Robin Stevens’ Murder Most Unladlylike novels, is the vice-president and secretary of the Wells and Wong Detective Society whose cases the series follows – captures everything that makes Mistletoe and Murder perfect season’s reading.
Stevens’ novel has huge fun playing in Cambridge and the Cambridge snow, drawing perfect portraits of a markedly diverse university population, and with a crisp scatter of period-precise details to keep the reader warm and alert. But never too cosy – for those two murders, as well as the investigation that Hazel and Daisy launch in and among them, run up and down the staircases and rooftops of 1935 academic life, with all of the interest and agility of the Cambridge night climbers whose escapades the novel emulates.
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