"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Winter Tale: A Letter from Father Christmas

You are familiar, no doubt, with the awkwardly sweet pieces of fiction that are his Father Christmas Letters. They were handwritten and illustrated between 1920 and 1943, and told the many adventures of Father Christmas in the North Pole, alongside his trusted assistant the Polar Bear.

It’s hard to pick one, as lots of them are really delightful, but my favourite has to be the 1933 letter when the goblin attack the workshop and they’re fended off by the Polar Bear and the rest of the elves. The one from 1932 is a good one too, featuring an episode similar to the one in the Wind in the Willows where Mole goes down with Badger to his ancestor’s catacombs: here Father Christmas and the Polar Bear find some ancient caves beneath the North Pole and they’re able to decipher some parts of the goblin’s alphabet.

 

Hills Like White Elephants

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

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Summertime

Mapping the Furrow

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

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books and literature

Keanu Reeves & China Miéville: The Book of Elsewhere

It would be a vast understatement to say that this book was a surprise. Not being familiar with the comics (so unfamiliar, in fact, that I didn’t even know they existed), the first impact with the main storyline was “ok, what the hell am I

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Hills Like White Elephants

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

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Mapping the Furrow

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

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