Sofa, coffee and book: what to read this holiday?

The end of the year break is coming and, although we are going to spend a lot of time buying gifts and trying to find the perfect gifts, we will also have time to rest and enjoy reading.

We’ve asked several of our literature experts what books they recommend for those free moments. And if they hit the nail on the head and the occasion arises, we may end up wrapping them for a loved one.

The Light Years (Chronicles of the Cazalet) by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Translation by Celia Montolío

“This is the first of the five novels that make up the Cazalet saga. It is no coincidence that the story is preceded by a family tree: the family is the axis of everything that happens to characters that will soon steal our hearts.

Three generations with very different voices come together in Sussex to enjoy the last ‘light’ summers that they will live for a long season. Those readers who decide to continue with the saga after reading the light years they will grow hand in hand with the characters and will inevitably end up feeling part of the Cazalet family”.

Recommended by Silvia Hernández Hellín.

Monsters in America: our historical obsession with the hideous and the haunting, de W. Scott Poole

“This work is based on a central hypothesis: the impossibility of knowing American culture without attending to its monsters. As Poole explains, these menacing beings arise from historical traumas that permeate the villains of the present. Beyond the close context, which is also analyzed, slavery, racism or structural violence are fundamental to understanding Candyman or Freddy Krueger.

In short, it is an essay that those interested in cultural history and cinema will find exciting and fundamental to understanding the same society that is capable of housing both Donald Trump and Michael Myers as well as Betty Friedan and Laurie Strode”.

Recommended by Erika Tiburcio.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Translation of Concha Cardeñoso

“In Hamnet (2020), the Northern Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell tells the story of the tragic death of the son of the most important playwright in English literature (since he is not named in the novel, I will not do so here either) and of the emotional and artistic consequences That this entails.

But the protagonist is not Hamnet, nor his famous father, but Anne Hathaway, the wife and mother who bears the loss of a son. It is a story about grief that seduces the reader from the first moment and immerses them fully in that house in Stratford-Upon-Avon where there is room to fall in love, get excited, laugh, cry, and even (why not) for a little bit. of magic”.

Recommended by Alicia Muro.

The Anonymous Confession, by Suzanne Lilar

“The Uruguayan writer Ercole Lissardi stated that ‘few works like The anonymous confession They show how, lived in all its splendor, desire can lead to a spiritual mutation, to an access to the sublime’. The anonymous confession It is an autobiographical novel, feminine, and also of love, because the love adventure is in the center of it. It is the only reality, it invades everything and occupations go to the background. Love-passion, fatal love, total love… it is like a divine gift and everything is accepted with the only condition that this deep mystery is realized in the lovers.

A polyphonic novel that speaks directly to the heart, it shows that life is a privileged experience because it can become literature. The novel gave rise to a 1983 film by André Delvaux titled Welcomewith Fanny Ardant and Vittorio Gassman as protagonists”.

Recommended by Àngels Santa.

The evening in Benicarló. Dialogue on the Spanish War, by Manuel Azaña

“The author, president of the Second Republic, writes this essay in the form of a dialogue in which eleven fictitious characters intervene. Azaña, the protagonist, is divided into two of them. The venue for the evening is a hostel on the Castellón coast; its moment, the insurrection of 1937 in Catalonia. Francisco Caudet has made a documented and revised introduction to this book published in Buenos Aires in 1939 and corrected by Azaña himself.

The republican side and its endemic struggles, the pre-eminence between the social revolution or the war against the rebels, the education of the crowds, the historical examination of Spanish thought and the unforeseeable but tragic consequences that can be guessed after the war, are some of its themes: ‘No policy can be based on exterminating the adversary’, the author of The garden of the friars. The historical perspective and the rationality of the analysis advise its reading”.

Recommended by Santiago Fortuño.

The Uruguayan of Pedro Mairal

“Funny, easy to read and completely from the River Plate, the uruguayan (2017) by the Argentine writer Pedro Mairal is a great novel to give away and treat yourself to this Christmas.

The book tells the story of Lucas Pereyra, a writer who is around forty years old and is not going through the best moment of his marriage. Pereyra undertakes a trip from Buenos Aires to Montevideo to collect a few dollars, due to the currency crisis in Argentina, and takes the opportunity to meet again with a young Uruguayan that he had met a few years before. An amazing and perfectly constructed light novel that he shouldn’t stop reading.”

Recommended by Micaela Moya.

Tostonazo, by Santiago Lorenzo

why read Tostonase? Because it’s a witty satire written at a time when intelligent humor is in short supply. Because he laughs at the unbearable contradictions of those who don’t know how to laugh at themselves. Because it reveals the miseries of mediocre climbers who want more than anything to appear and command without being up to the job. Because it caricatures the rancid, complaining and nostalgic intolerant that in its inconsistencies can only be grotesque. Because maybe it will teach us that we don’t have to waste time with tostones-humanos that make life impossible. And finally, for the pleasure of imagining extremely happy lives that escape Tostonase General”.

Recommended by Antonio Fernández Vicente.

Silvia Hernández Hellín, PhD in Literary and Linguistic Studies in their Sociocultural Contexts, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Alicia Muro, PhD in English Philology. Professor in the Department of Modern Philology of the UR. Member of the BANNA/BOND Center for Irish Studies and the GRID research group (Representations of Identities in English-Speaking Literary and Film Texts), University of La Rioja; Antonio Fernández Vicente, Professor of Communication Theory, Castilla-La Mancha university; Erika Tiburcio Moreno, Associate Professor in Contemporary History, Carlos III University; María Ángeles Santa Bañeres, Emeritus Professor of French Philology at the University of Lleida, University of Lleida; Micaela Moya, Predoctoral Researcher at the University of Salamanca- Doctorate in Spanish: advanced studies in Language and Literature, University of Salamancaand Santiago Fortuño Llorens, Professor of Spanish Literature, Jaume I University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.