After last year’s post on Christmas books, y’all left some wonderful recommendations and I read some fun Christmas book reviews on other blogs. This year I’ve read all the books recommended last year, so I thought it’d be fun to do a follow-up! Adult fiction, picture books, graphic novels and short stories all included.
The books:
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore (recommended by Diana of Part Time Monster). An irreverent Christmas novel for adults, featuring characters from several of Moore’s other books. I didn’t like the previous Moore book I’d tried, but I loved this one, which led to #LazyLambs Book Club on Twitter and WordPress. It read Moore books for a bit, and is reading The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow this quarter!
Winter-themed books by Jan Brett (recommended by Sabina of Victim to Charm). The internet provides again! I recalled these books from my days straightening the picture books in the library, but hadn’t read any of them. The one I was able to check out as an ebook is quite new I believe, but it was called The Animals’ Santa and it’s lovely! The plot is slow and gentle, very wintery, with old-school detailed illustrations. Also there’s a fox in it, so of course I liked it. 😉
Santa Mouse by Michael Brown (recommended by Nerd in the Brain). An old-school picture book full of charm, and an adorable mousey. I couldn’t get the library to send me a copy in time for this post, but the internet provides! In this case, it provides a Reading Rainbow-style Youtube video:
The Larfleeze Christmas Special of 2010 by Geoff Johns (reviewed on Modern Mythologies). You may or may not be familiar with the current Green Lantern mythos, but Larfleeze is one of my all-time favorite comic characters! Green light represents willpower, but orange light represents greed… And Larfleeze is, understandably, the only orange lantern. In this story, Green Lantern attempts to show him that the true meaning of Christmas is giving, not receiving. Hehe. Available on Comixology.
Bonus recommendations:
Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig. I absolutely adore Willig’s romances. Some of the standalones are very serious, but the Pink Carnation books are absolutely hilarious. A whole series of historical romances based in a Scarlet Pimpernel setting. This Christmas installment is set about halfway through the series, but I’m told quite a few people got into the series by reading this book. It can stand alone, but the characters appear in plenty of the other books if you like it. This is actually my favorite one so far (I haven’t finished the series yet) because the hero, Turnip Fitzhugh, is so stinkin’ adorable.
Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas by Julia Rawlinson. The Animals’ Santa had a fox in it, but this one’s actually ABOUT a fox, so there. Heehee.
And finally, a short story: “No Planets Strike” by Gene Wolfe, which I found in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (but has been collected elsewhere too). It’s fairies and aliens and talking animals and Christmas and shouldn’t work but it does.
Happy holidays, and leave your festive and wintry recommendations in the comments! Feel free to include movies, because I’m getting a “secular holiday movies” list together for next year.
Hannah Reads Books 
You can’t go wrong with anything written by Jan Brett. She has a ton of Christmas stories, The Hat, The Mitten, Home for Christmas, The Wild Reindeer and all of them fantastic. My kids always loved her books, and The Trouble with Trolls was their favorite story for a long… time! Some great picks!
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