Symptoms: Easily distracted. Thoughts in disarray. Waves of anxiety stemming from too much to do in too little time.
Cause: The holidays — 'tis the season to be out of kilter, off plumb, in need of calibration.
Prescription: Make a cup of tea, settle in a comfy chair and focus on one of these mini-distractions.
Alan Bennett's 120-page novella, "The Uncommon Reader," offers touching, gentle humor laced with political and social satire. No surprise there. Bennett, along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, created "Beyond the Fringe," an early-1960s British comedy review that changed cabaret theater and paved the way for "TW3" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus."
"The Uncommon Reader" is about the Queen of England and the subversive power of reading. It begins when the Queen follows her wandering Welsh corgis into a mobile library near Buckingham Palace.
Feeling obliged to borrow a book — we all know how one book leads to another and then another — the Queen becomes an avid reader, taking a book with her wherever she goes. We also know that the more one reads, the more one's world view begins to shift.
Subversive, indeed.
Bennett writes, "Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass ... one just wishes one had more of it."
He continues, "The appeal of reading ... lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not ... Books did not defer. All readers were equal ... It (reading) was anonymous; it was shared; it was common."
"The Uncommon Reader," with its surprise ending, is a delightful, easy read — a nice break from the holiday crazies. And speaking of crazies. ...
Anyone who has had it up to here (I have stopped typing and am pointing to my chin) with Christmas is in good company. John Updike's text and Edward Gorey's images come together in "The Twelve Terrors of Christmas," a little book guaranteed to take the glaze off the fruitcake.
Updike shows us there is something to dread in everything from the concept of Santa, to reindeer, to carols, to elves.
"Again, what is really going on? Why do these purported elves submit to sweatshop conditions in what must be one of the gloomiest climates in the world, unless they are getting something out of it at our expense?
"Underclass masochism one day, bloody rebellion the next. The rat-a-tat-tat of tiny hammers may be just the beginning."
Gorey's accompanying drawing of wild-eyed elves is a delight, a dreadful delight, sure to scramble the egg in an egg nog. I know a number of people who would welcome this take on the holidays.
Last, but certainly not least, prolific writer Alexander McCall Smith is dozens of chapters into his first online novel, "Corduroy Mansions," carried exclusively on telegraph.co.uk. New chapters are set to appear each weekday through Feb. 13, 2009. And, what fun, the author is taking suggestions from readers to help the story unfold.
The chapters began appearing in mid-September. Not to panic. All of the chapters are available, and our options abound.
One can follow the story the old fashioned way, by reading it. One can listen to the story being read by Andrew Sachs, the actor who played Manuel on "Faulty Towers." And, of course, one can have the chapters downloaded to an iPod and played whenever it's convenient. All chapters are free.
Visit the Web site, meet the characters, locate Corduroy Mansions on Google Maps, correspond with McCall Smith. All is possible. We live in a remarkable time.
