Christmas Reading

My Christmas stocking was sadly empty of books this year (don't ask!) leaving me nothing to review. Instead, here's a mention of some of the books I gave to others. My mother received the very well reviewed autobiography by Mary Soames, Churchill's daughter, of the years with her parents up until her marriage. Angus has enjoyed The Private Eye Annual 2011, a Christmas stocking staple in our family which has caused much sniggering and outright guffawing over the holiday period. You sort of feel that this year was the year that Private Eye was at its zenith with the closure of the News of the Screws (in fact, I'm off shortly to have a quick look at the Private Eye exhibition at the V&A before it closes next week). Angus also received (perhaps worryingly from his 12 year old sister) that student staple, The Hungoevr Cookbook (sic). For Laura, Far From Home by Na'imba B Robert, a young adult novel set in Rhodesia and then, forty years later, in Zimbabwe which I picked from this review on Ladybookbird. As a committed Sherlock Holmes fan, she was thrilled with The House of Silk: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz which I suspect we may all read. For Derek, as well as Alice Oswald's Memorial (see Books at my bedside), as a Mac addict, he had to be given hastily produced biography of Steve Jobs and his annual Christmas fix of Slightly Foxed which is a delightful quarterly compendium of reading, sold in the Kew Bookshop. Oh, and we all ate too much and did too little.