Here are a couple of suggestions for your reading pleasure. They are not Christmas books, but big hefty tomes that need a bit of time to wade into.

The Life of Crime is a 700+ pages volume covering all kinds of crime novel, tracing the genre from its beginnings in the 18th century right up to almost the present day. Mind you, despite its comprehensiveness it doesn’t appear to include the Cormoran Strike novels by Galbraith, at least not judging by the indexes. Note that plural. There’s an index of titles, index of names and a subject index, plus a select bibliography. I love all the cross-referencing, and the little known (by myself at any rate) facts.

For example, David Goodis wrote noir fiction that apparently was so bleak that another novellist, Ed Gorman, said of Goodis that:

He didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes.

What a recommendation!

Like all the best books, this can be read chronologically or dipped into. It will keep you engaged for a long time.

The other book, Retroland, looks at a wide variety of novels published over the last fifty years. Again, there’s tons of detail and cross-referencing. What I especially like is that the book is divided into categories, and within those categories the works and approach of different authors are compared. For example, there is some overlap between the books of Rushdie and Naipaul in terms of the time and place they cover, but with very different perspectives.

Retroland is good for gaining a sort of Reader’s Digest overview of the literature of the last fifty years, and also serves to suggest books that should be added to one’s reading list. My only quibble is that some books are covered in barely a sentence, which can be a little frustrating.

Either (or both!) of these books would make a delightful, if unseasonable, present. I should mention, of course, that the links to the books are Amazon affiliate links, and that buying these books through those links will enable me to feed the three feline parasites who reside in Freedman Towers.