As much effort as I put into holiday-appropriate reading for Halloween, I somehow always let Thanksgiving pass me by. Who the hell wants to read about turkeys and the forced appropriation of land anyway?
This year, though, there’s been a lot of attention on Thanksgiving-related reading. The Smart Set covers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving.” Maud Newton points out how Mark Twain spent one Thanksgiving (being a lovable looney, just like any other day); the LOA posts Twain’s short story, “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey”; and the New Yorker shares the menu for one of Twain’s Thanksgiving dinners, which took place at the Park Avenue Hotel.
And then there’s the random assortment I found on that bastion on random knowledge, About.com. Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Jane Murray’s Thanksgiving”; “Mirages” by Walt Whiman; “The Thanksgiving in Boston Harbor” by the wonderfully named Hezekiah Butterworth; and another Twain entry, the rather politically charged “What I Am Thankful For.”
But what will I really be reading? The answer is obvious, since I didn’t get nearly enough creepiness in my Halloween reading: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Thanksgiving,” from Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. Oh, and this fascinating Thanksgiving Day letter sent from Yokohama, Japan.
And then there’s Alec Baldwin, who we never knew till now was absolutely made to play Mark Twain.
LikeLike