I have the unusual privilege this year of spending the holidays in Florida. For a girl who grew up in northern Vermont, where Christmas is typically white to a stupefying extent, it’s both relieving and disappointing to wake up each morning of Christmas week to bright sun, sparkling water and the sight of alligators sprawled out on the banks of the pond.

For my partner, this is paradise. Not because of the exceptional vitality of every corner of the green and living world, even in December, nor because of the wash of Vitamin D available for nine hours every day. No, it’s a paradise of golf.

And while he’s trekking back and forth across the greens in search of balls, I’ve been falling asleep in the sun with a book half-shading my face.

I packed five of the books I purchased recently at a library book sale: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Ethan Frome, Wide Sargasso Sea and a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and lectures.

That final choice is admittedly one of those books I’m always excited to acquire but rarely find myself actually reading. It’s an aspirational book — the kind I keep on myself because the person I want to be would read it, not because I plan to.

The others have thus far proven good companions for an unusual week away.

What can I say about Faulkner except that it seems he achieved in his own way the kind of experimental chronology and unfettered syntax that many contemporary novels fail so spectacularly at?

It was a relief, actually, to see that it had been done well, and so long ago.

Ethan Frome, on the other hand, is a remarkably simple novel. But what the style lacks in depth is balanced by the pulsing theme of human happiness. Maybe the lesson from a book like this is that the most profound questions should be dealt with in the simplest terms.

I’m midway through Wide Sargasso Sea now. I was put onto it, of course, after reading Jane Eyre earlier in the year. Although it’s a relatively short read, I’m digesting it slowly.

When I come to any conclusion, you’ll be the first to know.

For now, have a very happy holidays, and we’ll talk in the new year.

-abbie