Video Christmas Cards. How to treat yourself to the best romaine and a cinnamon-scented hot chocolate

The Christmas holiday with the newest books to read can even be an exclusive option. Here’s what you can choose from Alice Books

Christmas morning. It’s quiet. Christmas tree lights color your entire room. After a year of work, it’s time to relax your mind and soul. This is how the Holiday season can begin.

I thought I’d give you some ideas about the books that can accompany you during this period. The first step is to prepare the most delicious hot chocolate, in which you dip a frosty chocolate bar. All this magical liquor deserves to be indulged with lots of whipped cream and scented with cinnamon.

Sit comfortably in bed or in an armchair and open a book. And because the offer is big, I invited Andreea Verde from Alice Books to a dialogue.

About books that unite and computer games that become novels

Antoaneta Banu: What books should I tell Santa Claus to put under my tree?

Andreea Verde: I have two options. If you want to enter a fantasy atmosphere, to go with your imagination to unsuspected areas, I recommend you “Legends & Latte” by Travis Baldree. The author is a guy who has been creating computer games for a long time. He fell in love with the fantasy universe and managed to create a best-seller without realizing it.

During the pandemic, he started writing and because he wanted to get out of all the daily stress, he went to various places and wrote a little to relax. In time he collected a novel, and video game fans literally exploded, because they considered it a novel like no other. It is recommended for teenagers and even for any age.

Antoaneta Banu: A fantasy, as the first recommendation. And what else do you surprise us with?

Andreea Verde: I actually have another proposal. It’s called “Str. Charing Cross no. 84” by Helene Hanff. A book that I think you can read in about 2 hours, if you set your mind to it. It’s an exchange of letters between a writer in America and a guy who owns an antique shop in England. Between them develops such a beautiful friendship, which is captured in the letters they send each other, from 1949 to 1969. For 20 years, they corresponded constantly.

They also sent each other gifts, and made confessions, but all starting from the love of books. I recommend it to everyone who is really in love with books. It seems to me that “Str. Charing Cross no. 84” by Helene Hanff it is also a lesson of humanity beyond the books, because they are a pretext for the two to help each other. The book describes the world of booksellers that still exist in Europe.

Antoaneta Banu: I don’t know if it still exists in Romania. ….

Andrea Verde: It also exists in Romania. And for that I recommend you “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians” by James Patterson, in collaboration with Matt Eversmann and Chris Mooney. It is an anthology of first-person testimonials by several American and Canadian booksellers and librarians. But because we also wanted to find a touch of Romanian culture, at the end of the book we meet three booksellers from Romania who tell their own stories. And we have Cristian Boricean from Cărtureşti, then Oana Dobo and Raluca Selejan from Timișoara, who have the independent bookstore La Doua Bufnițe.

Girls, Japanese travel and an extravagant story from Florida

Antoineta Banu: You, at Alice Books, also brought Japanese writers to Romania. A fabulous literature from a cultural space still mysterious and considered strange to Westerners.

Andreea Verde: We have new, the novel “Kokoro” by Natsume Sōseki This is the best selling Japanese novel of all time. It has now also reached us in the translation of Ioland I. Prodan. It is a novel that has influenced many writers over time, and the author is Haruki Murakami’s favorite.

He has many texts where he talks about how Natsume Sōseki influenced his way of thinking about the scenes he outlines in his works. The story of “Kokoro” is simple but full of lessons and a huge dose of personal emotions. Natsume Sōseki is about an apprentice, a young student who finds a master and the friendship between them over a long period of time. The book also includes a lot of details about Japanese culture.

Antoineta Banu: And for lovers of reading, what proposal do you have?

Andreea Verde: It is a book that deals with a subject that you can perceive according to your own inner reality. “I Who Never Knew a Man” by Jacqueline Harpman. The premise from which the novel starts is about the existence of women who have been locked underground for a very long time, without them knowing why they are there, in that situation. The novel begins right in the middle of the action, revealing their life underground. Among them is a young woman who is believed to have been brought there by mistake.

This girl ends up living her teenage years underground. It’s fiction, but it seems remarkably believable. Together with this young woman we live her story, who has never been in love, who does not even have a body that has developed harmoniously like a woman’s. It’s a fictional social experiment that brings up a lot of questions about how we connect with people and how much or how little we appreciate what we have on earth.

I have another proposal, also for ladies and gentlemen. “Brute” by Dizz Tate. It’s about sisters who go through some age-specific transformations and that makes them react in a certain way to their parents, to the world, to boys. The novel is written from a collective point of view. You never know who’s talking, because “us girls” becomes a character, being the main narrator.

It is an extravagant story from Florida, which very interestingly captures the dynamics of teenage girls, how far the emotional transformations go and how they ricochet in the relationship with others. Adolescence does not only come with this development or maturation, it also comes with many anxieties, sometimes it also comes with a lot of malice, with a lot of envy, with a lot of jealousy that is created in relation to other girls who may look much better than you.

“Side roads. Story from Xinjiang” by Perhat Tursun

Antoaneta Banu: Let’s talk a little about Sideways, a very special book

Andreea Verde: That’s right. “Side roads. Story from Xinjiang” by Perhat Tursun. It is considered one of the best books of 2022 and tells the drama of the Uighur people oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party. The main character is a Uyghur man who, in an attempt to escape the suffering and poverty of the countryside, arrives in the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. What this novel describes is universally valid for the era in which we live. It is about urban isolation, social violence and dehumanization.

The author, Perhat Tursun is a writer, poet and a great Uyghur social critic from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He is regarded as the most important modernist Uyghur writer who has published numerous poems and short stories as well as three novels. What is very important to know, Perhat Tursun disappeared in 2018 and in 2020 it was found that, following some charges that remain unclear, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

And Christmas is coming…

If you want to discover even more books from the Alice Books universe, watch the full edition of Adevărul Live that I made with Andreea Verde, the PR Manager of the publishing house.

From the interview you will also find out what future publishing events Alice is preparing for readers in 2025. Read a book and give your brain and soul fresh air.