I wasn’t joking the other day when I said this is a thing. Partly because of the upcoming Xmas over-indulgence (I seriously just moved an appointment from the 4th Jan to the 10th so I have an extra week without obligations), partly because it feels like my last chance of the year to learn something, and partly to cook up a little gratitude, I’ve started reading a difficult/challenging/harrowing book in the first week or two of December.

Last year, when the tradition originated, it was Red China Blues by Jan Wong. It’s a memoir of Wong’s time living in China (she’s Chinese-Canadian), including her white-knuckle first-person account of Tiananmen Square and her gradual disenchantment with communism. I think everyone should read it.

This year it was The Diary of a Young Girl, which I somehow, shamefully, had never read before, despite there being a copy on our bookshelves growing up. (Also, we didn’t study this at school, which I think is unforgivable considering some of the books we wasted our time with. We weren’t taught one single thing about the Holocaust. Also unforgivable.)

Anyway, this is the definitive edition, which includes material Otto Frank omitted from the original. Also, it shows where Anne added to and edited some passages, adding material later to explain her angry outbursts about her mother, for example. This is the version of the diary she was getting ready for possible publication (though she thought perhaps as a novel) after the war.

Clearly, there’s nothing new or clever to say about it. What an insightful, sad, and ultimately tragic read it is, but there’s something life-affirming about it too, with Anne in all her witty, angry, stoic glory. On Twitter I said it smashed my heart to smithereens, and that about covers it.

Now I’m going to watch Freedom Writers because Miep Gies (RIP) features in it, and the kids are all turned on to education by books like Anne Frank’s. I know the movie is problematic — rich white lady comes to save a class of poor minorities, gets applauded, pukey! — but I think it has a lot of good things to say about prejudice and the power of education, even if it’s over-simplified, sentimental, and paternalistic.

The bit where Ms Gruwell asks her class:

“Raise your hand if you know what the Holocaust is?” And one person raises his hand. And then she says:

“Raise your hand if anyone here has ever been shot at?” And everyone (but one) raises their hand… will never not bring tears to my eyes.

But after that, it is JINGLE ALL THE WAY. Metaphorically, that is. I may be turning my brain off but I am not sitting through that crappy movie again.