With Christmas so close here are some short reviews of books that will make good gifts or light reading during the season as it invites us to settle down by a fireplace to read and to listen to gentle music.

Let me start with "Maigret's Christmas", a book of short pieces by the great French master of detective stories, Georges Simenon. These capture the Paris of his time (the 1940s and '50s), a Paris that has not really changed very much despite some grandiose new buildings that successive French prime ministers and presidents have had erected to mark their reigns. Anyone, who knows Paris a little, will recognize the places mentioned, the streets, the city districts.

These are tales with simple plots, and easy solutions to the crimes. They are, as the French would say, "les amusettes", little idle pleasures. Inspector Maigret and his team of helpers have a casual way of solving crime. There is a bit of Agatha Christy's Miss Marples in Maigret's approach and manner, but Simenon does not bring the psychological depth to his characters that Christy did, and to the crimes to be solved or committed.

This is definitely good holiday reading.

[Maigret's Christmas, Georges Simenon, A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc., paperback, 405 pages, $20.95]

"Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola" first came out in 1986, and has now been re-issued by Polestar, which is an imprint of Raincoast Books. It is an unusual book of etiquette for ladies crossing Canada by train. It's highly amusing, but also fascinating, and sparked with a little bit of danger, tense moments, and in style is reminiscent of Katherine Mansfield's writing.

The author is Paulette Jiles, who was born in Salem, MO in 1943, and who moved to Canada in 1969 to work for CBC Radio in Northern Ontario. She has now moved back to the United States, but holds dual US/Canadian citizenships. She has received a Governor General's Award for her poetry collection, Celestial Navigation. Her first novel, published in 2002, Enemy Women, received high critical acclaim.

If you have every travelled by train across Canada, you will re-experience the trip through Jiles' clever and observant writing. Her heroine travels from Vancouver eastward. I won't reveal her final destination, because that would spoil the fun of this comic mystery cum love story. It's ideal for the holiday season and makes a good stocking stuffer.

[Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola by Paulette Jiles, Polestar, softcover, 108 pages, $16.95]

"In a German Pension" is from the pen of Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealander, who quite justly is called the initiator of the modern short story. This is the first book she ever published in her short writing career which lasted from 1911 to '23, when she died from tuberculosis at age 35.

In this book of stories she captures the atmosphere of staying in a pension in a Bavarian spa town, where she observed her fellow guest with very astute eyes. It is indirectly based on her own experience — she spent some time in just such a place during an unwelcome pregnancy that miscarried.

The observer in the stories is a young Englishwoman, who during her 'cure' has to put up with some fairly dislikeable fellow-guests. For a free-thinking spirit like Mansfield, the narrow German petit bourgeois prejudices were obviously fodder for her great imagination. She had a way of looking through the pretensions of people and this book is a fine example.

[In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield, Hesperus Press, softcover, 116 pages, $16.95]

By the same publisher is the re-issue of Ivan Turgenev's "Faust" This is a darker story than all of the previous books mentioned in this review. This is not a rewriting of the Faust of Marlow or Goethe. Instead, it is the story of a young woman, who was forbidden to read poetry as a child and continues to obey her mother wishes even after her death. Then a neighbour enters her life, who introduces her to Goethe's Faust, and this leads to unexpected tragedy. It is the neighbour, who tells the story through letters to a friend.

Turgenev was a master storyteller and one of Russia's great writers. He advocated the westernization of Russian literature, studied abroad, and wrote sympathetic studies of the peasantry, which earned him the displeasure of government. A sympathetic notice that praised Gogol on his death caused Turgenev to be banished for two years to his country estate. The country scenes he describes in Faust are observations from his own time spent away from Moscow during his banishment.

This is a fascinating story that you will want to finish reading in one sitting so as not to lose the thread and the feeling of the story.