My year of reading women
This is not a euphemism.
(Unfortunately? For those thirsting
after some of my adventures of yesteryear, anyway, perhaps. If it’s something
saucy you desire, then delve back into this episode from Uzbekistan in 2009; if
you’re after something rather more literary and staid by comparison, then
please do stick around.)
It’s been a while, but some loyal
readers may recall my series of ‘reflections on reading’ from last year. As
referenced in my last post, I think I’ve moved on from that series, in an
official way, but old habits die hard and I feel compelled to share my latest
reading project. I love themed reading phases. What I
mean is, as much as I adore reading, it’s always nice to break up the usual
routine and take on a theme to my reading, and to get outside my comfort zone
and do something different.
I’ve often asked myself, ‘what should I
read next?’ and there are two schools to questions like this. There are the –
arrogant/snob alert! – the non-readers who genuinely haven’t a clue what to
read, and then there are the avid, voracious readers like myself who have
Amazon wishlists of over 100 and hundreds of books to potentially read and some
serious confusion about what to read next.
I tend to go through themed phases – there
has been futuristic/sci-fi/apocalyptic stuff like Bradbury, Huxley, Cormac
McCarthy and Michel Houllebecq (notably The
Possibility of an Island). There have been religious phases with Blaise Pascal,
Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Francis Spufford (Unapologetic: Why Christianity Makes
Surprising Emotional Sense).
There was a long, drawn-out science
phase with gene, brain physiology, biology stuff about genes, neuroscience,
macrobiome health, gut physiology, etc (Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of
Cancer were among the highlights).
Last year at various points I was hit
with pangs of nostalgia for Northern Ireland and England which involved Colm
Toibin’s A Walk Across the Border,
Garrett Carr’s The Rule of the Land:
Walking Ireland's Border, and Matthew Engel’s Engel’s England as well as any elegiac ode or paean I came across
on the topic (excepting Brexit-related ditties).
There’s always a place for political
angsty material, and last year included Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is
Breaking America), Jonathan Haidt (The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion) and
Arlie Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own
Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right).
Inspiration, hare-brained or otherwise,
hits me in unexpected, unpredictable ways. But when I came across Gary Younge’s
article ‘My year of reading African women’ at the end of 2018, I was
positively inspired to take up a variation on this theme to start 2019.
I thought his approach was too narrow,
too focused for my liking. Not that there was anything wrong, per se, with
focusing on African women, but with my protean, eclectic tastes, I’d struggle
to dedicate myself to an area with such a narrow remit, when there’s so much
else I’d ‘planned’ to read this year. I’m fine with reading books on my Kindle,
but I do much prefer the old-fashioned pulp and paper and I have some 20-25
unread books on my shelf already, with a limited selection of what I can get in
Kyiv at local bookshops.
A year dedicated to reading women is not
exactly the most difficult, ‘get out of my comfort zone’ idea in the world, but
if you look at my current ‘to-read’ list, there’s a pretty wide and varied mix
of stuff to read.
Of the some fifty-odd books I read last
year (I’ve certainly got my priorities right – friends who haven’t heard from
me in ages, this is why. People wondering why I don’t write more often, this is
why.), some of the utter gems and delights were from female writers: Olivia
Laing’s Lonely City: Adventures in the
Art of Being Alone*, Mary Beard’s SPQR:
A History of Ancient Rome and Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.
These were some of my favourite books from 2018. An honourable mention has to
go to Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain
Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery, Cathryn Jakobson Ramin.
(*The
Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing, is also highly
recommended.)
But they were all non-fiction. And this
year would be all about fiction. The only
fiction I planned to read in 2019 would be from female writers. I got a head
start in 2018 with Stella Gibbons’ Cold
Comfort Farm and Dodie Smith’s I
Capture the Castle, but this year the plan was to dedicate, at a minimum,
every month to a female writer. That would mean 12 works of fiction this year,
one for every month. That, let me stress, is at a minimum. More would be
better. And although I was technically limiting this to fiction, I was going to
strive to read as much non-fiction as well.
This wouldn’t be easy – because even
though I love my reading themes, there are two major impediments to this
approach. One, as I’ve said many times before, I usually have anywhere from 4-6
books on the go at once. And two, there are times when I feel an immediate urge
to read a particular book. Were this urge to hit me around March, would I be
able to hold off until the start of 2020? I’ve got Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and John dos
Passos’ nearly 1200 page USA trilogy
sitting on my shelf, staring at me, practically begging to be read.
(The overwhelming majority of baby
advice books I read last year were by females, but do those count? I don’t
think so)
So far, so good. Here’s what we’ve read
thus far:
January: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (I read Jamaica Inn years ago)
February: The Secret Lives of the Four Wives, Lola Shonyegin (a Nigerian
writer who Gary Younge highlighted as one of his reads – I decided that I was
going to read at least 3 books that he had read, from a range of African
countries)
March: After You’d Gone, Maggie O’Farrell (the debut novel from a Northern
Irish writer – this was harrowing and moving and there were times when my eyes
welled up. There’s a chance that this is borderline chick-lit, but if so, so
what?)
April: The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan (because this is half
fiction, half non-fiction, it was sort of ‘cheating’, so needed a 2nd
for this month – I kid you not, I got misty-eyed and emotional throughout this
book – I won’t say why, but if you do a quick internet search for her, you will
find out); The Moor’s Account: Laila
Lalami (Moroccan-born, a piece of historical fiction about the Spanish
expedition, which included the Moor Mustafa al-Zamori, or Estebanico, to the
New World in the 16th century)
Lalami’s book has been the highlight so
far, and if you are at all interested in historical ‘fiction’ – it’s barely
fiction, really, the details are very accurate – then this is highly
recommended.
May: The
Friend, Sigrid Nunez (about a woman and a dog – fairly philosophical, very
introspective, excessively literary: beautiful and poignant)
June: I got a bit waylaid here. Up to
this point, all of the books I’d read had been excellent. I can’t say the same
for all the fiction I read, there are usually more ups and downs, more hits and
misses. But the first 5 months were consistently outstanding and every book I’d
read had been a treat. And if I didn’t have this theme going, I very well may
not have read any of these books. But in June I hit my first roadblock: the
winner of the 2019 International Booker Prize, Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi. Award winners can be hit or
miss – The Friend was another
prestigious prize winner, and I really enjoyed it. Over the years, some award
winners have been duds – I just couldn’t get into DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003 Booker Prize
Winner) and gave up.
Though I didn’t have a geographical
focus to my theme, I did want to cover as broad a range of nationalities and
eras, though my choices have heavily tilted towards modern-day Anglo-Saxon
writers. For the first 5 months, my authors have been, in order: English,
Nigerian, Northern Irish, American, Moroccan-American, American again. So I
felt it was time to branch out and I went with Alharthi, an Omani author. I
persisted as long as I could, re-reading chapters, but I had to call it a day a
third of the way through. It was tough-going and turgid, in all honesty.
I hesitate to call works of writing
‘shit’, but as a replacement, I opted to read a proper ‘shit’ book: The Big Necessity, Adventures in the World
of Human Waste by Rose George. This was book was absolute shit –
literally. And in this case, it’s a compliment. Very eye-opening, and it will
make you think twice about what you flush down the toilet or pour down your
kitchen sink. I now have a very healthy appreciation and respect for sewage workers
and toilet designers. It will also terrify you when you think about what the
world does with all of its human waste. I think we’re all sitting on a ticking
time bomb. (I don’t mean to panic you, but where the hell can we put all of our
waste? Add on things like nuclear waste and plastic and you’ll realise we’re
pretty much screwed. If I’d read this 3 years ago, I may well have thought
twice about having a kid!)
For good measure, I also read Elizabeth
Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which
is also non-fiction and equally terrifying, but more from a ‘we’re wiping out
loads of animal species’ perspective.
And Grayson Perry’s – a man, albeit a
transvestite – The Descent of Man,
which I read over the weekend of the 8th of March fit in well with
this year’s theme. Not in an environmental/doomsday catastrophe sense.
July:
Social Creature, Tara Isabella Burton (American, think a cross between The Talented Mr Ripley and Cruel Intentions, which is itself an
adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons:
this has to go down as a guilty pleasure. I could have finished this in a day
or two, but it was so juicy, gripping and intriguing that I had to drag it out
for as long as possible); Nights at the
Circus, Angela Carter (English, a nice piece of magical realism, with
healthy doses of feminism mixed in); All
That Remains: A Life in Death, Sue Black (Scottish, a forensic
anthropologist, and a book about the ‘many faces of death’, whether from an
emotional, coming-to-terms viewpoint, or from a more corporeal, purely physical
view, including the nitty-gritty details of how bodies decompose – if this is
your thing, then I’d also recommend Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Glorious Lives of Human Cadavers, which I read many
years ago – not only am I eclectic in my tastes, but also morbid and macabre).
From the introduction to Nights at the Circus:
Her
theatrical, fabular style has much in common with that of the other great
magical realists, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but she wrote,
always with a distinctly feminist agenda, determined to debunk cultural
fantasies around sexuality, gender and class.
(Sarah Waters)
Discovering writers: a brief aside
Two of the writers from this year I
discovered in 1843, which bills
itself as The Economist's ideas,
culture and lifestyle magazine. Tara Isabella Burton is a religion writer for Vox, but I first discovered her in 1843, in a very unreligious article
about spending 24 hours straight in a New York City diner, hanging out,
drinking copious amounts of coffee, talking to the regulars and generally just
taking in and soaking up the scene. It was a fascinating idea and immediately I
started thinking of all sorts of hare-brained variations on the theme, thinking
of ways I could tweak this and do something fun and adventurous. I think, one
[of these] day[s], I’ll spend 24 hours straight doing a solo pub crawl around
Kyiv, writing while I do it. I think that would be a blast, though God knows –
Burton would approve! – what I’d sound like by hour 17.
The article was so engaging that I started
following Burton on Twitter – I don’t follow very many people – and discovered Social Creature, though it is a book
that’s got a lot of buzz and has been widely praised and is bound to be made
into a film.
The other was Sigrid Nunez, who I also
read about in 1843. It was just a
short blurb about her latest book The
Friend, but it was enough to grab me. This was the opening:
Why
aren’t more people familiar with the work of Sigrid Nunez? At 66, she seems
doomed to be a writer’s writer, beloved by a loyal few for her clear, incisive
prose, but regrettably overlooked by almost everyone else. Perhaps The Friend –
her seventh novel – will change this.
So there you have it, that’s the plan,
and I’m sticking to it. As I’ve said, I was looking at getting a good mix of
genres, different regions of the world, wildly eclectic themes. A handful of my
all-time fiction favourites are from women: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Willa Cather’s My
Antonia, Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I
realise that I’m not doing too well in terms of geographical diversity, and
there’s definitely a late 20th century/early 21st bias
here, so for the remainder of the year, I am after recommendations, preferably
from non-American/non-British/Irish writers. I’m willing to stick to more
modern authors, but I’m flexible. I do of course realise there are plenty of
classics out there, but I’m looking at discovering some new writers, ones I’m
less familiar with. It’s always fun to stumble across previously unknown
writers like Burton and Nunez haphazardly and randomly. But recommendations are
also nice.
For my local readers, I’ve had little
exposure to Ukrainian writers. I dip in and out of Lina Kostenko’s poetry – in
Ukrainian, I understand very little of it – but otherwise all I’ve read is Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabushko and Chornobyl Prayer by
Svetlana Alexievich. Red Famine: Stalin’s
War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum is not by a Ukrainian writer, but it’s
certainly all about Ukraine.
Here’s what it’s in the pipeline for the
rest of the year:
I’m
the King of the Castle, Susan Hill (English,
published 1970)
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (Ghanaian, published 2016, one of Gary Younge’s reads)
Bookworm:
A Memoir of Childhood Reading, Lucy Mangan
(English, published 2018)
And one more – I’m tempted and intrigued
by the second writer mentioned after Nunez in the very same section, under the
subheading of ‘Sugar, sex and sea creatures’: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar. Go ahead, read
it too and see if it grabs you – it sounds very juicy:
If you’re one of the few to have made it
this far…thanks for reading.
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