Telephone by Percival Everett, held by guest blogger Alice Oven
I’ve definitely neglected my blog of late. The fact that I only recently got around to writing about, and posting, my list of what I read during 2019, bears that out. After two January posts in quick succession, one of my friends asked if I was going to be revisiting my blog more frequently, and this struck a chord with me. I do want to keep it going; I do want to breathe some life into it. And so I thought that having some guest bloggers might be a good way to do this. I contacted a couple of friends, and the first response came from Alice.
When I started to write an opening for this piece, I mistyped ‘incredible’ as ‘increadible’, which seems fitting. Alice is my incredible, increadible friend. We love many of the same books, and I have some exciting recommendations from her for this year, including Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham: A Novel, and a book and writer I’d never heard of: What Are You GoingThrough by Sigrid Nunez. When Alice and I meet up (either in real life or via any of the, um, video conferencing platforms) talk turns quickly to what we are reading.
We met when I interviewed her for a role in the publishing company I worked for at the time. We hit it off, quickly discovering a shared love of booze and books, and combining both at the company’s book group we belonged to with our colleagues. The book group covered modern classics such as Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, and more contemporary reads, including Blindness by José Saramago and All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld. More recently, in a lockdown summer, we joined with some other friends/former colleagues to reignite book group over Zoom, where we discussed Normal People by Sally Rooney. Next up is Wyld’s latest novel, The Bass Rock.
Alice recently added some of my 2020 reads to her list, declaring herself delighted to have been name-checked in my blog post for lending me some of what I read in that year. I told her then that she would likely reappear. And so she has….
What you will read below is typical Alice: smart, thoughtful, interesting and engaging. I love how she describes the communal way she read the book with a close friend at a time when friends can’t get together properly in person. I was interested in the point she makes about the increase in online book groups. In making this point, she identifies something so current about this book and the process of reading it that demonstrates how significant reading – and the sharing of reading – has become during the pandemic. Her descriptions of the plot and the writing make it sound like a must-read, and I am dying to get a copy to find out what my last word is.
If you want to follow Alice and her adventures in all things books, vegan, house renovation and fitness, you can find her on Instagram as alicemicrowave. For her writing on animal right, ethics, welfare and veganism, you can go to her blog, here.
But here she is, my inaugural guest blogger, writing about Telephone.
I read Percival Everett’s Telephone on a sticky Saturday near the start of lockdown, when London was sunk in that oppressive May heatwave we long for all winter and loathe when it arrives. I’d not heard of the author before but my friend Ian recommended him (not Jackie’s Ian: apparently everybody needs a friend called Ian who recommends great books). Anyway, he suggested this particular Everett novel because it had just been released in three subtly different versions, each with an alternative ending. Which version you got when you ordered the book was a lucky dip. So Ian thought we could read our copies in sync, him in Bath and me in London, and see if our Telephones were different.
So, slowly baking on a beach towel in my garden, I read Telephone cover-to-cover in one sitting, keeping up a WhatsApp dialogue peppered with exclamation-marked page references from me and insightful observations from Ian (“I really like coincidences in books, and the title, and the telling phrase in the Roth book is ‘Here we are’ – and on p.99. Innocuous in itself”).
Funny – it’s only occurred to me now that on that stifling lockdown weekend, Everett’s novel became a kind of telephone itself. A long-distance line between London and Bath, slightly out of sync but connecting two readers at a time when real-life face-to-face conversation was impossible. I suppose that’s why online book clubs have become so important to people during the pandemic: sharing the same words on a page is a great cure for loneliness. It doesn’t matter how restricted your reality, while you’re immersed in the pages of the same book, you all share the same expansive landscape. In this case, starting with a chess game in Los Angeles, then getting lost in Paris, and finally accompanying the protagonist on a nail-biting rescue mission in New Mexico.
When we’d both reached the end of Telephone, we realised that we had, in fact, read the same copy (“my last word is ‘bear’ too”). No matter: the differing endings sell is the least interesting part of the book. Telephone’s premise is unbearably tragic. Zach Wells, a geology professor, struggles to come to terms with his 12-year-old daughter Sarah’s terminal diagnosis with Batten disease, a horrific degenerative disorder similar to Alzheimer’s. Everett’s understated and often hilarious narrative takes us from the game of chess when Wells realises something’s wrong, to Sarah’s final moments, a scene so devastatingly sad that I had to temporarily put down the book. The humour in the novel might seem at odds with the subject matter, but without it this would be a depressing, maudlin read. Instead, it’s something far more touching and poignant, especially in passages like the one below, where we see Wells’ paternal love for his daughter in all its raw, heart-breaking vulnerability.
Paternal love in Telephone
Running alongside this is a very different sort of tale: in a shirt he orders online, Wells discovers a note with the word for “help me” in Spanish, tracks the package to a P.O. box in New Mexico and ends up attempting to rescue a group of kidnapped Mexican women. Does he succeed? Well, I suppose it depends which Telephone you got.
Everett is a Black American writer and his novel came out shortly before the brutal killing of George Floyd: in fact, we were reading it on 25th May, the very day Floyd was murdered. Race does play a part in Telephone, during the scene in Paris for instance, where Wells loses Sarah during a protest and fears that she will be harmed because of the colour of her skin. But it’s not the subject of the book: as one critic writes in the New York Times, Everett “writes about the experience of being black, but he does not write about the experience of being black as a problem to be solved or a condition to be endured” (Yeh, 2020). He’s also a terrifically clever writer but not in a show-offy way; his novels (I’ve since read one more, So Much Blue, which is nearly as good) are full of subtle cross-references, word tricks, foreshadowings and, in this case, coded chess moves. That’s why the three-version thing works so well; you could read Telephone at least three times and still not be disappointed that you’d picked up the same rendition. Aside from the ending, there are apparently very tiny but deliberate differences between the three books, small substitutions of single words that bring new meaning. In retrospect, I didn’t do this book justice by devouring it in a day: Telephone deserves to be savoured.
I could wax lyrical about this book for many hundreds of words, but given that Everett has the sexiest voice of any author I’ve listened to, I suggest seeking out some podcasts where he’s interviewed about this book (and his writing process in general). And obviously, read Telephone. Just let me know how yours ends…
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout, started December 2019
Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie
Bad News by Edward St Aubyn
Edith’s Diary by Patricia Highsmith
Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn
Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie
Red Riding: 1977 by David Peace
Red Riding: 1980 by David Peace
Red Riding: 1984 by David Peace
Collected Stories and Other Writing by John Cheever, started and read on and off since 2010
Big Sky by Kate Atkinson
Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn
At Last by Edward St Aubyn
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Rabbit Redux by John Updike
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Rabbit is Rich by John Updike
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Canada by Richard Ford
Intimations by Zadie Smith
The Colossus by Sylvia Plath
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K Steinberg and Karen V Kukil, started 2019
The New York Trilogy: City of Glass by Paul Auster, started around 1998
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath, started 2009
Lowborn by Kerry Hudson
Books vs Cigarettes by George Orwell
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Cinema of Outsiders by Emmanuel Levy, started 1999
The New York Trilogy: Ghosts by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy: The Locked Room by Paul Auster
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Essex Girls by Sarah Perry
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Towards the end of 2019 I thought about my reading challenge for 2020. How could I find a way to read some of the stuff on my shelves, some of those half-finished or barely started books? And what about the book series I had started last year, by David Peace and Edward St Aubyn? I couldn’t wait forever to finish those off. So, I decided on ‘Completion’ as a theme. This allowed me to finish books I had started and abandoned for various reasons, and to make my way to the end of these book series. But that was too limiting, and I knew it wouldn’t last me for the year. So, I expanded the theme to include reading other works by authors I had previously read. I knew I wouldn’t finish the entire works of these authors but I could at least read more of their books and still fit with my (somewhat looser than usual) theme.
I started strong by finishing a book I had started at the very end of 2019, and you can read what I had to say about it here. It made more sense to put my review in that post rather than this one.
I then headed straight to one of my mum’s battered Agatha Christie paperbacks. Reading Christie, despite some of her characters’ less savoury attitudes towards Jewish people, is like getting a hug from my mum: familiar, warm. I followed it later in the year with Taken at the Flood and The Secret of Chimneys, both previously owned by my mum, and filled with the sums and shopping lists that she wrote on the blank front and end pages and, occasionally, the margins. Seeing her handwriting in unexpected places was beautiful. Then, after clearing out an old chest of drawers, came the best Christie find of the year. I had read a passage from The Mysterious Affair at Styles at my mum’s funeral in 2009. It had seemed fitting to read from her copy of Poirot’s first published case. I was overjoyed to find what I thought I had lost, and like the other books of hers that I read this year, it brought her back to me for a while. This book was also decorated with sums and shopping lists, along with the initials FDR at the bottom on page 81. My friend Martin thought he knew what was meant by this: ‘Future Daughter Readership’. That’s probably the most beautiful thing anyone could have said.
Future Daughter Readership in The Mysterious Affair at Styles
I’d started the Patrick Melrose novels last year (on loan from Kathy and John), and before Lockdown 1 I had finished them all, racing through them on the daily commute and during my lunch breaks. The first one remains my favourite, because I rather lost patience with almost book-length drug taking and parties of the middle books. By the end of the quintet I had regained my interest in Melrose and his life, and found the final one subtle and moving, with some moments that felt close to home; surprising, as Melrose and I have led such different lives. But some passages transcended the class and life of this character and reached out to me. Overall, a deeply affecting journey through the traumatic life of the central character over decades.
Those first long months of the year, despite affording me a real social life, clearly also gave me enough time and space to read, because aside from the books mentioned above, I also added another Patricia Highsmith novel – the brilliant and vibrant Edith’s Diary – and the latest Jackson Brodie novel by Kate Atkinson. I love all the Brodie novels, and the third (When Will There Be Good News?) is exceptional. Big Sky grabbed me and held me, as Brodie and Atkinson always do, although I had to wait some time to borrow it, such was its popularity.
I had bought John Cheever’s Collected Stories in 2010, and read many of the stories, and the selected writings at the end of the book, on and off that year, and then on and off every few years after that. In March I determined to finish the rest of the short stories. Considering the sheer number of them, there is hardly a dud amongst them. The Swimmer, about a lonely drunk swimming his way home via the pools in his neighbours’ gardens, in a tale that becomes increasingly dark and surreal, and Reunion, about a boy meeting up with his father, are my stand-out favourites – both deceptively melancholy and edgy, and built on premises that allow the author to explore the loneliness and sorrows of his characters.
Probably the most ridiculous decision I made in February was to finish the final three books of the Red Riding tetralogy consecutively. Ian had loaned me the first, and Kathy and John handed the other three over during one of my visits. By the time I had got to the end of the third book in the series, set in 1980, I just thought ‘in for a penny…’, gritted my teeth and headed back to hell with the fourth and final one. Utterly brutal, narratively complex and compelling, and so surprisingly beautifully written, with a vivid, glittering poetry attached to the descriptions of the grim lives, environments and experiences of the characters, I was both bereft and relieved to reach the end.
Then it was April and we’d been in lockdown for just over a week. And everything changed.
Arlington Park was a freebie from Faber & Faber. I had a surprising run of luck with their competitions, winning an overnight stay in a 5-star hotel with tickets to see True West on stage last year; and this year I won tickets to see the film of Peter Carey’s novel The True History of the Kelly Gang, which Faber & Faber publish. When the cinema didn’t seem to know anything about it, and the manager had to be called to inspect my winning email before letting me and my friend in, Faber & Faber made it up to me by offering me a copy of that book or any from their list up to the value of £10. As I loved Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy I opted for another of her novels. Read in the early days of lockdown, when concentration was scarce, and alcohol and tv were playing a bigger part in my life than usual, it took a long time to read. I was managing a paragraph or two before I reached for my phone to check the news. I didn’t give this novel the attention it deserved, and I will re-read it one day.
It took ages to get through Exit Ghost, too. I supposed I realised how tired I am of Roth’s ancient protagonists scoring (much) younger women, and of annoying literary couples who, as in this novel, ‘read the tragedies’ together. I think I’m done with Roth. That makes me a bit sad, but aside from Sabbath’s Theater, I think I’ve covered what I think might be the best of his work; the most interesting to me.
The summer saw the return of my reading mojo: lots of time spent on the balcony with a glass of cold, white wine and the Rabbit tetralogy, Updike’s four novels covering the life of ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom from the 1950s through to the 1980s. My first attempt to order this quartet from the local independent bookshop was thwarted because Jon thought I must be kidding. ‘You know what it’s about, right?’ After I managed to convince him that feminists could read about misogynistic characters, the massive volume containing all four Rabbit novels arrived, using up the last of a book token from Daisy and Gavin. I read the first two books in the series, had a break from them, then read the last two. They got better and better for me – by the last two I was so involved in the flawed Rabbit and his flawed family, and the expansion of their lives over decades of social history, that I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to them.
Having read Conversations with Friends back in 2018, I turned to a loan of Normal People from Daisy this year, having already seen the tv dramatisation. It had the same effect on me as the other novel – I enjoyed reading it, found some passages uncannily relatable and moving, but it didn’t stay with me for long. Probably my favourite thing was the creation of the complex, rounded Connell. He felt sweetly real; I wanted him to be so; and the way he went home after a meeting with an author, and started on his own ideas, shoving his sorrow into a short story, having faith in his own writing as a way to feel better, felt like reading my own experience.
I devoured The Bass Rock within days, as I always do with Evie Wyld’s novels. I was surprised to feel less engaged with the chapters set in the 1950s, as though they had crept in from another novel by another writer, but the contemporary sections were as great as anything Wyld has written. Her storytelling and style rank her high on the list of my favourite, unmissable contemporary writers.
I pulled a grubby second-copy of A Room of One’s Own by Virgina Woolf from my shelf and read it in two sittings. Whilst its cry for women’s independence as essential for creativity is important and welcome, the exclusion of a detailed examination of this in relation to working class women leaves a hole in her arguments.
I don’t know why I put off reading Canada for so long. I’m a fan of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter and of his memoir about his parents, which I read last year. In between those two, I read a novel that had turned me against his fiction a litte, but nothing that excuses this book staying unread since Kellye handed it to me when she left London for Leeds a few years ago. I sped through it, barely able to put it down; it’s so full of beauty and wisdom, and the plot – though crazy in places – is nonetheless so authentic, and provides Ford with an unusual and interesting way to discuss what he wants to talk about in this novel. I stayed up until the early hours to finish it, and then couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, or feeling it.
Intimations is a slender volume of essays that reminds me why I love Zadie Smith: smart, funny, absorbing, curious, and just so brilliantly written, I felt cleverer from having read this, and for having watched her give a thoughtful, funny, intelligent interview via a Zoom event set up by the publisher.
Once I’d committed to finishing The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II this year, I became obsessed with reading more of Plath’s poetry. Although I knew some of the poems from The Colossus, I wasn’t familiar with them all; reading about some of them in her letters gave me a yearning, so I got my copy in readiness. Reading The Colossus in bed one morning, the most nourishing of breakfasts, helped fortify me for finishing the huge second volume of the letters.
Breakfast in bed: The Colossus
And by October I had finally done so. My heart sank as I edged further on through the early 1960s, as she wrote about her love for Ted Hughes, how helpful he was around the house, what a great father he was; what a great husband. I knew what was coming of course, but even so it was a punch to the gut to read the last months of letters. The last line of the last letter in this huge volume is: ‘Now, the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea.’ Written a week before her suicide, it destroyed me.
I started The New York Trilogy: City of Glass around 1998, when I bought it second-hand somewhere. On a birthday trip to Kent in September, when precautions were in place but bed and breakfast establishments, and pubs and restaurants and shops were open, I left Sylvia Plath’s massive hardback book of letters behind and took this slim paperback with me instead. I had an early cup of tea on the patio, my eyes moving between this book and the fields, flowers and hills in front of me. I followed it up quite quickly with the other two books in the trilogy, Ghosts and The Locked Room. With all three, there was a sense for me of something beguiling and intriguing in the premises, but the first one didn’t deliver on that; the second improved for me; and the third I loved.
I had seen Kerry Hudson read from Lowborn at the local independent bookstore, back when we were allowed to gather in groups in enclosed spaces, drinking in the words of authors and the bookshop wine. I therefore allowed myself to read it this year, figuring that I had kind of started it (even if that was by way of the author reading a section of it out loud). It’s brutally honest, clever, compassionate; Hudson is so good at making the links between poverty and the diminished choices that result from it, how people living in poverty are seen in such a way that it exacerbates the lack of choice they have in all areas of their lives. Once you are marked out as ‘poor’ it can be impossible to escape the preconceptions that society has. My upbringing wasn’t as traumatic as hers, but we definitely struggled with money at times. But I was lucky. We always had somewhere stable to live, someone to help, and my state school education was enough to get me to A Levels and then university, all for free – full grant, no fees, no loans, easy part-time work to supplement the grant. I’ve been lucky enough in being able to use that education to get work that has led to a life where I could start reading this book in a pricey local restaurant, treating myself to lunch and a carafe of wine on a day off from work (in between lockdowns). Lowborn is a gruelling, intense, honest, funny, sharp, moving – and timely – reminder that society (specifically the upper echelons, governments and their related institutions) should stop poverty shaming.
Lowborn, with wine
I nabbed Books vs Cigarettes when a friend was getting rid of some books. It has some interesting ideas in it and I enjoyed the process of reading it, but it didn’t inflame me like Orwell’s fiction does.
Cinema of Outsiders was a gift from Ian, who knows me and my film likes better than anyone. This book should have been perfect for me, as it covers what was at the time (late 1990s) contemporary independent American cinema. It was a great gift choice. I started it, but it fell by the wayside; years later I dipped in again. This year I committed to it and was reminded of why I had put it down so often over the years. To be fair, and to do it justice, I started from the beginning. But despite loving a lot of the films and the directors under discussion, this book does not work for me. A lot of the writing is clunky or just plain sloppy – a reference to one director’s work being set in a specific place in his films all the way from the first to the third, as if this was some extensive example of auteurship, weakens the point. Outlandish claims are made of directors as if they are the only people who could possibly make a film that includes, as in this example, two women discovering they are married to the same man. There are several basic errors (to pick a couple: one prominent director’s first feature is forgotten when discussing the number of features he has made; I’m not the world’s biggest Springsteen aficionado but even I know that his most famous song is not called ‘Born in the US’). The range of films and directors under discussion is great, but the writing and the editing made the reading of this such a chore.
Kathy loaned me The Little Friend a couple of years ago. It stayed on my shelf because I always found an excuse not to haul if off and open it. I half-remembered disappointed comments from friends (and reviewers, although I care less about those) and I wasn’t sure if it would be worth my time. But, having read The Secret History (twice) and The Goldfinch, I bit the bullet. I was glad I did. It started strong – one of the great opening paragraphs, throat-grabbing and elegant at the same time. I had the same feelings as with the other novels: a little bored by the dip partway through as the plot takes a slightly ludicrous turn; tired of peripheral characters who move centre-stage but should have remained largely on the edges; the desire for a stricter editor. But overall, I loved the time I spent in this part of the US, with Harriet.
Essex Girls, gifted to me by Kirsten for one of my writing group Secret Santa presents this year, took only a few hours to read. It’s a slender volume that discusses the concept of Essex girls as an attitude, rather than just covering women related to a specific geographical area. I liked the wide-ranging links to a variety of women from different backgrounds and areas, but felt it could have done with being longer, to enable the central thesis to really breathe. By the end, it felt hurried; the discussion of some women felt forced, as though Perry wanted an excuse to write about them so she was hanging them onto the Essex girl hook. If the book had been twice, even three times, its length there would have been a chance to develop these fascinating ideas and the coverage of these interesting women.
I’ve had Persuasion on my bookshelf for years; another book procured at a second-hand bookshop, decades ago, with a view to one day reading it. As with any book from this period, it takes me a while to get into the rhythms and style of the language; then it reveals itself as sharp and modern. It felt slightly weaker in plotting and character than Sense and Sensibility (which I read a few years ago, in my year of reading women writers) but so much better than my first Austen novel, Mansfield Park, read for A Level English Lit in 1986. It takes a special kind of writer to keep these ‘will they-won’t they’ plots going, alongside the typical characters of the selfish, pretty sister; the calm broken hearted one; the distant handsome love interest. If not the most brilliant end to the reading year, it was certainly a very good one.
And so to 2021. I decided by November 2020 that the following year would have no reading challenge. For obvious reasons, 2020 was a year of restrictions, and it became clear that a great deal of 2021 was going to be the same. So, I decided I didn’t want to restrict my reading in the coming year. In 2021 I am going to read whatever the hell I want. Lined up, purchased from the local independent bookshop in a brief period when small numbers were allowed in to briefly browse, is Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, recommended by so many friends, but specifically Kathy.
The Orton Diaries by Joe Orton, edited by John Lahr
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Between Them – Remembering my Parents by Richard Ford
I’m a Joke and So Are You by Robin Ince
The London Scene by Virginia Woolf
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Manson Family on Film and Television by Ian Cooper
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
Lanny by Max Porter
The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin
Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
Couples by John Updike
I Know a Woman by Kate Hodges
Transit by Rachel Cusk
Terrific Mother by Lorrie Moore
Outline by Rachel Cusk
The Power by Naomi Alderman
How to be Famous by Caitlin Moran
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn
Sunburn by Laura Lippman
Damn You, England by John Osborne
Red Riding: 1974 by David Peace
Faber and Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber
At the Strangers’ Gate by Adam Gopnik
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Books by Claudia Roth Pierpoint
The Flaneur by Edmund White
Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading by Edmund White
September 1, 1939 – A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Bodies from the Library by Various authors
Bodies from the Library 2 by Various authors
Fleabag – The Scriptures by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
White Girls by Hilton Als
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
I turned 50 in September 2018, and luckily (and typically) received a lot of books and book vouchers for my birthday, as well as the spoils of book gifting as part of our writing group Secret Santa in December. In order to get through them all, I decided that my reading challenge would be to read presents only in 2019. But I knew I would run out, so I added loans, figuring that someone loaning me a book because they thought I would like it was pretty much the same as buying me a book because they thought I’d like it. In doing this, I knew that every book I read would also remind me of a friend or relative, and this would make the reading even more special.
I started strong, with my mum’s favourite author, and one of the Agatha Christie books I’ve never read. By the Pricking of My Thumbs, in hardback with a glorious yellow cover, was published in the year I was born. Matt and Katie handed me the book whilst they were dressed in Manchester United kit, and I was in a blue nightgown and carrying a kitchen knife. I should point out that we were at my 50th birthday party, all dressed according to the theme: 1968. Matt and Katie assured me that Man U had won something that year (they would have said what it was; I wouldn’t have paid attention), and I was dressed as Rosemary Woodhouse from the film of Rosemary’s Baby, released in the year I was born.
I followed this with a gift from my friend John, who had published a book about Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, written by another friend, Ian. John had gifted me the book (so that Ian didn’t have to give up one of his author copies) during one of our long, boozy dinners, which have become a staple – me travelling to his and Kathy’s house in Leighton Buzzard a couple of times a year, and dissecting our reading lists and work lives. As usual with everything that Ian writes, it’s passionate and knowledgeable and written with a style that evokes the voice I know so well, after nearly 30 years of friendship.
I’d bought the Orton Diaries with part of a book voucher given to me for my 50th by my half-brother, Michael. I’d read bits of them at A Level, when I was studying Orton’s play Loot but wanted to return to them because of something I was writing at the time about Orton. On reading them all I discovered entries that went on to inform the work of fiction I was writing; to give it a purpose and a centre that had been lacking. I remain surprised by how undiscussed some of the entries in the diary have been, but grateful for the impact they have had on my work. Orton is, as you might expect if you know his plays, scabrous and dark; brutally honest. Shockingly honest.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was another gift, from Jon and Justine who own the local independent bookshop. They gave me the run of the shelves, and as I wouldn’t normally have bought this myself, I figured now was the time to see what the fuss was about. I didn’t love it, but I enjoyed it, and its readability got me through the long stretches of waiting that characterised my jury duty in January.
I followed my appearances at Southwark Crown Court with a night in a five-star hotel. Not kidding. I won the stay, plus tickets to see a West End play (True West, in this case) in a competition that I could barely remember entering. Over a plush breakfast in my plush room, and wearing a plush bath robe, I devoured Richard Ford’s memoir about his parents, a 50th birthday gift from the aforementioned John. Beautifully evocative, tender and gentle, it made me cry about my own losses and also healed them a bit, in that way that great writing can do.
When Robin Ince appeared at the local independent bookshop to read from and discuss his book I’m a Joke and So Are You, I cornered him to discuss a similar reaction he and I had to different traumas in our lives. He politely ignored my red wine Salvador Dali moustache and kindly let me talk at him, gently guiding it into a great conversation. He signed my book with an entreaty to ‘be curious, be chaotic, be kind’ and then I used some of writing group’s 50th birthday book voucher to pay for it. It’s funny and honest and enlightening, and remains a favourite of the year.
It didn’t take long to read the diminutive and beguiling The London Scene, one of the gifts that Jude and Dan gave me for my 50th, and I followed it by finishing The Mill on the Floss, which I had started the previous year (and which I had also bought with Michael’s book voucher). Two female authors writing about such different worlds in such different ways and styles; reading the books consecutively was a diverting experience.
Kathy bought me All the Light We Cannot See for my 50th birthday, and I was enchanted by it – its scope and heart really touched me. So it made sense to me to go grisly for the next book, the second offering of the year by my friend Ian. The Manson Family on Film and Television is an in-depth, exhaustive look at Charles Manson and his ‘family’, and their depictions on film and tv, which Ian gifted to me on one of my visits to the quiet German village where he lives.
Before I talk about the next two books, you should know about me and Max Porter. I’d seen him do a couple of readings, found him hilarious and smart and engaging. I’d have a red-wine fuelled chat after, at the local independent bookshop (but I drew the line at storming into the Green Room at the Purcell Rooms on the South Bank). One evening, on the way home from work in 2018, not long after having spoken to him at a local bookshop reading, I saw him in front of me at Victoria Station, caught up with him, told him that we had a friend in common. “I can’t read your book this year [2018],” I said, explaining how it didn’t fit my reading challenge. And I told him what our mutual friend had said, that the book in question would, as I feared, break my heart but would also mend it.
Occasionally I would see him on the Circle Line train as we made our way to work from Victoria Underground Station – me in High Street Kensington, him going on to the Granta offices. Like me, he was young when his dad died, so when I read a remarkable piece he wrote about this, specifically about his dad’s voice, it struck all sorts of chords with me, and I found myself scribbling a note to him which I thrust into his hand one morning as I raced off the tube. Yes, I actually did this instead of saying, ‘Hi Max, we’ve met a few times and….’. I didn’t think he’d remember me after such a long time, plus he was plugged into earphones and reading a manuscript. I didn’t want to disturb him.
Cut to, some months later, and he is appearing again at the local independent bookshop. I dread seeing him. I feel embarrassed. I need not have done. He was delighted with the note, touched that I had written it. He read from Lanny that night and I was gifted that and Grief is the Thing With Feathers as part of my aforementioned birthday package from the bookshop owners. Both were signed by the author. In Grief he says simply, ‘For God’s sake read this now’; in the front of Lanny he asks me to stop giving him notes on the train, as he is trying to work. Honestly, you give one author one note, once, and they don’t stop banging on about it.
I read Grief in one sitting the next day, the day before Mothers’ Day, while the sun said ‘come outside’ but I stayed in bed, not eating or drinking, but laughing and nodding and crying and thinking, yes, this, exactly this, it’s exactly like this, the death of a parent, both parents for me, now, and yes, grief is the thing with feathers. I started Lanny the same day, and finished it two days later, having gasped weakly on the train, a ‘no’ as I feared the worse; later laughing and crying again, holding my breath. And that ending, the ending that takes your heart and lungs and gives them such a squeeze you don’t know if you’ll recover.
Grief is the Thing With Feathers, looked over by my parents.
The Orchard on Fire was another gift from the bookshop, given after an event with the author, who signed my copy. Her book about female friendship in the 1950s, and about the disruption when you are pulled from what you know into what you don’t know, spoke more loudly to me than the short story collection of Mackay’s that I read last year. I found Their Eyes Were Watching God a difficult read, hard to get into the rhythm of the language and the storytelling. But when I did, it paid off. A complex female protagonist, especially one of colour, is still less common than it should be, and considering this was published in 1937 it is an even more astonishing and audacious work.
Evening in Paradise was a swap with Kirsten from writing group. I’d been given two books by Simon, one of which was so perfect for me that I’d already bought and read it the previous year. Luckily, Kirsten was happy to swap her Lucia Berlin – a beautiful gesture, made more so by the fact that it was Kirsten who had bought me my first ever Berlin short stories for a birthday a few years previously. As with that previous volume, I bedded down with this collection, revelling in Berlin’s skill in finding beauty and poetry in the all the dark and dazzling recesses of her characters, their situations and their environments.
I started to read Vilette in a hotel room in Margate, looking out onto a rainy sea, ahead of the tenth anniversary of my mum’s death. The weather brightened up, even if the book didn’t, but I loved it of course, as various friends had assured me I would.
Killing and Dying was the second book bought for me by Simon for writing group Secret Santa, and the first graphic work I’ve ever read. I wasn’t sure it was my thing, and as usual Simon knew better. It’s a collection of short stories, ideas spilling out of the frames; warm, surprising, enlightening; one of the finds of the year for me.
I was given a copy of Couples – also published in the year I was born – at my 50th birthday party, by two friends who told me it was real life ‘with the mucky bits left in’. It was indeed a bit mucky, but I found the central characters too tiresome to want to spend that much time with them. I was glad to have read it, and it didn’t diminish my yearning to read Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, but I found its grubby cynicism difficult to take.
I Know a Woman, which uses text and illustrations to explain the surprising connections between a range of brilliant women, was a 50th birthday gift from fellow feminist Roberta. I knew many of the women discussed in the book, but some were new to me, and in many cases I hadn’t ever considered the links between them. This book was an interesting way to think about and explore the range of scientists, writers, sportswomen, artists, activists and explorers – the inspiring women in the book’s subtitle.
Having read Kudos, the third in Cusk’s loose trilogy, I started the second one, Transit, on a spontaneous overnight stay in Rye, in the summer. There’s something hypnotic and enchanting about Cusk’s writing that pulls me into the deceptive simplicity of her storytelling. Loved it.
This was a slight cheat, because even though it was loaned to me by Alice, I realised early on that I’d read Terrific Mother before, as part of the Birds of America collection some twenty or so years previously. It’s an incredible piece of writing and I have no idea why my brain might have pushed it to one side. I was delighted to have found it again.
Alice also loaned me Outline so that I could finish Cusk’s trilogy in reverse. Doing it this way didn’t upset the flow of the work at all, and in fact, for me, it added to that hypnotic, woozy quality that I loved so much about these novels.
The Power was a loan from Hilary that should have been read last year, but sat on my shelf instead. I wasn’t blown away but I enjoyed it, certainly more that How to be Famous, which I borrowed from my then colleague Naomi’s desk when I inexplicably found myself in need of a book. I know Moran has a massive fan base, but I am just not one of them. There are passages that are more detailed newspaper columns – the chance for Moran to expound her theses without really trying to transform them into the feelings of the characters; and the overuse of adverbs was grating – over 2 pages there were multiple uses of the word ‘warningly’. It says it all that this is what I remember most about this book, but I know I am very much alone in this, and that’s fine. We can’t all like the same thing. And we don’t need to.
Beloved took my breath away; a complex, challenging read. It had been on my shelf since I borrowed it from Jude a few years ago, and Morrison’s death seemed like the right time to finally take it down and read it.
Kathy loaned me the Patrick Melrose novels, and I started the first one in bed one weekend morning. The glass shard prose of the opening chapter hooked me; so much communicated about the characters in one line – in half a line.
I bought Sunburn, signed by its author, for a German friend Julia, who likes crime fiction. I waited a year and then I borrowed it from her. It’s a sharp, witty, engrossing modern noir, right up my street. I followed it with a loan from Julia’s husband, my friend Ian. He’d raved about Osborne’s vicious wit in Damn You, England, a collection of impatient, dark prose that develops the writer’s perspectives without mellowing them in any way through the medium of fictional characters.
I took two books to my friend Ben’s seaside cottage, where I was staying for a week, initially alone, then joined by Vic, my oldest university friend (I met her on the first night; she’s not super old): Red Riding: 1974, on loan from Ian; and Faber and Faber: The Untold Story, gifted to me by Robert because he knew I’d love it. I alternated the two – Red Riding was perfect for when I wanted to break up a long walk along a brightly sunny coastal path; The Untold Story kept me company at night when all was dark outside the isolated cottage ahead of Vic’s arrival. Red Riding was a tough, brutal slog; an incredible piece of storytelling. The Untold Story was a fascinating insight into the founding and development of Faber as a publishing house. Obviously, I skipped the appendices that showed various accounts, but I pored over the letters from authors, and regret that so much of our business conversation takes place via email, because it will mean far fewer books like this.
Red Riding 1974: a fun beach read
I enjoyed At the Strangers’ Gate despite agreeing with John and Kathy, who loaned it to me, that there is a smugness about it that grates a little. On the whole, it’s engaging and gave me a nice break from some of the more grueling reads of the recent weeks. Talking of which…
Hilary gave me a lovely hardback of the newly released The Testaments for my birthday. Is this where I confess I have never read The Handmaid’s Tale? I know! I have seen the first tv series, though, and have been reliably informed that it covers the first book. I knew enough about Gilead and the central characters to find this one completely engrossing. The writing is by someone at the top of her game, and I followed every character, every plot element, with my heart in my mouth. I’m not sure I have fully recovered from the last pages.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Books was loaned to me by Matt, as was The Flaneur and The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading. Each of these books did their job, none impressed me massively. All seemed rather full of themselves at the expense of the reader. I was getting into The Flaneur until a casual bit of lazy anti-feminist rhetoric, delivered as throwaway comment that I couldn’t quite throw away. Happy to have read all of these; don’t mind forgetting them.
I am obsessed with the stories and characters of Les Liaisonsdangereuses. I’ve seen several screen versions, the play and listened to a radio adaptation. I was wary of starting the book, on loan from Katie, but I needn’t have been. It’s fresh, modern, witty, vicious, sly and – in its language and narrative style – entirely readable.
If you had said to me that one day I would devour a whole book devoted to one poem, I would have thought you were out of your tiny mind. But here we are. September 1, 1939 – A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom is a fantastically readable analysis of the poem (Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’), of its background, its context, and the life of Sansom (in all its self-deprecation). The book takes us on a meandering and simultaneously transfixing journey, line by line through Auden’s poem. It blew me away and I was so grateful that Matt had forced me to look beyond my scepticism and had insisted I borrow this.
I gave myself a break from the non-fiction with a novel that I knew would captivate me: Transcription. I can think of few modern writers who are as reliable as Kate Atkinson in writing such accessible but interesting prose. She always manages to combine the plot-driven readability of a blockbuster with the attention to language and style of a literary novel in a way that few of her contemporaries can do. I always look forward to a new Atkinson, and this one (bought with part of a book token given as a birthday present by Daisy and Gavin) didn’t disappoint.
I was gifted Bodies from the Library and its companion second volume by Mandy. An anthology of short stories from the likes of Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer, as well as some names that were new to me, both books were a mixed bag, although they provided an interesting time capsule of a world of detective fiction pre-forensic science.
Fleabag – The Scriptures was my writing group Secret Santa gift from Daisy. The scripts read like the best fiction because the directions are so sharp and visual. There’s a lovely postscript of paragraphs about collaborators on the tv series (such as the editor and the director), but I would also have loved to see the play script reprinted, along with a commentary about the changes that are essential in the move from theatre to the small screen. But I know the play is sold separately, which explains why it isn’t included here. I read this from cover to cover, in bed, on the first day of the Christmas holidays from work, and it was time well spent.
Fleabag The Scriptures: Breakfast in bed
White Girls was another loan from Matt, who seems responsible for a lot of this year’s reading. I started this book in London and finished it in Vienna, where I was spending the last days of 2019. There were moments when the writing seemed to be reflecting me back at myself, laying its cards on the table with a knowing nod. The passage about loving the dead versus loving the living was one such section.
Olive, Again, purchased with the book token that just kept on giving, from Daisy and Gavin, took me from the end of 2019 into the start of 2020. It was a privilege to share Olive’s life, and the lives around her. Complex, grumpy, honest, rude, kind, thoughtful women are thin on the ground in a lot of fiction, so when you find them you hang on to them. We rarely see women age, too, and get old, properly old, and Olive, Again laid all of that bare. A beautiful book about love, loss, how our bodies work to betray us, even as they keep us alive; and perhaps the most lovely thing of all – the beautiful surprises that old age can bring.
Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn
The Girls by Emma Cline
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
The Census-Taker by China Miéville
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Vertigo by Joanna Walsh
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Stranger than Paradise by Jamie Sexton
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandra Marzano-Lesnevich
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
Stop the Clocks by Joan Bakewell
Dancing on the Outskirts by Shena Mackay
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
Only to Sleep by Laurence Osbourne
Both Ways is the Only Way I Like It by Maile Meloy
Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Wary Wollstonecraft
The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
I looked to friends this year to lend me books by authors I had never read before. I clamped my eyes to their bookshelves whenever I visited, and never came away empty handed. These kind loans made up the bulk of my reading. The rest of this year’s reads had either been sitting neglected on my own shelves for years, or were gifted to me; bought in the local bookshop, The Bookseller Crow on the Hill, in Crystal Palace, or grabbed second-hand from a local charity shop.
Looking back over the list, it is astonishing to me that I had never read Steinbeck, Wharton, Shelley (Mary), Bronte (Charlotte), Kerouac , Chandler or Jackson. But I wanted to use this year to plug some gaps, and so I did. I read a mix of classic and contemporary authors, and still managed to avoid Emily Bronte and Martin Amis. I don’t think I’ll ever get around to those two.
I started the year strong, with a book that had been bought for me by my friend Simon, as one of his Writing Group Secret Santa gifts. When I unwrapped it, he saw me look at the ‘Winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award’ sticker on the cover of Station Eleven, and reassured me that I thought I wouldn’t like it but I would. And he was right on both counts. A dystopian novel set in a future that felt plausible, because most of the world’s people had died while everything else stayed the same. This meant that there was weather (providing water to keep the survivors alive and to grow food) and shelter and it felt like a world I could believe in. I remember not getting out of bed until I had read huge chunks on a weekend morning; taking it to the gym so I could read it on the bike. I remember finding it beautiful and profound and moving, and just loving the writing and characterisation. A book about the power of theatre; unexpectedly gripping. It remains one of my favourites of the year.
Amanda loaned me her copy of The Remains of the Day, which I devoured during a bout of flu, my heart breaking with every page. It’s a world and an emotional life so seemingly different from my own and yet I identified so strongly with it. For me, the book is a model of restrained writing perfectly evoking the central character and the way of life and set of values that the character so strongly adhered to. An absolute highlight of my reading year, and one that got me thinking a lot about the remains of my day.
I’d been warned by Daisy, who loaned me Standard Deviation, and by Hilary, who had also read it, that my feelings for this book would stand or fall on whether I loved or hated the central character. The story is told from her husband’s point of view, and I loved her as much as he did.
Bedsit Disco Queen, on loan from Lucy, proved a lively and interesting intermission between novels, and from there I headed to The Girls. I’d heard mixed reports but I really liked it. It captured a certain period and the intense friendship between girls – that can sour and leave you spinning –really effectively. Most importantly, I was completely convinced by the central character’s move into life with a cult. It felt slightly pornographic – the narrative structure building up to a gruesome description of the central crime – but it evoked the situation with skill and suspense. I’d given it to my friend Ian for his birthday the year before, as part of his research for a book he was writing about the Manson Family in popular culture, and he’d read it, loved it and loaned it.
Jane Eyre (on loan from Lucy) and Eileen couldn’t be more different in their backgrounds, environments, characterisation and style, and yet they had in common a loneliness and a darkness that pulled me towards them and kept me there for weeks.
Simon had also bought me The Census-Taker as the other part of his Writing Group Secret Santa gift. I would never have bought this for myself but I am glad it was bought for me, because I really enjoyed it. I whizzed through it, unlike The Essex Serpent, which I assumed I would love, but which I really struggled to wade through. Eventually, I sat and read the last 200 pages in a bid to simply get through it. I ended up liking it, but it felt like a chore, and that surprised me.
I’d had The History of Love on my shelf for a few years (a second-hand bookstore buy). It wasn’t in my hands as long because from the first paragraph I was hooked and I read it in a couple of sittings. Another book about loneliness and love; tender and humane.
The jury is out on who loaned Vertigo to me – Roberta or Alice. It’s a slim and unusual novel, which occasionally read like one of the experimental short films by women directors that I saw during my film and drama degree in the late 1980s/early 1990s.Then a perfectly written sentence or organisation of words that nailed something meaningful to me would smash me in the jaw. I read it in one sitting, thankful for my insomnia that night.
I borrowed Middlesex from Lucy, and was introduced to one of the most original and engaging narrative voices of contemporary fiction, rendered with a breath-taking lightness of touch. Aside from the San Francisco section and the ill-judged handling of Father Mike, I loved this, and it led to one of my favourite text message exchanges with a work friend who also loved it:
Me: Oh my word, I’ve just got to the gender reassignment clinic in Middlesex.
Rachel: I had to read this text twice. I got a bit of a shock until I realised you were referring to the book.
My friend and one of my authors from my first publishing job, Jamie Sexton, sent me his monograph on one of my favourite films by one of my favourite directors: Stranger than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch’s first official full-length feature. I edited the first eight books in the erstwhile Cultographies series at what was then Wallflower Press, so I felt territorial about this one. Read it in one sitting, like a proud mother.
The House of Mirth showed me what I’d been missing in not having read Edith Wharton. Cutting, deliberate and precise prose, surprisingly gripping story, detailed yet light characterisations, and hands-down one of the most brutal endings of any book I’ve ever read. No wonder Martin Scorsese looked to Wharton (though not this book) when he wanted to adapt some classic literature. ‘The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.’
My friend Ian, a true-crime book aficionado, loaned me The Devil in the White City. It takes place in Chicago, and my visit from 2017 was fresh in my mind as I worked my way through this impeccably researched and fascinating work. A dark way to spend some of the hot summer evenings on my balcony, but so brilliantly written and interesting that some light was let in.
I finally pulled The French Lieutenant’s Woman off the shelf and was absorbed by it. I was expecting ponderous and weighty but found that it held me carefully and lightly. I followed it up with Frankenstein, which moved me as much as I had expected, based on my knowledge of the first film version. The ending is still touching and powerful, even when you have seen the internet meme that proclaims ‘If, in the future, you just want to call me Frankenstein, that’s ok. I don’t mind.’
Two American crime classics followed: James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia and The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler. Both shard-glass sharp and full of zingers. Never dull.
On a trip to the West Coast, I read Kudos and Conversations with Friends, both on loan from Katy. Kudos is the third of a loose trilogy, but I was advised (truthfully) that I didn’t need to have read the first two to get this one. It’s a remarkably accessible, and simultaneously smart and literary, piece of work. I can’t wait to read the others. In a Portland diner, a woman stopped at my table to tell me how much she loved Conversations with Friends (and then we had a good chat about Olivia Laing). I loved it while I read it, by the Willamette River on a sunny day; at breakfast or dinner. I saw myself as my mum must have seen me when I went home for those first university holidays – annoying, arrogant, irritating; thinking I knew it all. I read it quickly – found the style absorbing and engaging. But it didn’t stay long with me.
I picked up The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression in Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. It explained a lot, especially in its inclusion of this sentence from C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.’ This book destroyed me, even as it was putting me back together.
There were only four things I read this year that I didn’t like. The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which I started on my last night in Portland, Oregon, and continued in Seattle, could have – should have – been brilliant. The weaving of personal memoir into the investigation of a disturbing crime is an interesting formula. But the writing style trowelled over any necessary delicacy, with lines like this: ‘I must have seemed to her like a walking time bomb. A bomb made of time.’ I feel sure that the editor wasn’t doing their job that day. The other three were well-received in their various times. I instantly gave away one to a local woman whose daughter urgently needed a copy (yes, Of Mice and Men is still on the exam syllabus and no longer in my flat); I passed another on to Roberta, who had coveted it when our friend Matt was giving it away (no one I know, it seems, could hang on to First Love). The third – The Lonesome Traveler – is probably in the charity shop, hoping it finds the love I couldn’t give it.
I found Stop the Clocks surprisingly mixed. I loved the premise and some of the points made, but found Bakewell’s writing pedestrian and cumbersome. A shame – books about getting older, written by brilliant women are thin on the ground and I’d have loved to have raved about this collection of thoughts.
I was gifted Dancing on the Outskirts at an author event at the local bookshop (part of my 50th birthday present from the shop’s owners). My view of it as patchy is not a popular one, but reading a short story collection is never reading time wasted and I am glad to have spent the time with these characters.
I bought Days Without End in a sale at the end of last year, because I had heard it was brilliant. I started reading it as this year edged towards its final months because I found myself with a free afternoon, feeling a bit unwell. The precis wasn’t particularly encouraging, and I was expecting the usual tale of men in war suffering hard times. Within pages, I started falling for this book, hard. The narrative voice; the characters; the language and the style; the plot and structure: it’s a modern masterpiece, and as I approached the final hundred or so pages I stayed up all night finishing it, reading the last chapters as a Saturday night became Remembrance Sunday.
Only to Sleep captured Chandler’s Philip Marlowe brilliantly. In a year when I read Chandler for the first time, it was interesting to read his key creation written by a different author. Here was Marlowe, older, frailer, unable to give up the work of his younger days. A poignant, witty and gripping novel.
I’d never heard of Maile Meloy until my friend Kathy loaned me this collection of short stories. The style reminded me of some of my favourite contemporary short story writers, like Julie Orringer and Robin Black, but Both Ways is the Only Way I Like It is as singular and original as it is sharp and knowing and wonderful.
I bought The Lottery and Other Stories with a birthday book token, and was delighted to finally discover what people have been going on about for years. ‘The Lottery’ itself (no spoilers) is everything you have heard and more. The last few stories made me breathless – the writing and ideas creep up and grab you hard.
I started A Vindication of the Rights of Woman during the summer, but had to keep putting it down to read other things, because it wasn’t an easy book to get through. It’s important and interesting and I am glad I have read it, but it took half a year, on and off, and it often felt like work. But it’s definitely one to have read in the year that we celebrated the centenary of some women being allowed to vote.
The Collected Dorothy Parker was bought with those aforementioned birthday book tokens, and I ended the year with poetry, reviews, columns and the dark, often choked, wit that Parker was famous for.
So, in the summer of 2018, a friend of mine wondered if I had time to do this thing on Facebook where you talk about books that changed your life. I found the time, because I loved how it forced me to think about books every day, and then to write about them, too.
In doing this, friends and (on Instagram) strangers opened up about their own favourite books, and about their love of the books I was writing about. I discovered how people had been hanging on to the same version of The Bell Jar as me; how my schoolfriends had loved the Enid Blyton boarding school books as much as I did. The posts encouraged people to read some of the books (a few people decided to finally read Catcher in the Rye; one friend went out and bought As I Lay Dying on the day I wrote about it). It sparked conversation, and no one told me my choices were wrong. Everyone who read the posts understood that these were the books that had changed my life. Everyone respected what I was revealing about myself. And that was enough.
Here are my top ten, in the order I posted about them, but in no other particular order. I’ve made some changes to the text, but the essence of what I originally typed onto my Facebook wall, and then reproduced on my Instagram feed when the sun was shining all those months ago, remains.
This book did more than change my life. I truly believe it saved my life. It got me out of a teaching career that was starting to smother me. It was the first book I ever edited and it showed me I was born for the job. It brought several people into my life who, years later, have had me at their weddings, celebrated big birthdays with me, travelled with me, loaned books to me. It reminded me that I knew my shit. It made my mum proud.
It’s 1986. I am heading into my second year of A Level English Literature. We are studying this. At that time, it was probably the strangest book I had ever read. There’s a chapter that is only one line; another narrated by a dead woman, halfway through her journey to her burial place. Layer by layer, each character is developed as they narrate their chapters to us. I am soaked in the language, the imagery. It opened my eyes to what American literature could do. It sent me to second-hand bookshops to buy all the Faulkner I could. This copy of As I Lay Dying accompanied me into my A Level exam, its underlined passages and tiny essay plans seeing me through. I re-read it for the first time in over 30 years last year. Luckily those pencil marks had faded, so I had little distraction from the beauty of every sentence, every chapter, every character.
This book. THIS BOOK. In February 1979, my dad died. I was 10. It broke my picture of the world. At the end of that year, my brother gave me a double album of Beatles’ love songs for Christmas. Less weird once I had worked out it was meant for someone else who was no longer around. I listened and I fell in love with it and the Beatles. A year later. December 1980. John Lennon was killed. His killer cited this book. I was intrigued. A few years later, as an angsty mid-teen, I read it. I can’t remember what I thought of it then, but clearly enough to make me re-read it, at another point of emotional crisis, in my mid-20s. That second reading made it clear to me that I hadn’t got it before. This book was funny. Really funny. In between those readings I had read everything Salinger wrote that was available in book form, so something must have stuck. Last year I re-read it again. And it broke me. Still funny, yes, sure. But I had forgotten that it is a book about grief and loss and depression. Is that why I turn to it at certain stages in my life? Maybe. I can think of several books, massive doorstops of books, that I adore and that speak to me as if written for me personally. The Lacuna. The Goldfinch. The Blind Assassin. But this. This skinny wretch of a book that puts me into a world and a life and a character so seemingly different to mine showed me how art and literature work to transcend those differences and speak to every tiny part of us. This book. This book is the one.
I was 28 before I went abroad. I know! (I’d been on a plane, but only to Jersey in the Channel Islands.) When I was a kid, we went to Ramsgate as a family. Bed, breakfast and evening meal. Donuts. Punch and Judy on the beach. After my dad died, it was a week in a caravan with my mum, aunts and cousins in Cornwall. I had nothing to complain about. It was lovely. There was no money for foreign holidays then, or as I moved through my teens and student days. And, if I’m honest, I didn’t really feel like it. I seemed to have little interest. I have no idea why. Parts of Europe were close and cheap enough, but even when I started work there just didn’t seem like enough money or time or impetus to go. Crazy. Utterly incomprehensible. Then I had my heart broken and for the first time in years – since I was born actually – I ended up living alone. I’d possibly been unconsciously craving it because I know it was partly my inaction that led me there (he says it was all his fault). Maybe I needed a bit of wing-spreading. Whatever. Seven months later I was on a plane to New York. With this book. My mum, whose key experience of the city came from NYPD Blue, was terrified. She needn’t have worried. Armed with this book, I navigated the city alone. I went to Macy’s and the movies. I did the Circle Line ferry tour. I went up the Empire State Building. I listened to the original recording of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds in the TV and Radio museum. I walked across 110th street. I stood crying in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art. I pounded the streets all day, stopping to gaze up at buildings that were so familiar from films and TV shows, and to eat giant slices of pizza. When a rain storm flooded the subway line I needed to get back to my cheap room, I worked out – by myself – how to get there (it helps that Manhattan is a grid). That journey took me past Central Park and some projects, in the dark and pouring rain, but I grew up on council estates and refused to let NYPD Blue dominate my thoughts, so I was ok. I had the best 5 days. So this book opened up the world to me. I was back in the city less than a year later with the heartbreaker and his first son, proudly negotiating the subway like a pro. And for as long as I’ve had enough money I’ve been away. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends or boyfriends or colleagues. Sometimes in the UK, more often to the US, or Canada, or Europe, or Asia. This year I’m heading to the west coast of America alone and then making my first trip to Rome with some friends. I owe it all to this book.*
* Since first publishing this on Facebook, I have indeed travelled to San Francisco, Portland and Seattle alone, and made that pilgrimage to Rome with four friends. Nothing held me back.
I was going to say, “from the sublime to the ridiculous”, but if a certain kind of book gets you reading, it’s not ridiculous. As a small child, there was a period where I got a Ladybird book a week. Beauty and the Beast. Snow White and Rose Red. The Princess and the Pea. Rapunzel. And so on. Lots of fairy tales. Lots of girls being rescued. Lots of girls whose resourcefulness – such as it was – relied on being beautiful. Lots of girls whose beauty got them into trouble. It would have been my mum and dad who first bought me the first books in the series of which you see some examples here. And then two childhood friends who, courtesy of their much-loved, now much-missed mum, filled in the gaps at Christmas and on my birthday. Then I’d spend my pocket money on the rest. Enid Blyton’s boarding school books – the St.Clare’s and Malory Towers series – brought clever and spirited girls into my reading life, like the many clever and spirited girls I knew in real life at that time. I don’t doubt that if I re-read these books they would reveal a privilege, racism and snobbery that passed me by when I was around 8 to 10 years old. But they were the first books I started buying for myself and the first books that brought female friendship and solidarity into my reading life; the first books to show me that girls could be pretty and clever, plain and clever, good at sports and maths and writing, in a way that reflected my real life in a state junior school in Pitsea in the 1970s. For that, I remain grateful.
Having popped my book-buying cherry on Enid Blyton’s boarding school series, there came a time when I needed more. I have no idea how I knew who Oscar Wilde was – we weren’t an especially literary household – but something must have sparked in me when I spotted this book on a second hand book stall in Basildon market at some point in the middle of my secondary school years. I would have been about 14. It was the first grown up novel I bought and the first I read outside of enforced school study (I was an avid library user though; libraries and school were my sources of more grown-up books). I remember being engrossed and bewitched, so deep into the plot, so enamoured of the style. The ending floored me, and even now, when someone mentions that I look a bit younger than my years (ahem), my standard reply is “You should see the portrait in my attic”. It’s a concept from literature that has entered common parlance. A second reading last year showed a more forced wit and style than I recall, but I still loved my re-reading of it. It showed me how literature could be grown up and gripping, and completely accessible to someone from such a different world. In the summer of 2017, on a work trip to Chicago, I was lucky enough to see the revolting portrait from the first film version up close, in the Art Institute of Chicago. The problem with the painting, as shown in the film, is that it can never be what we imagine, what we thought it would look like. Because we all have a portrait in our attic, and none of our portraits are the same.
This is the book that made me realise that there could be someone out there who would write something for me; hold my hand through the tricky bits. This book made me feel less alone as a teenager. At university, when I casually mentioned how much I identified with Esther Greenwood, how much I felt that this book was written for me, a friend said, “So does every even slightly neurotic young woman.” Maybe that’s true. But the glittering gems of each line of this book, hard and sparkling as diamonds, are for me; its humour, its sadness, all for me. This book gives a woman the kind of deep and authentic interior life that I hadn’t really read before. A few years ago, I was staying in Haworth, and I made the pilgrimage to Hebden Bridge, and up to Heptonstall to find Sylvia’s grave. After spending some time in the wrong cemetery, I walked through a gate, worked my way to the middle (as I had been guided by a friend) and there she was. I was surprised at how tiny her grave was, almost like a child’s. The inscription on the headstone made me cry. The slightness of the grave itself made me cry. The flowers lying across where her belly must have been made me cry. I silently thanked her for everything she had given me: the poetry, this novel, and an idea of what it might mean for a woman to be a writer.
I studied this during the second year of my degree, as part of my ‘minor’ subject, Modern English Literature. I went for English Lit as it seemed safe; I’d studied it before, and the addition of ‘modern’ meant I could avoid Chaucer. Looking back, I wish I’d done Modern European Literature instead, but then I would have missed out on this book. It made such an impact on me when I read it ahead of that second year that I used it as a loose (very loose) basis for my drama graduation production. The novel is written in the first and third person, a structural device that can be seen as a conversation between the younger and older versions of the same character as we follow her life story. She starts poor and neglected, marries, divorces, gets a job, a career, and ends up in prison for committing an act that many see as the worst a woman could commit. It’s a kind of everywoman story, almost accidentally – but not quite accidentally – feminist. There was a period where if you were female and I was buying you a birthday present, it was this book. It didn’t hold up as well on a second reading last year, but at the time I adored it, and I needed it; it spoke to something in me. I loved the structure, and the life and mind of this woman, Praxis. In psychology, praxis means the process by which a theory or lesson becomes part of lived experience through a cycle of action-reflection-action; in Feminist theory, praxis is the act of putting theory into practice, theory in action. The character of Praxis has many names throughout the novel, but it is her birth name that she returns to as she reflects on her lived experience. At the time I first read this novel, I had been a feminist, and a Jacqueline, Jackie, Jack, and Jacks, for as long as I could remember. I guess this was the first book to really make me reflect on that, on how women are handed identities by others, and on my own lived experience as I returned to the name I call myself when I write, the name I was given at birth.
Having rewritten the Ladybird stories in the back of the books, read my childish compositions to the headmaster, and bled my ideas out during English exams at secondary school, I started writing short stories with a vengeance in 2005. I picked at them over the years, and then I did a short story writing workshop in 2009. Whilst it didn’t offer me the collegiate nature of collaboration and support I had hoped for (I got that 3 years later, at the Bookseller Crow on the Hill, where I swam in support and guidance, and made friends that I am still close to), it did at least give me some good tips. As a result, I got some of my stories accepted for online and print magazines, and also got some readings at storytelling events. These events were usually themed, and I found myself digging out an existing story, shoehorning the theme into it, and hoping for the best. I still do this now, at times. But then it felt like all I could do – rework something that existed rather than write something new. “I can’t write to order,” I would say. Not in a diva-ish way; just sadly, because I knew this was a real shortcoming of mine.
In 2010, I got involved in a fundraising campaign to help the fight for the return of the cinema to Crystal Palace. The organiser read some of my stuff and asked me to write something to read at the event. She wanted “something Victorian. A bit Edgar Allan Poe”.
Did she not know I could not write to order?
Soon after I received this brief, I was in Germany, staying with friends. In the time it took them and their baby and their cats to have an afternoon nap, I had the idea for a new story: a ghost story, set now and in Victorian times, in Crystal Palace, with a cinema theme. I think you’ll find I more than ticked all the boxes there.
I read the result at the aforementioned fundraising event to an audience who had been denied their dessert in order to spare me the scraping of spoons on plates as I moved amongst the tables performing my story. They hid their annoyance well on the whole.
And then I found out about a new press, based in nearby Brockley, who were publishing a book of stories covering every station on the Highbury & Islington to Crystal Palace/West Croydon line. I had something that fitted the bill perfectly. Almost perfectly. You know what I did, don’t you? Yes, I shoehorned a scene with the character on an overground train into my existing story. You can’t see the join.
So, this book is the first anthology I ever appeared in, and it represents an example of me doing what I know I can do – I’ve called it shoehorning, but some may call it editing – as well as doing something else. This book contains a story that I wrote, from a brief, a commission, from scratch, from my imagination, while two adults, a baby and some cats napped in a nearby room.
Oh, this book REALLY changed my life. How much, remains to be seen. It’s not as obvious or straightforward as some of the other books, so settle down – this could take a while. Matt Haynes rejected the first story I submitted to Smoke: A London Peculiar, the magazine he had co-founded with Jude Rogers. His reasons for doing so rankled a bit. But I let it go. Then a year or so later I submitted another story, and this time he published it in the magazine. As a result, he and Jude asked if I would submit something to the first Smoke book, about the London 2012 Olympics. I could only do this because I’d had a kind of almost religious conversion at the end of the games, when I held one of the torches in a cupcake cafe in Crystal Palace, a couple of friends in attendance. And because I could now “write to order” (see previous entry). I found myself writing a love story that started out cynically and ended up romantically. A bit like my own relationship with the Olympics. As a result of this book, I was asked to contribute to another Smoke book, this time on London water. I had nothing. I did not want to write about the Thames. Then the internet told me that Dirk Bogarde, one of my favourite actors, had filmed scenes from a film on the boating lake in Crystal Palace Park in 1966. And my story was born. The book didn’t get published in the end, but the story ended up on the Smoke website. As a result of that (I warned you this was going to take a while), I made a new film producer friend on Facebook via a very longstanding real-life one. The film producer encouraged me to write a film version of the Dirk story. And so I did. Four years and many drafts later, we have something that might go somewhere. So, in a roundabout way, this book brought a whole bunch of interesting and funny people into my life, and if the film gets made and a few red carpets are brought into my life, I won’t be at all upset about that. Whatever happens, I have those people and I have this screenplay. All because of this book.
Jacqueline Downs is Reading and Writing 