The 100 Book Year

Reading a book can be a comforting, warming experience. A little radiator that you fire up inside your belly and brain. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined is not such an experience. Don’t settle down to it expecting a rosy, joyful time. But you can expect devastating and important questions to be asked. Nottage’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play is set in the Democratic Republic of Congo in its most recent years, crippled by civil war. Most of the play takes place in a bar and brothel that’s situated in an area that’s increasingly becoming a key battleground between the insurgents and governmental forces. While the background of the play is national strife, the focus is very much on the human impact – specifically noting how, whoever wins the battle, the Congolese women end up losing. The proprietor of the brothel, a sturdy and charismatic woman called Mama, illustrates this perfectly. She takes up space and, in her property, her word goes. She’s setting herself up as indomitable, irrepre

Claudia Hampton, the star of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger , is about as big a shit as you can imagine without actually being a psychopath or criminal. This book, then, is all the more impressive for being able to take such a dislikeable character and reveal the reasons why she is the way she is, and make you empathise and sympathise with her. Actually, before we get into that, let’s address the stripy lunar elephant in the room: Moon Tiger is a brilliant title for a book. It’s the sort of title I imagine that, when she came up with it, Lively lit a big cigar and swanned around the house for days chuckling to herself. A tiger! From the moon ! Whimsical diversions aside, this book has nothing to do with tigers or the moon, so get that out of your head right now. It’s actually about a woman evaluating the history of the world as it relates to her, and the discovery of the events in her life that developed her personality. It’s also a book that’s very concerned with the fal

I didn’t quite know what to expect from Shirley Jackson. I feel like she’s often put into the thriller category, but if you encountered her alongside John Grishams and P.D. Jameses, I suspect you’d consider her misplaced. Mostly, though, I only knew it from a brief mention on The Simpsons, shortly before Homer throws the book into the fireplace. I know, I know. This is what you get from Broken Britain’s education system. Imagine my delight, then, to find that The Lottery and other stories is a collection of carefully-crafted short story gems. Turns out that people enter the literary canon for a reason. Who knew? Jackson’s stories have a clear theme running through them of propriety and conformity. She tackles these from lots of different angles – judgemental mothers, anxious homeowners, murderous communities. These are all brilliantly polished, mostly viewed from the perspective she knew best – city life in 40s and 50s America. There’s a clear focus on gender here too, w

It’s hard not to respect trees. I try my best, but they always get me in the end, the cunning green-and-brown scamps. They don’t do anyone any harm. They just stand there, absorbing nutrients from above and below, pumping out oxygen with the quiet confidence of a wizard puffing his pipe. It would be wrong to call that the central premise of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian , because it’s not. But the idea of comparing human morality against the gentle harmlessness of vegetation rings through its core. The central character, Yeong-hye, a housewife, decides to stop eating meat. While this seems like a fairly small choice and one hardly worth building a whole novel around, the novel explores the reactions of her family and her own gradual slip into extremism in a slow-but-steady deterioration. The most intriguing, and in many ways frustrating, aspect to the novel is the impenetrability of Yeong-hye herself. You’re never quite allowed inside her head, and so have to observe her change from

Other people can make life hard. After all, we’re each given this pink-and-grey hunk of headmeat that sits quite apart from everyone else, merrily pumping out our own thoughts and dreams, actions and reactions. Other people help to define who we are, but can also encroach on our own individuality at times. So imagine how it must feel to be a conjoined twin, and never able to be alone. This is the premise of The Less You Know, The Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler, a story about the true-life conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova. It spans the course of their full lives from 1950 to 2003, living in various institutions in Moscow. The difficulty of constant contact between the two sisters is compounded by the deep differences in their personalities. It’s actually almost a textbook abusive relationship, with Masha showing genuine signs of psychopathy – volatility, violence, charm and lack of empathy – and Dasha bearing the deep sensitivity, sadness and passivity of

Earlier in the year, I read Mary Roach’s Gulp - a fascinating and hilarious journey down the alimentary canal. When picking up Giulia Enders’ Gut , I worried that I might be over-gutted. What more could I possibly have to learn, having already read one other book? Fortunately, Ender’s bestseller couldn’t be a better companion piece to Roach’s. Where Gulp is a light-hearted set of the facts that she found most interesting, Gut goes and fills in more of the hard detail. Both are immensely readable, but the former is set to entertain, and the latter to inform. They complement perfectly. Enders (and let’s not forgo the cheap mention of nominative determinism here) makes you fall in love with the gut by being in love with it herself. Her passion and joy blast out of every sentence, and like so many things discussed within the book, that’s infectious. Sometimes the writing style feels slightly young, but I think that’s to make it engaging to a wide audience, and is easily over