The 100 Book Year

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...

I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen . The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around. Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page. It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to w...

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...

Coming-of-age stories are really hard to get right. You have to walk a line of being nostalgic without being indulgent; sincere without being mawkish; funny without being twee. This One Summer pulls this off really ably. A collaboration between two cousins, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, TOS tells the story of a girl, Rose, who spends a summer at her parent’s Canadian beach house. As a complete aside, do all North Americans have access to a beach house? It’s one of those cultural markers we see in every single imported TV show, like high school corridors lined with lockers and calling tortoises ‘turtles’ even though they’re clearly bloody not. ANYWAY, there are two things that combine to make this a really compelling book, each contributed by a different Tamaki. The first is the storytelling. The main character, Rose, is just starting to enter her adolescence, and the book is really about the subtle emotional shifts that that entails, and how she struggles to balance her adu...

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...

I Love Dick is a book whose title feels like a deliberate trick to make you aware of other people looking at you when reading it on a train. I’m certain that it will have been a publishing decision to catch the eye. I look forward to seeing the same publisher’s follow-up hits, Eat All Puppies and I’m Not Racist, But… Publishing chicanery aside, ILD is, in its through-line, about a woman who develops a mostly one-sided infatuation with a man called Dick (get it? The title was a phallusy). But it’s an indirect plotline, with plenty of other ruminations about gender, art, politics and more thrown in too. “Plotline” may not be quite the correct term to use, given that the basis for the book is essentially autobiographical, and it reads like a memoir in the clothes of literature – or possibly the other way around. You’re certainly aware that these are real people being discussed, none more so than the author, Chris Kraus, who brings her whole self to bear on the page, with all the m...

There’s little I love more in the world than a really great sentence. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is stuffed with them, a literary scone crammed full of word raisins. Here are a few examples just from opening the book at random: All day and night she worried time like a bone. Daisy is walking a drum tune. He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. I could fill this review with them. The imagery and the rhythm and ingenuity of Hurston's writing weave powerfully through the book. I realise that this isn’t the main reason that this book or Hurston's writing is most significant in the literary canon, but as a reader it’s a deep pleasure to savour, up there with a long walk on the beach or a YouTube playlist of celebrity cat videos. The novel itself is essentially about black women and their lot in the US South post-slavery. The exact time period isn’t given, but it’s roughly when sharecropping replaced slavery as the white means of ...

My rating: 3 of 5 stars By Chance or Providence is a collection of three short visual stories written as love-letters to mediaeval mythology. They follow the conventions pretty neatly: there are dark woods with monsters, sex and death intertwine and everyone ends up more miserable than an Eastenders Christmas Special. By far the strongest narrative is the final instalment in the trilogy, Demeter . A woman whose husband is lost in a storm does a deal with the sea to get him back for just a little time – and then lives in perpetual fear of the time when he’ll be snatched away again. The slow shuffling approach of death, like a George Romero zombie or the inevitable return to work after a holiday, hangs over every pane. Cloonan has two clear storytelling strengths. Her first is pacing. These stories are short – sparse, even – but each development or step is allowed time to breathe, and have an impact on the reader. She achieves this through careful structuring of the whole ...

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...

Every year, I see people doing things with their lives to support worthy causes. They run marathons; climb mountains; enter tedious white-collar boxing matches. And every year, I realise there is just no way I can do any of that. My lungs would collapse; I’d topple off base-camp; my knuckles would fall off. Fundraising is difficult for people who have no life-skills. And then I remembered: I can read . Admittedly this isn’t a huge boast in the Western world, sitting somewhere between being able to tie your shoelaces and knowing how to make toast. But nonetheless, I can put it to good use. So in 2018, I’m going to read and review 100 books . On average that’s a book every 3.65 days, maths fans. A YouGov survey suggests the average number of books read per year in the UK is around 10. Last year I managed to read 85 books – and that was going full-pelt, so this is going to be a hell of a stretch. A full Stretch Armstrong’s worth. I’m also going to be reading books exclusivel...