The 100 Book Year

From A Visit From The Goon Squad , Past Me expected light-hearted whimsy and comic plot twists. I based this on its title and the book cover. Present Me laughs in the stupid face of Past Me, for being such a clunk-headed dope, because it turns out that Jennifer Egan’s breakout hit novel is nothing of the sort. The structural style is similar to that of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing , with each chapter covering the perspective of a different character experiencing a different event in their life. Where Gyasi sought to show the depth of history and the way cultural influences trickle down a family tree, though, Egan shows breadth – all the characters covered live within a couple of generations of each other, and so the device is more used to outline the way that different people with wildly varying motivations can converge in a few chance meetings to influence each other’s lives, circling around two key characters, Sasha and Benny. It’s less a family tree than an acquaintance hedge. ...

I think we all have it in us to romanticise oblivion. The alcoholic writer; the drugged-up band; the tubby-custardised Teletubbies. It’s easy to see the excess and the self-disregard as edgy, rather than embrace what it would be like to actually be like to be in (or around someone in) that situation – desperate, bleak, sad. Wishful Drinking performs an odd tightrope act across this cultural tension. The late Carrie Fisher wrote this to be performed as a one-woman show, and the sense of that performative element permeates the book. The language is casual and discursive, and a wry, dark sarcasm rivets the words to the pages throughout. This isn’t a lecture, it’s a conversation (although admittedly a one-way one, no matter how hard I tried). What this also means is that Fisher is able to make her reactions very human. It’s easier to see her wry reactions to very dark and troubling things as blasé, but by staying as open and direct with the reader as she does, she’s able to ma...

After the weight of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (both figuratively and literally – I weighed the book and it came out at approximately the same as 2 African elephants, or, if you’ve not gone metric yet, 1.5 Africanne elephants) I desperately needed something light and fun. Happily, Lisa Hanawalt’s My Dirty Dumb Eyes entered stage left to provide exactly that comic relief. Hanawalt isn’t exactly a household name, but she’s very well-respected in the publishing industry, and you’d probably recognise her artistic style from the anthropomorphic animal circus of BoJack Horseman , for which she is the production designer. This collection takes that style and combines it with Hanawalt’s own humour – surreal, crude, hilarious. The artwork varies in style throughout the book, but for me it’s at its best when she’s adopting the style that was also the best thing about BoJack Horseman - an odd combination of semi-realistic, highly detailed animals and cartoony blocks and c...

I loved The God Of Small Things like it were my own exceptionally eloquent child, and I raced through it. So I thought, I’ll read Arundhati Roy’s follow-up, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - it’s thick, but I’ll get through it in no time . WRONG. I tracked through it like a lazy slug, and I’m now a whole book behind schedule! This is bringing out the fear-sweats no end. But it’s worth it. TMOUH is an extraordinarily expansive and devastating book about the relationship between Kashmir, India and Pakistan over recent decades. It’s a pretty big undertaking, at nearly 450 pages, but the reason for its size is its attention to detail. Every character gets a full story, a well of experience that Roy uses to make each one fully three-dimensional. At first this is confusing, because you struggle to understand who the main characters are, and what the primary story is. But after a while you come to realise that, despite having some key plotlines, the aim of this book isn’t prim...

I love to judge a book by its cover. It’s one of those times when you can really get your judging suit on. After all, apart from damage protection, the only purpose of the book cover is to allow you to judge its contents without making any actual effort to open it. And so you can revel in the fact that as soon as you enter a bookshop, judging season is open and it’s high noon. Fortunately for Chemistry , the outside has been perfectly tailored to the inside. It’s bound like an old chemistry textbook – the kind that gets given out by the armload at the beginning of the lesson and returned just slightly tattier and more be-doodled at the end. It sets up your expectations wonderfully. The unnamed narrator of the book is a scientist – by occupation, but also by mindset. And this is really a story about her trying to use the scientific models and knowledge she’s accumulated (thanks to a pushy father and a fascination with the workings of the natural world) to make sense of hum...

When studying subjects at school, a fairly common refrain that bounces around your unkempt, alcohol-tattered student noggin is when am I ever going to use this in real life? . And while I’ve yet to find a real-world purpose for an isosceles triangle where an equilateral one wouldn’t do an equally excellent tri-pointy job, or had to describe my Saturday night at a discotheque to a Frenchman in his own romantic tongue, I can happily say that reading Professor Mary Beard’s Women & Power has fully justified the hours I slaved away, diligently copying other people’s homework for Latin and Ancient History classes. Infantile ruminations on my own fragile self-worth aside, W&P is a brief but sturdy, and thoroughly readable, treatise on the ways that the ancient forebears of our modern Western culture, the Romans and the Greeks, still exercise influence on the way that women are treated in public life today. The book is pulled together from two key lectures that Professor Beard r...