The 100 Book Year

I’ve never been a fan of the word bitch when applied to women, so I confess to some reticence about picking up Bitch Planet . After all, if I don’t like it being used about one woman, using it to describe a whole planet should rocket me into heights of discomfort previously only known to people visiting emergency rooms having glued bits of themselves to other bits of themselves. I needn’t have worried. Its use in Kelly-Sue DeConnick’s graphic novel series is exactly to underline the reason I don’t like it in the first place. The eponymous Bitch Planet is a sexist epithet used by men to describe an off-world prison reserved for women who don’t fit into the neat box that society wants them in. Its use is deliberate and knowing, rather than lazy. Yeah, okay Nash, keep yer sociolinguistic jibber-jabber to yerself. What’s the actual story, you pretentious codpiece? Thank you, dear reader, I value your feedback. Essentially the premise is somewhere between The Handmaid’s Tale and Th...

In the course of this 100 Books shebang, I’m trying to read some classics that I’ve woefully missed educating myself upon, as well as literature’s newer babies. To this end, The Yellow Wallpaper and other stories nudged its way into my open hands. With pieces originally published between 1892 and 1914, this slim but solid volume of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s stories is an enjoyable representation of the themes for which she’s famous. This is essentially an exposition of the harm that gender-based roles do to both sexes, across a series of bite-sized narratives. While they’re all thematically-linked, Gilman’s writing style shifts across the book, from the whimsy of Three Thanksgivings to the first-person horror of the book’s famous titular story, The Yellow Wallpaper . This gives the book a nice sense of balance, and helps deliver her messages more effectively. Many of the stories seem to be written as a form of wish fulfilment. They feature female protagonists who find ...

But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens is a short but extremely striking memoir. ‘Memoir’ isn’t entirely correct – it’s a love-letter of sorts to the memory of her father, from whom she was separated during the Holocaust. If this sounds sad – it is. Despite its opening line I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us , this is a hauntingly heartwrenching, powerful and upsetting read. It explores in-depth the psychology of the Holocaust survivor, and just how they can start to try to piece things together after they were so comprehensively blown apart. This isn’t done, as Primo Levi does, through comprehensive and detailed retellings of the camps, and how they worked, although she does recount some anecdotes. Loridan-Ivens instead focuses on the relationship with her father, whom she saw just once after being sent to different concentration camps and how that aborted relationship turned into a driving force that stayed with her thr...

There’s not much more predictable than death. Not the exact nature of anyone’s death, but the fact that we’re all going to hit the doom saloon at one point or another. And yet we fear it; avoid preparing for it; create unhelpful taboos around it. On a scale of dopey things to do, this ranks right up there with Morris dancing. This is one of the key messages of Dr. Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind . Through a number of examples from her time working in palliative care, she explores what death really looks like and how to come to terms with it in an age increasingly concerned with preserving life at all costs. There are some genuinely moving points in the book, but for me none was more so than the first time she watches a consultant describe the dying process to a woman with a terminal condition, who is scared of the pain and loss of dignity she believes it to include. Mannix carefully recounts the process for us to benefit from too: gradually increasing tiredness, regular cycl...

My first play of my 100 Book Year is the Pulitzer prize-winning The Flick from American playwright Annie Baker. Oof, that almost sounds like the opening to Wikipedia article. But instead of rewriting it, I’m just going to reference that fact and turn this intro into solid gold through the lazy medium of apparent self-awareness. ANYWAY, it centres on three people working in a run-down little cinema in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s the first I’ve read / seen of Annie Baker, but it’s apparently very representative of her style: lots of small, apparently mundane conversations by everyday people, that are vehicles for big overall emotional shifts. This gives a lot of space for nuance, which I like, and goofball humour, which I like even more. Imagine all the crummiest jobs a minimum-wage cinema attendant might have to deal with, condensed into a few short interactions. It could be depressing, but Baker makes it hilarious. Plays are different to novels in that novels have the...

Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in. The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails. That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part –...

Painfully, I’d never read any Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche before, so Americanah seemed like a good choice. I was right! Well done, me, you clever genius. Although poor show, me, you doltish fool, for never reading her before. I’ve seen it classified before as a love story, and while a love story is certainly shot through it, it defies that classification. As much as anything, it’s an sociological comparative study of the US and Nigeria, although I understand why they didn’t hire me to write that on the back, because that sounds less interesting than it is. As a white British person, I’m aware that I’ll have read it very differently to a Nigerian or to an American, and there are doubtless a lot of layers I’ll have missed. But even from my outside perspective, the sheer richness of detail and cultural insight is astonishing. Ifemelu, the main character, makes her home in both countries at different times, which lets her paint broad cultural strokes across a number of minor inter...

I like my detective stories like I like my eggs: hard-boiled. (This is a lie, I actually hate eggs, but for the purposes of a punchy opening pun, I like my eggs like I like my detective stories (hard-boiled, in case you missed it).) So it made perfect sense for me to include a few detective stories on my Quest of 100 Books (films rights available). And what better place to start than in the golden age of the detective story with one of its most celebrated female authors, Dorothy L. Sayers? Whose Body? is at one and the same time a meticulously-plotted mystery novel and also something of a pastiche of the same. It features Lord Peter Wimsey (whose name should give an indication of the novel’s tone) who has weaned himself on Sherlock Holmes stories and, with too much time and money on his hands, rather fancies himself as following poshly in his footsteps. This is to the well-wearied consternation of his butler, Bunter, who's sick of waiting up to all hours of the night wai...