The 100 Book Year

It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve ever read a book set in Yorkshire before. Is there a dearth of Yorkshire authors? Is it cultural – do they get kicked in the ear if they try to publish a story? Or technological – if they sit down at a keyboard does it send electric shocks up their fingers until they submit? Or is it that there are loads of Yorkie writers and books set there, and I am a human dumpling who simply hasn’t read them? Oh god, it’s the last one, isn’t it? As a means of rectifying this minor patheticism, I picked up Elmet by Fiona Mozley. It’s set in West Riding of Yorkshire, where the kingdom of Elmet used to be in ye olde times(e). It’s very much in the present day, but the significance of Elmet as a sort of ‘badlands’ tees up the theme of the book well. Elmet follows a man called John and his children, Cathy and Daniel, through Daniel’s eyes. John is a professional fighter, revered and feared throughout the country for his strength and ability. He's...

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Okay, so it’s basically my own fault for not properly researching what I was reading. I knew of Anaïs Nin as a writer of fiction and essays, so when I picked up this slim volume of short stories, I thought little of it. But as it turns out, she also wrote erotic literature. I’ve reviewed quite a few graphic novels during this 100 Book Year, but this is my first set of graphic short stories. And by graphic , I don’t mean it has pictures. I took this to read this on the train, and as my misconception became clearer, found myself regularly glancing anxiously at the woman next to me in case she could read the content of the page I was on and now considered me a Public Transport Pervert. It’s important to consider these stories in their proper context. Nin, a complex and controversial character, wrote mostly in the 1940s within a circle of mostly-male literary elite, and sought to find her place at the lead of it. She’s widely considered ground-breaking in the West as a woman writ...

The first thing you notice, upon slotting a copy of The Best We Could Do into your greedy, sweaty little hands, is the texture of the dust jacket. It’s gently rough, and feels a little like the book’s bound in human skin. This is odd, but feels very appropriate for a graphic novel that’s all about the human experience. It personifies its own story. Thi Bui’s graphic memoir recounts the lives of her siblings, her parents and her grandparents as they navigate the political turmoil in Vietnam. I’ll be calling it Vietnam in this review, rather than the more correct Viêt Nam, because I’m writing this on a train and it’s really hard to do the little circumflex over the e . The events and political shifts that preceded, occurred during and followed the Vietnam war are explored, but through the eyes of Bui’s relatives and the human effect it has on them. As always, I’m as ignorant about the Vietnam war as a short stack of pancakes, but this feels like it gives another perspective ...

Elizabeth Is Missing is basically Memento , if Guy Pearce were a confused old woman. I imagine many Guy Pearce films could be improved by this minor tweak. It has all the elements – mystery, memory blocks and crime. And also a surprisingly large number of references to toast. The central premise is that the main character, Maud, is trying to track down her missing friend Elizabeth (the title of the book being somewhat on-the-nose) while she bashes up against against the seemingly-insurmountable obstacle of her own deteriorating memory. But that doesn’t necessarily do justice to this. The way Maud’s memories dart in and out, surfacing some details and losing others, is an elegant patchwork, and gives the reader the gradual unravelling of the story even as Maud fails to hang onto it. And there’s a whole other story tied into this, as her efforts to discover her friend’s whereabouts increasingly mirror an unsolved mystery from much earlier in her life – the disappearance of M...

There is not much better on Earth than a bee. Bees and ants are fascinating, as much for their social structures and integrated intelligence as for their individual values. When humans are smeared off the world like so much spilled jam, it won’t be the chimps or the gorillas that take pride of place – it’ll be the ants or the bees. Take my word for it, I say in the full knowledge that if I’m wrong there’s literally no way you’ll be able to tell me so (my favourite kind of situation). This is presumably what inspired Laline Paull to write The Bees , a sort of nature-fantasy book about a worker bee who transcends her born station in various ways. It’s a love-letter to the hive and all the curious ways that bees work together. Paull has clearly done a lot of research, which pays off enormously. The world within the hive feels full, with details pulled from real life to describe Flora 717’s existence. She doesn’t pander to the audience – never explaining why bees do something, or wha...

There are two types of experimental fiction. There’s the stuff that’s inaccessible: the ones that replace all verbs with synonyms for hedge , or only include sentences that start in the middle, end and then begin. And then there’s good experimental fiction, that actually uses experimentation to enhance, rather than obstruct, the story. The Hour of the Star is the second sort. Written in the 1970s, Clarice Lispector’s book draws from her early life in Brazilian poverty, and perhaps even more so as a novelist. It’s a superb example of a book where the narrator is not only visible, he’s actively present and even obstructive in the telling of the story. At first, Rodrigo S.M., the narrator, is a pompous and rather tedious being; a sort of literary Michael Winterbottom. But over time he seems to suffer a kind of breakdown as he wrestles with his own doubts, faith, the story and his main character, Macabéa. Macabéa in particular is as slippery as a Vaselined eel, dragging the s...