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 ...