The 100 Book Year

The Story of my Teeth by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, is a post-modern funhouse in the style of a slightly less surreal The Third Policeman . Which means it might not be up everyone’s street, but it’s more up mine than my own front door is. It follows the life of “Highway” Sanchez, a highly talented auctioneer who’s a yarn-spinner extraordinaire. He is also a collector of just about anything: fingernail clippings, paperclips, courses, stories. It’s this last that the book is principally concerned with, although it does touch kaleidoscopically upon a whole rumination of philosophical questions (which is – or should be – the correct collective noun to use) along the way. As we follow Highway’s progress, we understand not only his talent for storytelling, but also the importance of stories in general. After all, the items that he auctions only have worth as a result of their personal histories. The more impressive a story an item has, the more money it fetches. It’s his...

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe...

Rutu Modan’s Eisner Award-winning debut graphic novel, Exit Wounds , is troubling and sweet by turns. Set in Tel Aviv, it draws (indirectly, I hope) from her experiences of day-to-day there to explore what it means to be living in Israel, and to be Jewish, particularly as a woman. This isn’t a book that contains violence – it contains the aftermath of violence, and the constant threat of it. The way death and destruction is normalised is skilfully done; a recurring motif is the way people respond to the protagonists’ questions about a recent bomb explosion by confusing it with another one that occurred afterwards. The implication is clear – here, explosions are normalcy. You only generally refer to the most recent one. For all that, this isn’t a book about Israel and Palestine. It doesn’t seek to make Israel a victim, or Palestine an aggressor (or vice-versa), or even mention Palestine or Palestinians at all. This is a book about people who have learned to live in a context...

You meet a lot of people with tremendous faith in their memories. I remember it like it was yesterday , or sure, I have a photographic memory , they’ll say, confidence rolling off them like arrogant petrol fumes. So for me, as someone who is constantly in a state of confusion and anti-clarity, it’s something of a relief to read Dr. Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion and see that they’re full of it. And by it , I don’t mean objectively accurate memories . I mean the other it . Most of us are fairly comfortable with the idea that our memories are often imperfect. Or rather, we tend to be fairly comfortable with the idea that other people’s memories are imperfect, while rarely doubting our own. This is why, as part of Shaw’s whirlwind tour of memory and its flaws, she introduces the concept of asymmetric insight: the fact that we think that we understand other people better than they could possibly understand us. It ties into something of a superiority complex that we have – we i...

The Women Who Built Bristol is an exciting compendium of women who have pushed boundaries, and pioneered social and scientific breakthroughs. The rules of the book are that every woman included must have been born, lived or died in Bristol. This is a neat way of ensuring that you get a good overview of people who have affected the city’s makeup – after all, there are plenty of women included who were born abroad (such as Andrée Peel, the French Resistance fighter who moved to Bristol after the war), who nonetheless have helped to define Bristol’s character. Other pioneers from the panoply include: Janet Vaughan, a haemotologist who revolutionised our understanding of anaemia and how to treat it; Fleur Lombard, a firefighter who died heroically fighting a supermarket fire – the first female firefighter to die on duty in the UK; Annie Kenney, a working-class suffragette who became one of the Pankhursts’ right-hand women and took over the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) af...

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...