Anyone who spends more than an hour in my company will very quickly realise that books are my lifeblood. I try to spend around two hours a day reading but with a busy job and a house to renovate that doesn't always happen. I usually read about two books a month so this is only a few of the books I'll read this year, but they're the ones I'm most excited to get stuck in to.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
I’ve heard so much about this book. It recently won the Costa Award for First Novel. Reviews have described it as heart-breaking, depressing but ultimately uplifting - that, coupled with the fact that Eleanor Oliphant is a fantastic name, put it straight to the top of my reading list. It follows the life of a woman who leads a simple life: she wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal every day and drinks the two bottles of vodka every weekend. Until one day everything changes.
Published in 1908, Maurice Guest is the debut novel by Australian author Henry Handel Richardson. It is a study of obsession and erotic love, centered on a young Englishman, the eponymous Maurice, and his love of a young Australian woman, Louise Dufrayer. I came to this book in a rather convoluted way. In 2016 BBC made a fantastic documentary about Virago Press. Working for Virago was my dream for a very long time (until the London housing market killed that dream), and founder Carmen Callil is one of my idols, so I hung on every word she uttered during that hour. Anyway, at one point in that documentary the tremendous Carmen read a quote from Maurice Guest and, from that one line, I knew I would love this book. So this year will be the year I finally read it.
Well how could it not be on my list? I’ve had so many people tell me how much they completely love this book there was no way it was going unread. It needs no introduction from me, after winning the 2017 Man Booker, but for the unfamiliar, the novel is a realm-bending story of Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War.
How could you say no?
A friend of mine has read several Brookner novels of late and his absolute love of her work has made me utterly desperate to get in on the action. From reading reviews of Brookner’s novels, it is her ability to describe pain and the emotional lives of her characters in precise detail that has intrigued me. Those are the books that tend to stick with me the longest. Look At Me is the story of a lonely art historian who is pulled into the lives of a glittering couple, only to find her hopes of companionship and happiness shattered.
(I get the feeling I’m drawn to depressing books about love and discontent…)
Mona Eltahawy is a Twitter hero. She’s a hero in other ways, but for the purposes of this sentence, she’s a Twitter hero. If you’re not following her and you have a need for more fired up redheads in your life, follow her. Fun fact: I was once sat opposite her in the Hay Festival green room and all I managed to do was stare for a solid 5 minutes. This book has been on my list since it was published back in 2015, partly because of my love of Mona but also because women’s issues in the Middle East is something I definitely need to understand better. It was also Mona’s personal relationship with headscarves that made me think I absolutely must read this book.
What's on your reading list for this year?
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