Reading women

If you’ve read my article on representation of women authors and protagonists on the exam set texts lists in the UK at 16, you’ll know the picture isn’t that great, and students are likely to be mainly encountering a man’s eye view of the world in all contexts of literature. If not, read it, it’s open access!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pros and cons of reading lists recently, but I loved a reading list as a teenager, and I was very pleased to find out that my tweeting of the Balliol college reading list for aspiring Oxford English students sent it semi-viral in 2016. (Have a look – it’s a surprising list.) So as an accompaniment to my article on set texts, I thought I’d make a list of six suggested reads by women for teens who want to balance up their school curriculum texts (or anyone else!).

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison. This Gothic modern classic is the story of an African-American woman who escapes slavery only to be taken back. Rather than allow her 2 year old daughter to return to slavery, she kills her, and this is the story of her haunting by Beloved, who may or may not be that daughter. A powerful novel which won many prizes.

2. The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor. A modern SFF novel (or ‘magical futurism’) which links the US and Africa, this is about the rise of a superhuman woman and also about our world and what we are doing to it and its peoples.

3. Anita and Me by Meera Syal. Now this technically is a GCSE set text but it doesn’t appear as widely as it used to and given that everyone has to study a 19th century novel, I suspect the vast majority will be doing a 20th/21st century play rather than another lengthy prose text. Anita and Me is a fabulous Bildungsroman set in Wolverhampton, an area of Britain that gets little attention in literature. Anita is the kind of friend everyone wants and fears.

4. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. This was one of my favourite reads of 2017. It’s a dual timeline story, of a diary written by a teen in Japan, and the woman reading that diary in the US after it is washed up on a nearby beach. It’s not for the faint of heart – and I would be careful recommending it to teens given it has sex and swearing in it in abundance, but perhaps the uncomfortable context of Japanese fetishism of schoolgirls has lessons for all of us. It’s beautifully written and another powerful read.

5. The Shadow of the Sun by A.S. Byatt. I debated what Byatt novel to include, and Posession came a close second – a novel I read and fell in love with at 17. The Shadow of the Sun came about a year later, and it is definitely a challenging read – perhaps of particular interest to those aiming at a high status university. It’s the story of what happens when a high flying young woman comes to pieces. I hope the ending would be different nowadays – but it’s a useful reminder that the choices young women have now were not always available to them.

6. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Another Gothic mystery, this one centres on the dialogue between two women, one a famous novelist who is dying and the much younger woman to whom she has finally chosen to reveal the key to the mystery which has been at the heart of her life and work. It’s BRILLIANT. And much better than the television adaptation from a few years ago.

What would you recommend?

Happy World Book Day!

Today is the day dedicated to books: the day that it's okay to bunk off work and bury your nose in a book*, the day that is specifically designed for you to go to a bookshop or website and buy a book - any book, the day that you should spend asking other people what they've read recently and enjoyed, and telling them what you've read recently and enjoyed. Change your facebook status to tell everyone you know the title that changed your life. Spot a stranger reading a book and ask them about it. See someone in Waterstone's looking at a book you hated and tell them that: then recommend a better one.

I love reading. I love bookshops. I may have mentioned this before. When I'm feeling low, visiting a bookshop is practically therapy. I don't have to buy anything - in fact I frequently don't - instead, I just browse and let all the pages and covers calm me slowly, tell me of the thousands of other worlds I could enter if I chose. That's the best thing about books: inside any one could be the portal to another world, a parallel dimension, an ideal place.

The books that keep me coming back for re-read after re-read are always those ones which do capture me and transport me bodily. I'm not just talking about the books which I can fall into and switch off completely from the outside world - I'm pretty talented at that. Easy to stop up your ears when your inner ear and eye is so completely concentrated on the object in your hand. I'm talking about the books which are a perfect mix of big ideas and tiny details, that contain characters I can identify with, that recreate that sense of magic I got from my first hit of fiction all those years ago. It's like heroin only without the fatal side effects or fall off from the intensity. I can re-read books like these instantly - have been known to - and still get the magic.

Books like this usually fall into one of two categories for me: children's fantasy (The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce, practically anthing by Diana Wynne Jones, to name but a few) or books about books (I'm talking things like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, things which Middeke and Huber call 'biofictions' that create their own intertextuality). I know not everyone likes the same things, and not all the books I go back to time after time are like this, but a good proportion are. (To my shame, the other major category is Dick Francis novels. I re-read all thirty odd of them every year or so. But then that only takes about a fortnight!)

I find that I have this strong emotional reaction to books less often nowadays though. When I was six or seven I saw my mother putting aside some books to take to Oxfam. "Didn't you like them, Mummy?" I asked. "Yes," she said, puzzled. "But then why don't you want to read them again?" I couldn't conceive of the idea of liking a book but not wanting to go back to it. Now I know there are so many books out there that I won't have time to read, that it's sometimes not worth going back to them. I'm trying desperately to reduce my holdings of books at the moment: I don't have room to store all of them on bookshelves as it is, and I'm expecting to have to move to a smaller place in the summer, and to have fewer shelves still. I've got a shelf which contains only books which I haven't read yet but which I expect to get rid of when I do. So far only two out of seven have escaped the cull: Q&A, the novel which Slumdog Millionaire is based on, and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, even if it made me cry. I regret a little letting The 19th Wife go, but since it was a free book anyway it probably won't kill me.

So the only question is: do I celebrate World Book Day by buying a new book? Or by reading one I've already got? There's just so much choice!



*subject to terms and conditions: namely your boss's attitude...

How many have you read?

During January The Guardian published a series of booklets under the title 'One thousand books to read before you die'. The idea, explained in this introduction is that if you read one book every four weeks, beginning when you're 8, and finishing aged 85, you'll manage to pack in a whopping 1,000 novels (providing you don't read any twice!). The definitive list can be found here.

Well, this of course presented something of a challenge: I am nothing if not list-oriented. So, combing through, I came up with a grand total of 126/ 1000. Which is not too bad (especially if you consider that some of these 'individuals' were Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (circa 30 books); the Narnia books (7) and the Lord of the Rings (3). So really, that's 163/1037. But who's counting?

The more worrying thing was that many of those hundred books were ones that I could remember only vaguely, or knew I hadn't liked that much. Some of the ones I hadn't read were ones I have made conscious decisions not to. The Guardian sensibly didn't stick to the classics - there was an astonishing range of books represented, although I was surprised not to see a section of children's fiction - especially in a list we're supposed to start on at age 8. Which is where putting my achievement into context comes in: twenty years at 13 books a year, and I should have read at least 260 off the list. Aargh - I only have another sixty years to read them all. Luckily, as you will have read below, I reckon I pack in a few more than one every four weeks. Although possibly not off this list.