Book Recommendations: January

Fiction

Elizabeth Day, The Party

At a certain stage during the evening, at just the point where the liminal haze of extreme tipsiness slides into the bubbling froth of pure inescapable drunkenness, the guests began to be ushered outside the house … the usual British reserve dissolving like aspirin as the night wore on.

Part mystery, part social realism, The Party was an intriguing read from start to finish. Day’s narrative centres around an event which the police are investigating in the present. This is the format of alternate chapters, with others focusing on the protagonist Martin (both in the present as a 40-year-old and in school flashbacks) and the diary of Martin’s wife Lucy. This novel has a sense of foreboding throughout and keeps its readers truly on their toes. As the different chapters coalesce, the suspense builds. But there are moments of lightheartedness, too.

Lucy knew me better than anyone else but there were many things I never told her. She looked at me sometimes as if trying to make out the shape of a rocky outcrop on a foggy horizon.

This is a book about social relationships, loyalty, infatuation, class boundaries, and fitting in (or rather, an inability to fit in despite your best efforts). The whole book carries an aura of intensity and suspense which keeps you reading, but also offers a subtle critique of the blinding effects of money and fame: when idolisation and obsession become dangerous.

If I thought DC Nicky Bridge were clever enough to understand, I would tell her the problem is that everything is now so deeply intermeshed I no longer know where I finish and where Ben starts. We are, in the end, just two chambers of the same poisoned heart.

Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

This book is astoundingly life-affirming in its heartbreaking portrayal of collective (and personal) trauma and unthinkable injustice. Focusing on the life and true story of Lale Sokolov, Heather Morris demonstrates with sensitivity that love and loyalty can be found even in the most barren and joyless environments.

Of course, and as is to be expected with writing of this nature, it was extremely hard to read at points. But Lale’s story, as Morris so well demonstrates, is about more than the trauma that he was subjected to. It is about how he retained his humanity when everything around him threatened its existence.

Lale looks up, searching for the sun to shine down on him. But it is concealed by ash and smoke.

This book demonstrates how individual stories are so important in the teaching of history. WWII is often studied in terms of its wide-sweeping political and historical lessons, but zooming in on individual narratives of loss, heartbreak and triumph are important too. History must be humanised; after all, it is made up by and of humans. History and memory walk hand in hand along the long road of time. If we humanise history, we validate empathy.

But what this narrative also emphasised to me was how we cannot limit these lessons to the past. Millions of people suffer injustices just like this in the present day – from genocide in Darfur to the horrific treatment of Uighur Muslims in China and the US’s immigrant detention system – and we can’t become complacent in taking a stand against this. Reading about the Holocaust as a catastrophic historic event is important. It generates anger, outrage and devastation, and helps us to recognise how easily people become complicit with violent regimes. However, we should also recognise that it is easier to take a moral stand about something retrospectively. Can we use this anger at the past to drive change in the present day, despite the mind-numbing barrage of bad news? I hope so.

Beth O’Leary, The Flat Share

Last but definitely not least; The Flat Share was possibly my favourite book of the month, if not the last 6 months. I picked this up not really knowing what to expect. Would this be a cutting cultural commentary? A predictable rom com? A heartbreaking story of love and loss? A sarcastic laugh-out-loud comedy? In truth, it is all of these – but in the most joyful and unexpected ways.

The Flat Share follows the lives of Tiffy and Leon; Tiffy is an editor who has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend, and Leon works night shifts as a palliative care nurse. They enter an agreement where Tiffy has the flat (and its only bed) during nights and weekends, and Leon occupies it in the day between his shifts. As the narrative develops, we see how their lives become intertwined.

I rest my forehead against the fridge door for a moment, then run my fingers across the layers of paper scraps and Post-it notes. There’s so much here. Jokes, secrets, stories, the slow unfolding of two people whose lives have been changing in parallel – or, I don’t know, in synch. Different times, same place.

With their individual and collaborative moments of pure joy and laugh-out-loud comedy, I grew so fond of each of the characters in this book. What I loved most about it was how seamlessly it switched between creating this comedy and delving into the devastating psychological and physical effects of emotionally abusive relationships. Ultimately, it is a celebration not only of resilience in the face of trauma, but of friendship, and the ways that friends can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves.

Long story short: I really didn’t want this book to end.

Non-Fiction

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

I think the first line of this recommendation should be: I think everyone in the world should read this book, including, and especially, men. Criado Perez clearly and concisely spells out the gender data gap, and its costs, in a style that beautifully melds the sciences and the humanities. Data, or the lack thereof, has real social effects. This is a data gap and a failure in equality that affects all of us, every day.

Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them and their needs.

Perez demonstrates the proliferation of the lack of data on women, and how it affects lived experience in so many ways: healthcare, paid and unpaid work, travel, politics, toilets, technology, urban design, and more. She uses so many recognisable examples that it was impossible not to see how much this male bias features in the lives of all the women I know, often without me even realising it.

She emphasises that the majority of studies which are seen as ‘gender neutral’ either carry out their research only on men, or fail to aggregate their data by sex and therefore fail to acknowledge the differences caused by both sex and gender.

In the framework of our societies, in the studies that inform our healthcare, our health and safety measures, in the way that our cities and neighbourhoods are designed, human = male. And so women’s lives are framed as less important than human lives. Men are seen as default; women as deviations from the norm, an inconvenience to the ‘neutral’ data provided by men.

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body.

This is costing not just livelihoods but lives. From car safety mechanisms designed around the male body, to public sanitation designed around male needs, these ignorances are putting women in real danger.

Perez shows that feminism needs to acknowledge the sex- and gender-informed differences between men and women we are to move forward towards equality. We need to stop accepting the excuses that women are just too complicated to include in our collective vision of society. We can acknowledge these differences without using them to hold anyone back.

But today, companies and governments, largely run by men, fail to consult the female perspective, and as a result they completely ignore women’s needs. Everyone stands to benefit if we redress this balance, and Perez’s succinct and thoroughly-researched documentation of this is a key tool in this.

It might sound like a pretty dry read, but Perez’s writing style is accessible and interesting; she tells mini-stories throughout and intersperses her writing with anecdotes from around the world. These not only make for a more interesting read, but they also solidify her arguments by showing them as part of real lived experience.

This is my favourite type of non-fiction: when someone takes numerical and scientific data and presents it in a way that appeals to my socially-driven humanities brain; it makes me feel like I can take on the world’s injustices and win.

The solution to the sex and gender gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten. Female lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows … And so, to return to Freud's ‘riddle of femininity’, it turns out that the answer was staring us in the face all along. All ‘people’ needed to do was ask women.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

I went to a virtual book release event this week for Oluo’s new book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. In it, she stated, ‘Knowledge is important, but we learn so that we can act’.

In light of this, my recent read of her 2018 book So You Want to Talk About Race is the epitomisation of this statement. In reading it, I felt equipped with enough knowledge to act, to challenge people and engage with anti-racism in a productive way.

The chapters in this book are framed in a question-and-answer format, making them both conversational in their approach and tone, and perfect for generating conversation off the page. Chapter titles include: ‘Why can’t I say the N-word?’, ‘Is it really about race?’, ‘Why am I always being told to “check my privilege”?’ and ‘What is cultural appropriation?’.

Each chapter begins with an analogy from Oluo’s own life, then zooming out to examine each theme from a broader societal perspective. This makes each of her points resonate: we can see their personal, emotional effects, but also how wider society reinforces this across an entire population. Her writing style is clear and conversational, using direct address at times to really engage the reader.

Often, being a person of color in a white-dominated society is like being in an abusive relationship with the world. Every day is a new little hurt, a new little dehumanization. We walk around flinching, still in pain from the last hurt and dreading the next. But when we say “this is hurting us,” a spotlight is shown on the freshest hurt, the bruise just forming: “Look at how small it is, and I’m sure there is a good reason for it. Why are you making such a big deal about it? Everyone gets hurt from time to time”—while the world ignores that the rest of our bodies are covered in scars.

Oluo eloquently demonstrates the harm in the belief that the definition of racism is only the prejudice of one race towards another:

It’s the system, and our complacency in that system, that gives racism its power, not individual intent. Without that white supremacist system we’d just have a bunch of assholes yelling at each other on a pretty even playing field—and may the best yeller win … If I call a white person a cracker, the worst I can do is ruin their day. If a white person thinks I’m a n*****, the worst they can do is get me fired, arrested, or even killed in a system that thinks the same—and has the resources to act on it.

Reading isn’t for everyone, but it is my way of better understanding complex and nuanced issues, and equipping myself in the battle against systemic racism and the fight to educate the un- and misinformed (which, by the way, is all white people in one way or another, myself included). There are many ways to do this, but as white people, we should always be trying to educate and equip ourselves with this knowledge, and then use it, in one way or another. It is literally the least we can do.

These conversations will not be easy, but they will get easier over time. We have to commit to the process if we want to address race, racism, and racial oppression in our society … [A] centuries-old system of oppression and brutality is not an easy fix, and maybe we shouldn’t be looking for easy reads. I hope that if parts of this book make you uncomfortable, you can sit with that discomfort for a while, to see if it has anything else to offer you.

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

This is non-fiction that reads like fiction, even at times like poetry. Maya Angelou is an incredible wordsmith, and her ability to document and evaluate her own life’s journey is evident in this volume of her autobiography (and, I can only assume, the six other volumes that follow this). She captures her inner child’s voice through this first volume, relating the trials of her early life. It becomes apparent as her narrative goes on that she is a phenomenally resilient and admirable individual, even at this young age.

Before the girls got to the porch I heard their laughter crackling and popping like pine logs in a cooking stove. I suppose my lifelong paranoia was born in those cold, molasses-slow minutes.

I discovered that to achieve perfect personal silence all I had to do was attach myself leechlike to sound. I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep into my ears, the world would be quiet around me. I walked into rooms where people were laughing, their voices hitting the walls like stones, and I simply stood still – in the midst of the riot of sound. After a minute or two, silence would rush into the room from its hiding place because I had eaten up all the sounds.

In passages such as these, the words sing; the sentences dance from the page into your consciousness. Angelou has such a knack for putting into words sensations that it feels like we don’t have the words to describe; they can only be expressed symbolically. I always admire people who can write about their lives with such animation and creativity; this book was an inspiring read for this reason among many.