Book Recommendations: July

I haven't been writing as much recently; life is finally a bit exciting again and I'm just letting myself enjoy it. But I thought I'd like to try and keep up with my book recommendations – if only to look back on as a record of my reading. I've read quite a lot this month so I'm going to try and summarise each book in a couple of sentences (a challenge in itself).

Fiction

• A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman – A quirky and sensitive portrayal of the life and love behind an outwardly grumpy and pedantic old man. An endearing slow burn; funny yet touching.

• The Switch, Beth O’Leary – A 29-year-old Londoner and her Yorkshire grandmother switch lives for six weeks. Heartwarming and easy to read; O’Leary always treads the line of a-little-too-cheesy for me, but I always enjoy her writing and she never fails to touch on some serious issues along the way.

• A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby – A book that centres almost entirely around suicide but still manages to be funny. An unexpected bunch of people find each other and form love-hate friendships.

• Ariel, Sylvia Plath – Compelling, expressive, dark poetry. It reminded me that I should make the effort to read poetry once in a while. Gobbled it up in a single evening.

• Asking For It, Louise O’Neill – Harrowing but important; a story of the complexities of being a teenage girl, the fraught nature of consent, the effects of social media, and the toxic culture of victim blaming. A flawed narrator compels you to question your own prejudices.

• Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones – A story of two sisters born to different mothers and their bigamist father. Only one of them knows of the other’s existence (she is the ‘secret child’), but their paths eventually cross. An engaging exploration of human relationships and fallibility.

• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi – I love books that start with a family tree. The story begins with two chapters named after two half-sisters (that both don’t know the other exists) born in the Gold Coast of Africa in the 18th century, one sold into slavery and the other married to a slave trader. With a chapter dedicated to each character’s life, the book traces multiple generations and continents to end up in the present day. A book of many threads intertwined throughout time, space, and narrative. Even people hundreds of miles away from each other can be intimately connected. Beautiful.

Non-Fiction

• We Need New Stories, Nesrine Malik – An eloquent take-down of many of the myths that are only gaining strength in our current dominant global consciousness. Includes chapters about the myth of gender equality, of a political correctness crisis, of virtuous origin, and of a free-speech crisis (among others). Right up my street. I dog-eared many pages.

• The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, Christiana Figueres – This book starts off on a very depressing note: an imagining of our world in a few decades (spoiler, it’s bad). But if you can get through that part (just one chapter), it’s a truly incredible, motivating, and stirring read. It makes you want to get up and do something, and most importantly it tells you that all is not lost (yet).