Book Recommendations: May

Fiction

Love in Colour, Bolu Babalola

Now I’m not usually a fan of romance fiction, something that this collection falls into. But I had wanted to read this for a long time. Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour retells mythical tales from around the world, decolonising and de-misogynising (yep that’s a word now) many of them.

I recognised some of the myths (Ọṣun the Yoruba goddess, Nefertiti the Egyptian queen, Psyche of Greek mythology, and Shehezerade from One Thousand and One Nights). But every time I came across a myth I didn’t know, I googled its name (Babalola named every story after its female protagonist). And I then realised (or rather had it confirmed to me) how history has treated women.

Google didn’t recognise Attem; I had to delve deeper, finally discovering that the original myth was called ‘Ituen and the King’s Wife’; she was nameless. Nor did Naleli give any results; it had to be ‘Naleli and Khosi’ searched (Khosi being the male character in the story), to unearth the story ‘How Khosi Found a Wife’. So I’m glad this collection exists, to reclaim the identities of the diverse array of women whose stories have influenced global cultures for thousands of years.

Babalola outlines in her introduction that she loves the idea of romantic love, something that I admire but don’t particularly relate to (I’ve apparently become cynical in my old age…). And I have to admit, there were some romantic tropes in the stories that I recoiled slightly from. In the retelling of the story of Psyche and Eros, I did a mini eye-roll upon clocking the she’s not like the other girls so she has the ability to reform the ‘player’ type guy trope. And in the story titled ‘Attem’, a retelling of the Nigerian folktale ‘Ituen and the King’s Wife’, I sighed inwardly at the idea that a days-old romance could be quite so transformative for the individuals involved.

But perhaps this is all more an indication of my cynicism than the quality of the writing. And I have to say, the writing is beautiful. Babalola is, from the first page, evidently an extremely talented wordsmith. Even for me, the romantic love depicted in each tale was enchanting and gorgeously described. I love how she recentres women in these tales, even just through the retitling of ‘Ituen and the King’s Wife’ to ‘Attem’, for example. Some of the tales are timeless, and others modernised to varying degrees – my favourite example being the opening of ‘Psyche’ featuring Psyche spilling takeaway coffee over her work shirt. But they all demonstrate the timelessness of the love (and lust) depicted in them, and the world’s shared cultural fascination with it throughout our rich, long human history.

Elizabeth Is Missing, Emma Healey

I was in the mood for mysteries this month, and Elizabeth Is Missing was an interesting contender for this. The book’s tagline reads ‘How do you solve a mystery when you can’t remember the clues?’, and its premise is that Maud, the protagonist, forgets everything; she knows that her friend Elizabeth is missing, but she can’t remember anything else about it, and everyone around her doesn’t seem at all interested in helping her solve it.

A great premise, I thought, and the book as a whole was like nothing I’d ever read before. In terms of ‘big reveal’ mystery endings, I have to admit I was slightly disappointed. BUT I was so fascinated by how Healey had managed to produce a coherent, yet completely forgetful, narration.

And this also made me realise that I’d never before read or watched anything from the point of view of someone with dementia (as it can be assumed that Maud does). It was humanising; dementia sufferers are always the objects of narratives, never the subjects. Narratives involving people with dementia are nearly always about the suffering and sadness of those around them, not the first-hand experience of the person with dementia themselves.

I don’t know how accurate this depiction was, or about what research went into it (as I imagine it’s quite a difficult thing to get first-hand evidence for). But I thought it was an important non-traditional narrative shift nevertheless, and an interesting and enlightening read because of this.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

I won’t say too much about this because I can probably assume that most people have already read it (or at least watched the film). I found this in a charity shop and it’s one of those modern classics that I have always meant to read but never got around to. And I really enjoyed it.

The first half was a bit slow to get going, but once it did, it was just a thoroughly comforting, enjoyable read. It felt quaint and like a glimpse of a simpler (yet recent) literary past, but it was also dramatic and amusing at exactly the right times. It wasn’t the most revolutionary piece of literature I’ve ever read, but I plain-and-simple loved it.

Behind Her Eyes, Sarah Pinborough

My mood for mysteries in May started with picking this up. And wow, it really kept me enthralled throughout. I finished it in two days and it was one of those where I HAD to stay up to find out the ending (no spoilers, but it was nothing I could have ever expected).

Also recently released as a limited series on Netflix, Behind Her Eyes centres around Louise, an affair with a man she meets called David, and his wife Adele. A pretty simple love triangle, you may think, but things get weird and ominous pretty quickly. As the narration alternates between the first-person perspective of Louise, then Adele, then third-person flashbacks of Adele’s earlier life, it is clear that there is something seriously up with this scenario, and Pinborough flings you back and forth between different conclusions and assumptions.

I won’t give too much away, but all in all this was a juicy psychological thriller with a seriously unexpected twist that I would recommend if you want something to pick you up and carry you along (frantically) with it as it twists and turns and leaves you breathless at the end.

More fiction I read and enjoyed this month:

• On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005): a light-hearted exploration of cultural and familial differences.

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006): a harrowing and experimental but gripping dystopian narrative.

• Cane, Jean Toomer (1923): a classic of the Harlem Renaissance – beautifully written and poetic but at times objectifying of women.

Non-Fiction

Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon

This book is a pocket-sized bible of new important conversations around gender. I read it in about an hour, but, just like Alok’s appearance on Jameela Jamil’s iWeigh podcast, it told me everything I needed to know to feel like I can start to have productive conversations on this topic.

Alok is a non-binary and non-gender-conforming activist, writer and performance artist from the US. They have a LOT of important things to say about the construct of gender, which everyone can benefit from listening to, even those who are happy that their gender expression fits with that which they were assigned at birth.

I feel as though a few quotes from the book will communicate its usefulness better than I could:

At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity. Rather than celebrating people who express themselves on their own terms, we repress them.

The selective outcry over new words to describe gender and sexuality—amidst the thousands of words that are added to the dictionary every year—is about prejudice, not principle. If these people are so averse to change, why aren’t they outlawing the use of bingeable or taking more public stances on the use of the Oxford comma?

This is how power works: It makes the actual people experiencing violence seem like a threat. Moving from a place of fear leads us to make harmful assumptions about one another. In our fear, we treat other people’s identities as if they are something that they are doing to us and not something that just exists.

Gender is a story, not just a word.

Film

Promising Young Woman, dir. Emerald Fennell

WOW, this film had such an impact on me. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a woman whose one purpose in life has becoming avenging her best friend Nina, who was raped by a group of college boys and subsequently committed suicide. Cassie pretends to be drunk and alone on nights out, waiting for a ‘nice guy’ to take her home, and try to take advantage of her, before she reveals her stone-cold-soberness and oh-as-if-by-magic they no longer want to have sex with her, becoming defensive and angry.

The film was so compelling and really just said everything that needs to be said about rape culture. There was the ‘we were just kids, we didn’t know’ defence, the ‘but I have to give those boys the benefit of the doubt’, the ‘it would ruin this promising young man’s life to punish him for this’.

Fennell spells out how the men who commit these crimes are given the benefit of the doubt, allowed to go on living their lives, getting married, and achieving great things for themselves, while women’s lives are destroyed. It explores the culture of victim blaming, even on the part of other women, with nuance and intelligence. It shows how even the ‘nice guys’ play a part in rape culture, and how willingly men will defend their friends, no matter how repulsively they have behaved.

This all makes it sound pretty hard to watch, and I suppose it is in a way, but none of this stuff was news to me, so there wasn’t really a ‘shock factor’ (although there may be for others). It was provocative and entertaining. It feels wrong to say I ‘enjoyed’ a film like this, but I did. The acting, makeup, and cinematography are incredible, too, but not to the extent that they are distractions from the issues that the film explores. I would 100% recommend this; I think it will go down in history as one of the great films of the decade.

Podcast

Encyclopedia Womannica

This podcast does what it says on the tin. And the tin says: ‘Thinking back to our history classes growing up, we had one question: Where the ladies at? Enter, Encyclopedia Womannica. In just 5 minutes a day, learn about different incredible women from throughout history. … we’re telling the stories of women you may or may not know – but definitely should.’

Quick, informative, and interesting, these episodes take a different woman from history each day and explore her life and the impact she left on society. For each month of episodes, they explore a different theme. So far, I’ve listened to ‘Pioneers’, ‘Dreamers’, ‘Villiannesses’, and ‘STEMinists’. Just like Babalola’s Love in Colour, Encyclopedia Womannica reveals the gaping hole in history that extraordinary women all too often fall into. This podcast is a great effort at righting this wrong, and I’m really enjoying listening to it.