A resolution that never fails to make my list is to read more.
Every English student ever will tell you that we simply don’t have time to read for fun; I know I would love to, but at this point my brain connects reading to having to having an academic purpose and I can’t do both at the same time.
Nevertheless, this year I have read some amazing books and wanted to share the five best ones on here.
5. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
I first read Winterson’s comments on this book from her memoir The Wrong Crib in the first week of my Prose Fiction class; I read two sentences of it, put my iPad down and ordered the full book on Amazon on a rainy September evening. The next day, I had it in my hands – never been more grateful for Prime.
I love coming of age stories because they are so raw and powerful; it makes me feel like I’m growing up with the protagonist, messing up with them, celebrating their achievements. It’s probably that teenage allure that fascinates me so much because I can relate to a lot of what is written; but the distant, adult voice of the narrator always remains clear, never shaky like that of a teenager might be.
The story follows the growth of Jeanette herself – like she mentions in The Wrong Crib, slightly fictionalised, – in an English Pentecostal community with her adoptive parents. The reader meets her when she is only seven, a devout Christian and subdued to her controlling mother, and is brought along on an incredibly emotional story of coming to terms with her sexuality. I can’t stress enough how this book has it all. There is the innocence of the child, the oppressive religious climate, the impelling feeling of wanting to belong yet being unable to, the suffocating community of a small town, the confusion of loving women. It’s introspective in a covert way – the character is apparently cold in her narrative, almost passive, and it is up to the reader to realise her experience and put emotion into it.
And yes, it is brutal – as brutal as being a lesbian in an incredibly strict religious community can be, – it is painful, desperate, yes it made me cry a lot, but that is part of the experience of reading and even living.
4. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
The only reason for which I can’t put this book any higher is that, as I’m writing this blog post, I’m cheating a little because I haven’t finished it yet. Anyone that has had more than two conversations with me knows how ridiculously obsessed I am with Kerouac, the Beat Generation and 1950s American literature.
I don’t know if it’s the spontaneous “let’s move to Mexico” road trips or how they wrote in the longest, weirdest sentences while on acid, or how they decided to hate on the government, McCarthyism, and got kicked out of major US universities – but they could have published a book with a single word on it and it would still be my favourite. Allen Ginsberg is my twisted equivalent of Jesus and I read On the Road so many times I might as well base my life on it. I love the Beat Generation so much I wrote my Extended Essay on them, got a horrible grade out of it and they are still my favourites.
And if you’re still confused on why I’m so obsessed with this literary movement, let me explain that the Dharma Bums is all about trying to juggle spiritual quest with living in an incredibly bohemian San Francisco. It’s funny because one moment the narrator, Ray, is detailing the story of the Dharma Bums and explaining their spiritual philosophy, and the next they are in Gallery Six getting drunk while listening to poetry and ending up in a Chinese restaurant. It’s honest and spontaneous – the characters are, as always, carved out of real life and that makes them incredibly colourful.
It’s On-The-Road-meets-Siddharta, maintaining the classic messy, decadent, way too detailed Kerouac style that I am inexplicably attached to. But it also becomes a lot more reflective, introspective and real that a lot of other Beat works do; Ray is faced with loneliness, despair and the need to search for spiritual enlightenment not just for the sake of it, but to look for meaning in his life again after losing a friend.
It can’t quite compare to my intense jealousy of not having been in Gallery Six or even San Francisco when this was all going on – which I actually felt while reading the first chapters – but it’s a beautiful start.
3. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
I love reading books that my loved ones are super passionate about because it gives me a little bit of an insight into themselves and their mind – and, most times, some great literature. My housemate is obsessed with this book and Atwood herself, and after having read it I can say that that’s an incredibly wise and true judgement to make. I recently gifted her the Testaments for her birthday, waiting to buy a copy for myself when the cheaper, paperback versions come out in 2020 because I am so, so excited about it.
The book is based on a brilliant idea, which is what I adore about dystopian fiction. Set in a dictatorship in near-future America, based on Old Testament ideals and military force, it reflects on society and specifically the position of women in a newly created system. This is based on the complete loss of identity and independence for women, who can’t own property or money, read, write or have basic freedom or, most importantly, reproductive rights. The remaining fertile women are assigned to important men as Handmaids with the only duty of successfully reproducing; if this fails, they will be exiled and forgotten by society.
The story is, in a lot of ways, uncomfortable. Offred, the protagonist, sometimes has flashbacks of her past life with her daughter and partner, but she appears so brainwashed into the system that I almost wondered if she realised this was morally wrong at all. The interactions she has with other women, whether it be other Handmaids or the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, are dry and so disconnected they seem incredibly harsh. Most of all, however, it is the scenes between her and the Commander, with the hope of making her pregnant that become incredibly hard to read. It is a situation of normalised rape, seen through the lenses of a society which not only allows it, but endorses it, so much that even Offred becomes desensitised to being forced to sleep with a man.
The best thing about dystopian fiction is, however, the fact that there is always some kind of rebellion and underground activity behind the curtains. This is a network of women lost in the system, like Offred’s best friend, and Handmaids that create an underground network of resistance through a simple word, “mayday“. There are secret parties hosted for the Commanders and there is an upcoming revolutionary air amongst some of the Handmaids, which Offred becomes involved with.
With an incredibly open ending and raw, honest writing, this book is it. Trust me.
2. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
This book has been on my reading list for the longest time; most people I know have either started it and hated it, or finished it and loved it so I had to put a little bit of a controversial book in my list for the year. When speaking about Lolita, I always like to give two sides to my argument: the contents and the way in which it was written.
When speaking about contents, Lolita is wrong, uncomfortable and creepy. While reading it, I constantly wondered why Nabokov had decided to dwell on Humbert’s thoughts and desires towards young girls, basically children, and the sexualisation of childhood. This is what sets the premises for the whole story: Humbert, the protagonist, is only attracted to a specific “kind” of little girls he calls nymphets. There were a lot of moments in which I wanted to stop reading because it is, essentially, a story about pedophilia and the first person narrative on Humbert’s side was uncomfortable not just in the way he was speaking about young girls, but women in general.
However I kept on reading. I know it’s the issue with this book; the beginning is more graphic and uncomfortable, building up Humbert’s tension and frustration, but after a while it becomes a book about this man’s misery and delusions.
We get to hear from the monster himself – something which doesn’t usually happen, and arguably shouldn’t happen, but the events in his mind become so incredibly absurd it almost starts to sound ironic at one point. Him and Lolita embark on a journey around America, and, through his attempts of owning her, she becomes a more dynamic and independent character.
There’s two amazing things about this book that kept me reading – Nabokov’s writing style and Lolita herself. I’m gonna make a stretch and say that Nabokov’s style of writing is my favourite out of all these books, because it is just so deeply complex. There’s wordplay, puns, double entendres, he plays with languages – really wishing my French was better while reading the phrases. It’s thick, introspective, descriptive and sounds so good all put together and I’m a sucker for a wordy narrative.
The other thing that’s incredibly underrated about Lolita is, ironically, Lolita herself. It’s a shame that our image of her is so polarised because of Humbert’s position as an older man, her guardian and also her abuser, because we never truly get to get a good picture of her character, especially in the beginning. Nonetheless, she becomes almost like an heroine towards the end of the book, cleverly escaping Humbert’s control and building a life for herself. As her tongue gets sharper and the signs of her childhood start fading away – physically and mentally – the reader sees her more as the scarred, yet incredibly strong woman she has had to grow into.
1. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
I don’t know if it’s the 1950s in America setting, or the aspiring journalist in New York premise, or the fact that Sylvia Plath is one of my favourite poets, but I read this book in less than two days during my spring break, conveniently instead of studying for my exams. All it took was a rare couple of rainy days in Dubai and I cuddled up for forty-eight hours with many cups of coffee, wanting to vicariously living through Esther’s accounts of 1950 New York, in a time where journalism was still cool.
The protagonist is offered an internship at a prestigious magazine for the first half of the book – she ironically and detachedly reports many events that her and her colleagues have to attend, the conversations with her boss and the glamorous way of life of New York at the time. I’m a sucker for descriptions of lavish, “ideal” lifestyles of the past and this whole book manages to do it while criticising all of that brutally. It took me a little bit by surprise because I saw a lot of myself in Esther’s writing aspirations and the book started off as describing my dream internship in my dream city; it was like meeting the opposite of me when she realised she was not happy with the life and opportunity she had.
So, when I first understood that this was going to be the angle for the whole narrative, I almost got frustrated. Esther’s got my dream opportunity seventy years ago and she’s complaining about it; she describes things and people I’d love to meet, situations I’d love to be in but she is so underwhelmed by it all it almost made me mad, and definitely made me dislike the character at first.
But, when the book starts unravelling and her sadness is shaped through most layers than the unhappy girl that has everything in New York trope, I realised how important and introspective this novel actually is. A lot of people, a lot of women and probably a lot of aspiring writers have begun reading it expecting to live vicariously through it and when the expectations for this dream life collapse, we are forced to look into Sylvia Plath’s stark, almost decadent narrative and not ours anymore.
Esther’s depression spirals from when she leaves the internship after escaping sexual violence, when she finds herself purposeless having moved back home. There are rare spurts of inspiration and hope, but each of them is immediately shut down and the reader stops hoping after a while. After attempting suicide a number of times, she
I’ve thought a lot about this book since I’ve finished it. It’s hard to write about deteriorating mental health without romanticising it, hard to write about crushed dreams without it sounding overly melodramatic and hard to write about pressures women feel – and used to feel in a way that can appeal to women even seventy years later.
The metaphor of the bell jar for Esther’s depression is so well-constructed and indicative of the feeling of being trapped; as the narrative progresses, she keeps on trying to achieve freedom from the bell jar, her thoughts, the patriarchal society, psychiatric treatments and herself most of all.
When, at the end Esther decides to go back to school and find her passion again, it still feels bittersweet, like a shadow cast over her life that will take time to fully extinguish.
And, ironically, at the end I found myself loving Esther more and more. So don’t judge a book by its cover – or the fact that it’s throwing your dreams away.
Hope this inspired you to pick one of these books – or any book – up during 2020.
Have a very happy new year!
Sof x
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