“Have you read any good books lately?” My hairdresser always asks me this question. It is one of my favorite things to talk about, yet it always takes a long time to answer.
Yes. Yes, I have read some astonishingly good books lately.
The long, complicated, answer is inevitable because the word 'good' is so difficult to apply as a blanket label to books that I have chosen to read for so many different reasons; books that serve different purposes. A book might be (in my view) the most spectacular literary masterpiece to ever be scripted - it doesn't mean I enjoyed the story. A book might have made me laugh and made me cry - it doesn't mean it is necessarily academically brilliant or should be required reading. A book might have made me question big deep things about myself and could be argued to have been personally transformative - it doesn't mean that another reader will feel the same.
Here is what my 2024 reading list has looked liked so far:
Under the Skin - Michel Faber
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
Why We Can't Sleep - Ada Calhoun
Beartown - Fredrik Backman
The Complete Stories - Anita Desai
Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes
Emma - Jane Austen
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Night - Elie Wiesel
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Lucky - Alice Sebold
The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
1984 - George Orwell
The Swimmers - Julie Otsuka
Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
About a Boy - Nick Hornby
Talking to the Dead - Helen Dunmore
Hang the Moon - Jeanette Walls
Slam - Nick Hornby
After This - Alice McDermott
The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold
Juliet Naked - Nick Hornby
About Love and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
In a Lonely Place - Dorothy B Hughes
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
Case Histories - Kate Atkinson
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson
Elizabeth Costello - J M Coetzee
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter - Kim Edwards
D - Michel Faber
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan
The Fire Gospel - Michel Faber
The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Lady Oracle - Margaret Atwood
Major Works - Clare
Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married - Marian Keyes
Negotiating with the Dead - Margaret Atwood
The Women - Kristin Hannah
Poetics - Aristotle
The Outsiders - S E Hinton
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Some of these books sit on my A893 set text list. Some of them sit on my kids' High School and Middle School curriculums. Some of them came recommended by friends. Some of them were disrecommended by friends, which made them intriguing to me (especially as I then found some of them spectacular reads). Some of them have been considered controversial in some States meaning some school districts have banned them (I live in America, where apparently some people think that limiting literacy and limiting exposure to difficult topics is somehow good for the next generation... I mean... I can't even...). Some of them are funny. Some of them are artsy. Some of them are classics. Some of them were $1 impulse purchases from a thrift store. Some of them I have read again and again before. Some of them are first-time reads. Some of them took a week or two to work through. Some of them were read in a single sitting.
My summary - just read books. Read all the books you can. Be ok with not loving the same books as your friend or partner or neighbor. Be ok with mixing up the classics with 'trashy' holiday reads. Be ok with not understanding everything written down. Be ok with not having a favorite author. Be ok with being uncomfortable in what you read.
Read. Read. Read some more. It’s never a mistake.