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Emma Langford

Have you read any good books lately?

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“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.




Permalink 2 comments (latest comment by Gill Burrell, Tuesday, 1 Oct 2024, 17:20)
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