Best of 2019: Books
Bernadine Evaristo
Pi Culture’s ‘Best of 2019’ series highlights the favourite things we’ve seen, heard and read this year. In this article, our writers share their favourite books.
Girl Woman Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo (jointly) won the Booker Prize this year with her eighth novel, a hybrid work that could be a short story collection (the twelve characters each have their own clearly demarcated sections), or long-form poetry (Evaristo’s lyrical writing forgoes traditional punctuation such that each line runs on to the next). But it is a novel and you must pay attention to each of the twelve women because they resurface in subsequent stories as mothers produce daughters, teachers encourage students, and friends lean on each other. Although giving voice to a minority, Evaristo’s dedication assures readers the book is “For the sisters & the sistas & the sistahs & the sistren & the women & the womxn & the wimmin & the womyn & our brethren & our bredrin & our brothers & our bruvs & our men & our mandem & the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.” In a time of fiercely debated identity politics, Girl Woman Other is essential reading for us all.
Matilda Singer
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
“It’s worse, much worse, than you think.” That the climate crisis is now at last part of the mainstream political agenda owes itself in no small part to figures like David Wallace-Wells. In The Uninhabitable Earth, assimilating climate studies and data of astonishingly comprehensive range, Wallace-Wells is unsparing as he frames the scale of the need for change. The book is unremittingly anthropocentric, giving little scope for the life with whom we share the planet; but this seems like splitting hairs at a time when information can ensure we don’t grow complacent in the face of such imminent existential disaster.
Jamie Singleton
Circe by madeline miller
Women often get dealt a bad hand in Greek mythology and classical texts. Madeline Miller gives voice to the character of Circe from Homer’s Odyssey and creates a world so magical you may never want to leave. Where myths are real and the rage of God’s seem never ending, Circe must use all her powers and wit to become the author of her own life. Miller is accurate and engaging, telling the untold stories and gaps left by invisible women in literature. This is a novel not to be missed. It shows just how fearsome and independent women can be in a world stacked against them.
Olivia Olphin
the making of poetry by adam Nicolson
The Making of Poetry, by Adam Nicolson, is a biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge. It concentrates on the year 1798, when the poets were neighbours in the Quantocks and wrote some of their most famous poetry. To write the book, Nicolson went to live in the same hills as the poets. Over the course of a year, he walked the same paths, saw the same views, waded the same streams, and felt the same weather. He reveals this peculiar approach from the very beginning of the book, where he “walks with” Coleridge, “the same lanes, the same air, absorbed in his frame of mind.” This process of “embedding”, as Nicolson calls it, is informed by a talk he gave to the The Royal Society in 2017. He displayed two maps: one charting the migration of shearwaters, the other, the prevailing Atlantic wind direction. The patterns are almost identical. It shows, in Nicolson’s words, the “extraordinary attuning of creature to world”; encompassed in the very name, shearwater: flying so close to the sea that the wingtip cuts a momentary wake into the water. It is this “very breathing and sensing of embodied souls alive in the world” which, Nicolson suggests in this biography, is the making of poetry. And it is this “embedding”, this shearwater-y immersion, that most brilliantly reveals the poetry itself.
Joe Kenelm
The testaments by margaret atwood
The highly anticipated sequel to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale certainly lived up to the hype surrounding its release. Set fifteen years after the first book, Atwood explores the mechanisms, techniques and organisations that help create instabilities within seemingly impenetrable authoritarian regimes. Narrated by women found both inside and outside of Gilead, it is a tale of infiltration and intelligence. How can individuals destroy a regime that suppresses them? During a year that made so many feel powerless, this sequel was the perfect answer.
Laura Toms
Trick Mirror by jia tolentino
If you’re feeling flummoxed and uneasy about The Times We Live In, then perhaps Jia Tolentino’s first book might help clarify things for you. The New Yorker writer weaves in and out between the acutely personal and the sociopolitical, seeking to understand phenomena that symptomize our culture today: reality TV, self-optimization, the wellness industry. She leaps from Fyre Festival, to the way we treat “difficult women”, to finding a parallel sense of ecstasy in religion and drugs. The common thread? The notion of “self-delusion”, that we are perpetually trying to convince ourselves, to tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Kay Ean Leong
At the pond by ava wong davies, margaret drabble, esther freuD et al.
“You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in”, Herman Melville once wrote. As this thoughtful collection shows, a much smaller body of water can do just as well. At The Pond gathers together fourteen essays on the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. The accounts of the pond are as diverse as the “two reactions” Deborah Moggach (one of the essayists) gets when she tells people she swims in the Ladies’ Pond: “The first: ‘Ugh, isn’t it muddy/dangerous/cold?’ The other is, ‘How wonderful, lucky old you.’” Nina Mingya Powles, for example, remembers her nomadic childhood, asking “where is the place your body is anchored? Which body of water is yours?” The Hampstead Ladies’ Pond is her anchor; and the action of moving with the water becomes a shifting prism through which to consider her own past: Powles’s first collection of poetry was entitled Drift. Melville’s sea-room complicates rather than concludes truth. In her essay, Nell Frizzell weaves the same understanding into a memorable, and beautiful, inversion: “we’re not swimmers anymore, but astronauts; star sailors. We are floating through a silky, thick black as bottomless as the night sky.” The pond is a universe: as evinced by this energetic collection, it contains multitudes.
Joe Kenelm
me by elton john
Though we may not admit it, we all love a sneaky peek inside the lives of the rich and famous. Elton John’s autobiography shows however that it may not be as glamorous as we think. From the gloomy London suburb of Pinner to the sunny side of America, readers are led through the many highs and lows of stardom. Ghost writer Alexis Petridis has helped John in selecting the most suitable anecdotes from a seemingly endless supply. Those selected reveal a beautiful tension between those memories with his star-studded friends such as Queen, John Lennon and George Michael and his personal struggles with drugs and bereavement. The tone John employs is always refreshing. More self-deprecating than self-congratulating, it brings a human feel and charming wit to what could have become so easily an attempt to establish a glowing legacy.
Laura Toms
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado’s courageous memoir In the Dream House is as much about Machado’s experiences in an abusive relationship as it is about the quandaries of retelling it, of reconstructing trauma into narrative. Fragmented, self-critical and completely irreverent towards the expectations of its genre, Dream House is ambitious in its form – but also in its focus on the oft-ignored subject of domestic abuse in queer relationships. As Machado writes at one point, touching perhaps on the greatest challenge she faced in writing her memoir, "Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.” And yet, after reading Machado’s book, it seems dubious that anyone could be better equipped to create a new dialect for this neglected reality and to bring its difficult intricacies to light.
Anna Vall Navés