Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Bought Because…

Thank you to Natalie Haynes for this: the author of A Thousand Ships and presenter of Stand Up for the Classics has responded to the Covid crisis with a series of videos about Ovid’s Heroides – #OvidnotCovid a series of epistolary poems written by the wives and lovers of various classical heroes: Penelope, Briseis, Medea amongst others. The women sidelined by Homer’s depiction of the Trojan War and whose voices Haynes herself, Madeline Miller and Pat Barker are seeking to find again.

So, obviously, I went online (because going out is no longer an option) to find a copy myself. There is a small part of me that wonders whether my thirty-year old GCSE Latin wound be good enough to read the original Latin…

This seems to have generated a lot of fan art and fan love over on bookstagram. And the endorsement that is involves “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” did what Charles Stross wanted it to do: it got my attention. I mean, whose attention wouldn’t that get? It seems designed to hit every saleable genre you can imagine, although I found the fronting it with “lesbian” a little uncomfortably fetishistic.

I have begun it. I have been interrupted by the release of the Women’s Prize Longlist (see below) .

There was – and is – a lot of love about this book online and it really is not the sort of book that I would normally pick up: ignore the gayness of it, the fact that it is unquestionably a romance would have usually kept it off my radar.

But I am glad that – prompted by online friends and online book groups – I did give it a go. It is so sweet and positive – and oh the emails between the American President’s dual heritage son, Alex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. There is a gentle hint at a political thriller underneath the romance, but it is only a gentle hint and all the main characters are lovely and supportive of each other. A nice antidote to the world we live in at times!

Why I wouldn’t have picked this one up otherwise: Jeanette Winterson – whose Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit I did love – has in my head been relegated to the past, to A-Level syllabus reading, to a well-meaning but not terribly relevant literary cul-de-sac. How did that happen in my head?

Well, Frankissstein turns that on its head! Wholly relevant, exploring the liminal spaces within gender and identity and consciousness, the novel is also witty and wry and deeply humane – and above all beautifully lyrically written.

Obviously riffing off Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the story alternates between that summer in Italy and modern post-Brexit Britain. Wonderful.

Why I wouldn’t have picked this one up otherwise: I had never heard of Emezi before they appeared on the Women’s Prize longlist last year, but their writing is wonderful, mythic, deeply imbedded in Nigerian Igbo culture and deeply personal.

In Freshwater, they follow the development of Ada who is – and here I struggle for the right word, which English may not have – inhabited, infected, possessed by ogbanje, spiritual Godlings attached to her soul, spirit and identity, taking their own form and identity.

Ada’s journey explores Emezi’s and she explored her gender, her autonomy over her body, her sexuality. And Emezi’s writing is so potent that I am waiting with bated breath for the release of The Death of Vivek Oji this Summer.

Why I wouldn’t have picked this one up otherwise: it is set in a prison and is heavily American. And for some reason prisons are usually a turn off for me in terms of reading. I mean, where can you go without creating a prison break or riot?

Kuchner, however, created something utterly compelling: Remy Hall, in prison for murder, is our protagonist and – alongside the stories of her fellow inmates’ lives – her story in told in a patchwork style. Her childhood, her work as a dancer in the eponymous Mars Rooms, her crime – if that is what it was -are drip fed to us, and her voice is compelling, vivid but not wholly reliable.

Why I wouldn’t have picked this one up otherwise: the author was simply unknown to me, although I learn now that she has written seventeen books, eleven of which are novels… this doesn’t bode well for reducing my TBR list!

But the novel and the writing is gorgeous! Sensual and sensory descriptions in the first part, sense-memories linking the dying mind of Tequila Laila to moments from her past. Staggeringly beautiful in the final pages and a tender evocation of the power of family – blood and water families – and friendship and identity.

Why I wouldn’t have picked this one up otherwise: the slave trade. A little like The Mars Room, the setting – a nineteenth century slave farmed sugar plantation in the Caribbean – is one which generally I find… uncomfortable.

But the setting is quickly left behind: take a look at the image on the front cover: a floating balloon ship! There is a strong element of adventure and voyage after the opening pages, taking us far beyond the sugar plantations into the Arctic and mainland America and England and Africa… and Washington Black himself is a wonderful narrative voice.

Why I wouldn’t have picked this one up otherwise: zombies.

I do not enjoy zombie stories in particular, although I did quite like Mira Grant’s Feed – although that may be because I read it whilst in hospital waiting for my daughter to be born.

M. R. Carey’s book, though, takes a fresh and different slant at the genre, giving us the narrative of one of the infected (I think it is one of those zombie books that doesn’t use the word zombie), the ten-year-old Melanie, who is not fully aware that she is anything other than a child. And as often with zombie narratives, the real threat is not the undead but the humans.

There is a perception at work that I am obsessed with dark and sinister tales, and one colleague in particular regularly points me towards Gothic tales.

And it is not untrue that I love me a good Gothic novel. Wakenhyrst is a decent, competent gripping example of the genre – but it is perhaps a little over familiar with slightly too heavy echoes of The Turn of the Screw and The Woman in Black.

This particular colleague has also urged be towards Laura Purcell, who I haven’t got round to reading yet.