Every year, I set my reading goal to 52 books… AKA a book per week. In 2023, I got to 49, I read 35 in 2022, 52 in 2021, 45 in 2020, and probably plenty before that but 2020 (#COVID) was when the obsessive documentation was in full force.
I think it’s important to keep setting the goal at 52 even when I’ve not always reached it – it’s a fun number in general, but also weeks are a lovely unit of measurement to work with when reading. More importantly, it’s a constant reminder that I’m reading for my enjoyment and not for a deadline. The total lack of punishment for not reaching 52 every year is in its own way symbolic of the fact that even when you do hit goals, it’s pointless if the person you were reading for wasn’t yourself because (unfortunately) the trophy is metaphorical.
Every year I say it and I’ll say it again: Don’t let anyone tell you what to read. Unless they’re telling you not to read. In which case, don’t hang out with them anymore. Now, settle down and let me tell you what to read:
1. Expectation (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Anna Hope
Memorable quote: “Life is still malleable and full of potential. The openings to the roads not taken have not yet sealed up. They still have time to become who they are going to be.”
Synopsis: It is a story about three women in their late 30s, though the first chapter is them at 29: living together, loving their East London life, drinking wine in the park and putting off their anxiety about the future because their friendship is an anchor that keeps the rest going. Ten years later, and they’re in very different phases of life. Their friendship is changing, faltering, maturing but also regressing, and they all yearn for parts of each other’s lives while questioning the decisions that led to their own.
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2. People Person (Fiction – Contemporary)
Memorable quote: “Even though he didn’t really know his children, he loved them all the same. Each got 20% of the love he had to offer. No more, no less.”
Synopsis: It follows the story of the five children of Cyril Pennington – only two of which have the same mother. The eldest, Nikisha (and biological older sister of Prince), was not expecting that her parting words the one and only day they all met – to call if there’s ever an issue – to be taken too seriously. Especially not something as big as what Dimple asks of her. Nonetheless, Nikisha recruits all the siblings – who better to deal with a life or death situation than “family”?
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3. A Class Act (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Rob Beckett
Memorable quote: “I know what you are thinking: Is he the real deal or is he secretly a middle-class bloke pretending to be working class in order to have a career in comedy?”
Synopsis: Comedian Rob Beckett’s memoir (which, by the way, he wrote without a ghostwriter) is subtitled, “Life as a working-class man in a middle-class world”, which paints a pretty clear picture of what you can expect from it, leaving it to me to colour in with a bit more detail.
Audiobook: I listened to this as an audiobook, which Rob Beckett narrates, making it all the more personal. I think that I’m a lot more forgiving when listening to an audiobook narrated by the author, which you’ll learn throughout this list. When reading, for me at least, it’s easy to fully submerge and forget I’m reading someone else’s experiences. As a result, I project my own feelings and experiences onto the page and absorb the information accordingly. However, when listening to the experience directly from the author, I am much less judgemental and I am able to clearly separate what they have done from what I would have done. Perhaps it’s an ego issue on my part, perhaps it’s natural. Either way, there are very few audiobooks on this list that are not narrated by their authors (nor are there any that aren’t memoirs/non-fiction drawing on personal experience), because I’ve become so passionate about what a difference it makes. I also just adore reading fiction from a page.
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4. How To Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong (Non-Fiction – Political commentary)
By James O’Brien
Memorable quote: “Despite the title of this book, it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.”
Synopsis: James O’Brien hosts a talk radio show for LBC where he encourages people to phone in with their opinions on London and the UK’s politics. As such, O’Brien listens daily to people ‘blaming hard-working immigrants for stealing their jobs while scrounging benefits, and pointing their fingers at the EU and feminists for destroying Britain’. In this book, he engages with core misconceptions in British politics and shares some of the issues he has debated over the years.
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5. Back Story (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By David Mitchell
Memorable quote: “A society where you’re not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that’s being ushered in.”
Synopsis: This memoir is packed tightly with plenty of laugh-out-loud anecdotes, a couple of surprising ones, a great deal of hard work, some meticulously-formed rants and political commentary.
Audiobook: Listening to this felt like Mitchell was sitting in front of me, telling me about his life in the style of an episode of Would I Lie To You. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Looking back, this was the exact point in the year where I decided that I would solely be using my audiobook subscription for celebrity memoirs.
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6. Wishful Drinking (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Carrie Fisher
Memorable quote: “One of the things that baffles me … is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls.”
Synopsis: Fisher has had a rather remarkable life, which saw her survive everything from addiction to manic depression, with electric shock therapy in between, which erased a lot of her memories. She has never known life outside of the spotlight, and that was the case way before she was cast, aged 19, as Princess Leia in 1977 (which, by the way, was not even her first role). She is also super hilarious.
Audiobook: Owing to the fact that this is based off of Fisher’s one-woman-show, the audiobook is fabulous, as is she. Her experiences are much more real and impactful in her own voice and her dark sense of humour really shines through, which is even more poignant after her death.
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7. A Spell of Good Things (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Ayòbámi Adébáyò
Memorable quote: “What is not yours is not yours o, even if you marry the person that has that thing. If it is not yours, it is not yours o.”
Synopsis: A Spell of Good Things tells the story of two Nigerias. One is of the affluent, educated elite. The impoverished other exists not so much alongside the first as interwoven with it.
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8. In Memoriam (Fiction – Historical, WWI)
By Alice Winn
Memorable quote: “You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.”
Synopsis: The story starts with extracts: first, from The Preshutian, the public-school newspaper of the elite Preshute College, from June 1914; second, from the London Gazette in August 1914, announcing the state of war. The third, again from The Preshutian, takes us to October of that year and lists the students killed in action. What follows is both heartbreaking and life-affirming as we follow Gaunt and Ellwood to war, lovers at not just the wrong time, but in the wrong century.
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9. Chasing Marian (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Amy Heydenrych, Qarnita Loxton, Pamela Power, and Gail Schimmel
Memorable quote: “Four strangers, two cities, one chance online meeting.”
Synopsis: Amy Heydenrych, Qarnita Loxton, Pamela Power and Gail Schimmel are all excellent South African authors whose books I’ve loved over the years. They were meant to meet Marian Keyes at the Franschhoek Literary Festival but then, well, #COVID. So, they decided to write a book about four people who connect through a mutual love of Marian’s books and a joint effort to try to meet her at the festival.
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10. A Flaw in the Design (Fiction – Psychological Thriller)
By Nathan Oates
Memorable quote: “There was still time to turn and walk out, pretend he’d never come.”
Synopsis: The mysterious death of Gil’s sister and high-flying brother-in-law flips his and his wife’s rather ordinary life on its head as they are charged with his nephew, a troubled 17-year-old called Matthew, whose dangerous behaviour with their daughter seven years prior resulted in family estrangement. Now, they have no choice but to welcome him into their family and hope for the best.
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11. My Year of Not Getting Sh*tfaced (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Pamela Power
Memorable quote: “I think meditation and saying ‘no’ more often is going to help me, along with feeling it’s okay for people not to agree with me or like me.”
Synopsis: The latest contribution to the South African literary scene by Pamela Power is her memoir about taking back control of her relationship with alcohol. While Pam hasn’t given up alcohol altogether, My Year of Not Getting Sh*tfaced tracks her journey from giving up alcohol entirely (after some of the worst hangxiety I’ve ever heard about), to a place where she can enjoy it in moderation.
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12. The Heart Goes Last (Fiction – Speculative)
Memorable quote: “If you do bad things for reasons you’ve been told are good, does it make you a bad person?”
Synopsis: The system appears to be simple for the Consilience project – successful applicants are given a house and a life they could never have achieved on the outside. In exchange, they spend a month-on/month-off in Positron Prison. In the alternate months, Alternates leave the prison and enter the home. Half the housing, free prison labour, suburban utopia? As if, this is Margaret Atwood…
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13. I’m Glad My Mom Died (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Jennette McCurdy
Memorable quote: “Why do we romanticise the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them? Especially moms. They’re the most romanticised of anyone.”
Synopsis: McCurdy is perhaps best known as Sam from Nickelodeon-sensations ‘iCarly’ and ‘Sam and Cat’ (where none other than Ariana Grande started out), but she started her acting career, somewhat unwillingly and in a desperate attempt to please her mother, aged 8. What followed was an intensely abusive mother-daughter relationship and a severe eating disorder.
Audiobook: Again, what could have been a memoir read at arm’s length was more like one shared at a sleepover with McCurdy’s narration. She has suffered so much, and the way she tells her story helps highlight just how strong she has had to be through her life and specifically since her mom died.
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14. This Ragged Grace (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Octavia Bright
Memorable quote: “I like this idea that as we evolve, somewhere deep within us remains a skeletal trace of what came before that builds up in layers, a sediment of the self.”
Synopsis: Though I haven’t read a huge amount on the topic of alcohol addiction and the subsequent topic of abstinence, I’ve read enough to really feel that This Ragged Grace is unique. It goes beyond the flesh, the physical act of giving up alcohol as well as the bodily side effects, and sucks out the marrow – the psychological impact of chemical dependency that feels more like a personal relationship than an illness.
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15. The Art of Coming Undone (Poetry)
Memorable quote: “I have a theory that no poem sounds like a bad poem, provided that the knowing poet has taken time to practice reading the verse aloud, visualising the valleys of syllables in each word, breathing in just the right corners, following the line breaks like a trail through the woods.”
Synopsis: Christie Collins’s first full-length collection of poems, which includes artwork by Dutch artist Erna Kuik.
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16. Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
Memorable quote: “True friendship is a raft in the ever-changing waters of life.”
Synopsis: Friendship is a good thing – a healthy and necessary part of living a balanced and meaningful life. However, Elizabeth Day realised this was not what she was getting from a lot of the relationships which she would have previously called friendships. She reflects on how she was confusing surface level popularity with friendship, which she suspects might originate in her childhood where she was friend-less.
Audiobook: As the book is interspersed with interview transcripts, I suspect it’s more engaging to listen to than to read. Day has a soothing voice and her deeply personal stories sink in just that bit more deeply when physically heard.
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17. Leap In (Non-Fiction – Sport Memoir)
By Alexandra Heminsley
Memorable quote: “The grit was in the oyster now. It was the sea versus me.”
Synopsis: ‘A Woman, Some Waves, and the Will to Swim’ is the byline of this book, which does a good job in setting the reader up for Alexandra Heminsley’s biography. I have taken a deep dive (excuse the pun) into sea swimming and particularly cold water swimming recently, so have really been lapping up (sorry again) opportunities to read about other people’s swimming journeys.
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18. This Must Be The Place (Fiction – Contemporary)
Memorable quote: “We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.”
Synopsis: Whatever magical literary spell O’Farrell cast on me in Hamnet was equally powerful in This Must Be The Place, a saga which for the most part tracks the lives of protagonists Claudette Well, a film star who many assumed dead after her mysterious disappearance, and her husband Daniel Sullivan, whose life is significantly less high profile but almost as dramatic.
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19. Queenie (Fiction – Contemporary)
Memorable quote: “Maybe if all ah we had learned to talk about our troubles, we wouldn’t carry so much on our shoulders all the way to the grave.”
Synopsis: The reader joins Queenie on a turbulent year of being single, which is filled with a lot of sex, relatively little satisfaction, and arguably negative affection – apart from from her closest friends, who reveal themselves when she needs them the most (or don’t).
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20. We Used To Live Here (Fiction – Thriller)
By Daniel Hurst
Memorable quote: “But that is just my imagination, and a person can imagine all sorts of things if they take the time to just be creative.”
Synopsis: The story follows Steph and Grant, who, soon after moving into their ‘forever home’, meet Ken and Julie, an old couple who used to live in the house. Steph and Grant soon discover, from word on the street and some obsessive Googling, that Ken and Julie once had a son who mysteriously disappeared from the house.
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21. Rise (Non-Fiction – Sport Memoir)
By Siya Kolisi
Memorable quote: “A good sportsman exercises self-control. He plays the ball and not the man.”
Synopsis: Springbok captain (and World Cup 2023 champion, GO BOKKE) Siya Kolisi has written his life story in this inspiring autobiography, sharing his journey from the township of Zwide in the Eastern Cape to leading South Africa in its historic third World Cup victory, the first black captain in South Africa’s 128 years of rugby.
Audiobook: I made an exception for my rule of author narration because this has been narrated by a beloved South African actor, Treasure Tshabalala. I confess that I usually listen to audiobooks on a faster speed because my brain cannot handle X1 speed, but Tshabala’s deep baritone was too powerful to speed up. I listened to every word enraptured.
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22. The House of Doors (Fiction – Historical, Straits Settlements of Penang)
By Tan Twan Eng
Memorable quote: “He is married to China. He loves her the most, and he’s loved her the longest.”
Synopsis: In the prologue, we meet the widowed Lesley Hamlyn on a sheep farm in the South African veldt in 1947. Lesley accepts a delivery of an inscribed book, written by an old friend of her husbands who became a close confidant during his stay when the couple were living in the Straits Settlements of Penang. Flicking through, the writing immediately transports her 1921 Malaya. Thereafter, Twan Eng transports the reader there too.
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23. The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Kara Gnodde
Memorable quote: “The feeling you have of wanting me, of not wanting to share me? That feeling is love.”
Synopsis: The story follows two protagonists – a brother and sister, Art and Mimi – who lost their parents in a tragic, unpredictable way that most people wouldn’t expect. Except that Art did expect it; as a mathematician, he always spots the patterns. So when Mimi says she wants to find love, Art agrees to help her on the condition that she follows a mathematical formula of odds.
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24. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Non-Fiction – Sport Memoir)
Memorable quote: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
Synopsis: Murakami is running us (ha) through his running and writing career, which is rather remarkable – the man runs every day, including a marathon every year, and has written 34 books. Through this, he also runs us through his life.
Audiobook: I listened to this while doing Couch to 5K, which was simultaneously motivating and embarrassing given the lengths Murakami runs compared with the 30 second sprints I was doing. Again, I made an exception to the rule of author narration, given the language barrier, and also because of the running-associated intentions behind my choice to listen to this particular memoir. I admittedly didn’t love the narrator, but it was still worth the listen.
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25. Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? (Fiction – Short Stories)
By Bryony Rheam
Memorable quote: “Whatever happened to Rick Astley? She imagined that he was happily married with children. A record producer, perhaps? That was the usual way with singers, wasn’t it?”
Synopsis: These short stories set in Zimbabwe cover a time span of around 20 years, from the turbulent hyperinflation that started in the late nineties, to the modern day, where most people know of at least one person who has emigrated.
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26. Pleasure Beach (Fiction – Abstract Contemporary)
By Helen Palmer
Memorable quote: “Language’s progression mirrors the structure of desire. The. Inability. To. Ever. Get. To. The. Thing. Itself. But. The. Eternal. Desire. To. Try.”
Synopsis: Palmer crafts an altogether fantastic queer love story from a single day on the Blackpool seafront circa 1999: an impressive feat, an ambitious homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and an exemplar of what literary modernism is all about.
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27. The Midnight Library (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Matt Haig
Memorable quote: “It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers.”
Synopsis: Nina is unhappy, dissatisfied and living a life of what she considers to be increasingly little meaning. A series of bad events and a lot of pills lead her to The Midnight Library, where she encounters her old school librarian and shelves full of different ways her life could have panned out.
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28. The Promise (Fiction – Historical, Apartheid South Africa)
By Damon Galgut
Memorable quote: “Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.”
Synopsis: This family saga is set between 1986 and 2018, from the perspective of an Afrikaans family in Pretoria and set around key family funerals. At the start, Amor hears her father make a promise on her mother’s death bed: he will give Salome, their maid, the deeds to the nearby house in which Salome has lived through her years of service to them. Amor doesn’t understand that at the time, this can’t happen – not that her father had any intention of keeping the promise, evident decades later when the family are still fighting about it.
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29. When I Sing, Mountains Dance (Fiction – Abstract Contemporary)
By Irena Solà
Memorable quote: “’Nothing lasts very long,’ the mountains say chillingly, ‘Not a thing. Not stillness. Nor calamity. Nor the sea. Nor your ugly little children.’”
Synopsis: Each chapter follows on from the previous, and before you tell me that’s the point of chapters, let me clarify: We start by reading from the point of view of the thunder, which strikes a man on the hillside. Next, we experience it from the man’s perspective. Thereafter, his wife’s. Her children. Their lovers. And so it goes, with us totally absorbing the highs and lows of these interconnected lives in the isolated summits of the Pyrenees.
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30. Humble Pie (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Gordon Ramsay
Memorable quote: “When I think about myself, I still see a little boy who is desperate to escape, and keen to please. I just keep going, moving as far away as possible from where I began. Work is who I am, who I want to be.“
Synopsis: All in all, Humble Pie has everything that makes me appreciate a celebrity memoir: the author’s narration paired with it being written exactly how they actually speak (as opposed to how their ghostwriter speaks), a detailed unpacking of childhood trauma, the ‘rise to the top’ process, and the ‘view from the top’ experience – although where Humble Pie ends is not even close to Ramsay’s apex. Whatever you think of the superstar chef now, you will be humbled by how hard his early life was, how relentlessly he has worked, and how much he’s made of himself despite his circumstances.
Audiobook: This is a short book, so I was able to listen to it from start to finish on a solo drive from Brighton to Wigan to visit my family (ie about 5 hours). By the end of the car journey, it felt like I’d had company the whole way – one that might’ve called me an Idiot Sandwich if he’d seen how I handle driving and laughing at the same time. If it weren’t for Ramsay’s narration, I’m not sure I’d have enjoyed this, but the familiarity of his voice grounded/contextualised it nicely.
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31. In the Absence of Men (Fiction – Historical, WWI)
By Phillippe Besson
Memorable quote: “I want to experience only the moment, not the looming certainty that I will lose that moment”
Synopsis: The story, set in 1916, is told from the perspective of an upper class 16-year-old boy called Vincent, who is just young enough to not be at war. That’s not to say that the war isn’t affecting him and the world in which he now inhabits which, by and large, is absent of men. More than that, though, is the fact that Arthur, the 21-year-old son of one of Vincent’s family’s servants, would likely never have confessed his love to Vincent had it not been for the war.
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32. Ordinary Human Failings (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Megan Nolan
Memorable quote: “When she let herself pore over memories, she was hawkish”
Synopsis: Mia, a very young child, is found dead in a council estate in London, and the evidence suggests it was the 10-year-old child of a family of Irish immigrants, Lucy Green. A fiendish journalist with little regard for the humans behind the scoop picks up the story, and begins a feverish attempt to sensationalise every element of the occurrence so that his readers (who he dubs ‘peasants’) are suitably satisfied by the juicy lives of other ‘peasants’. The undercurrents of the novel, however, are arguably more morbid than the plot – what led to this death?
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33. Bad Influence (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Megan Nolan
Memorable quote: Behind the scenes of being an influencer… “The good, the bad and the instagrammable”.
Synopsis: It of course makes sense that Forbat has such a knack for storytelling, given that she is well known as a podcaster, comedian and influencer – a trifecta which famously keep their audiences hooked. The memoir is, for the most part, about the latter (influencer) and how it led to the former (podcaster, comedian).
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34. Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods (Non-Fiction – Political Commentary)
By Otegha Uwagba
Memorable quote: “I’ve spent my entire life treading around white people’s feelings. My job is to write the truth.”
Synopsis: This personal essay by Otegha Uwagba was written and published in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, which left society at a historical turning point where denying the consistent and ultimately life-threatening reality of institutional racism was no longer possible.
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35. The Catcher in the Rye (Fiction – Modern Classic)
By JD Salinger
Memorable quote: “I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”
Synopsis: JD Salinger has managed to pack in so much depth of character into Holden Caulfield, a teenaged boy dealing with a lot of nothing with the fervor and self-importance of many a teenager. Is everything and everyone in his bougie private school and New York “phony”? Certainly from Holden’s perspective, which seems to be a pretty apt byproduct of his inability to find meaning in his life. Then again, he’s a teenager, of course he’s not going to have it all figured out… but is that not adolescence in a nutshell?
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36. The Woman in Me (Non-Fiction – Memoir)
By Britney Spears
Memorable quote: “There have been so many times when I was scared to speak up because I was afraid somebody would think I was crazy.”
Synopsis: Icon Britney Spears speaks up about her life now that she is no longer under the conservatorship of her father. Whatever your take is on the turning points of her life, I think one thing is clear: she deserved this opportunity to share her story in her words. IT’S HER PREROGATIVE (sorry).
Audiobook: Clearly, there are enough exceptions to my rule that it’s maybe not that much of a rule. Britney didn’t narrate this, BUT she did narrate the introduction, where she explains why she chose none other than Michelle Williams to narrate it on her behalf. Another memoir which was a necessary listen rather than read – thought-provoking but by no means literary. I don’t listen to podcasts, so this sort of fills that spot in my life.
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37. Good Scammer (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Guy Kennaway
Memorable quote: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him to scam you feed him for a lifetime.”
Synopsis: Clive ‘Bangaz’ Thompson is somewhat of a Jamaican Robin Hood in Campbell Cove, though others might just call him a phone scammer. Many wouldn’t know what to make of him, which is possibly part of the reason why he approaches Willy Loxley-Gordon, a local author, to write his story.
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38. Really Good, Actually (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Monica Heisey
Memorable quote: “It doesn’t have to be some big conspiracy. It doesn’t have to be special. It can be just bad.”
Synopsis: Maggie is having a bloody horrible time after her divorce, but also slowly alienating herself from her friends as they start to distance themselves from her self-indulgent and self-destructive misery. AND YET. The humour is perfect. This book is so, so funny.
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39. The Satsuma Complex (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Bob Mortimer
Memorable quote: “My mum used to tell me that I was blessed with a good imagination and should use it to my advantage—to relieve any boredom and inject perspective and joy into my life.”
Synopsis: It all starts when the main character Gary (who I’d argue is the pretty thinly disguised subconscious of Bob Mortimer), goes for a pint in South London with an old work acquaintance, Brendan. Little does Gary know, Brendan will be killed that night and he’ll find himself inextricably wound up in the drama. Classic Bob… I mean Gary.
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40. The Road to Wigan Pier (Non-Fiction – Political Commentary)
Memorable quote: “It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.”
Synopsis: The picture painted of Wigan is grim, but it’s not really a picture of Wigan so much as one of all industrial Northern towns brought to their knees by not just the war but a criminally unequal society. I don’t believe anyone could have read the chapters about mine labour at the time and not found themselves simultaneously deeply respecting what a gruelling yet utterly essential job it was, and squirming at the conditions made so much worse by government.
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41. Happy People Are Annoying (Non-Fiction – Celebrity Memoir)
By Josh Peck
Memorable quote: “You’ll probably get what you wanted, but by then you won’t want it anymore.”
Synopsis: From his disordered eating as a child which led to obesity, to his alcohol and drug addiction in his adulthood which ended in AA and recovery, child actor turned influencer cum adult actor Josh Peck has been through so much and his memoir is filled with so many life lessons.
Audiobook: If you watched Drake & Josh as a child like I did, Peck’s narration is the most thrilling throwback. It’s so sad that the beloved goofball I was hearing wasn’t having quite as lovely a childhood as I was. But his optimism and outlook is inspiring.
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42. Orange World (Fiction – Short Stories)
By Karen Russell
Memorable quote: “The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it.”
Synopsis: I like to imagine short story writers in a room overflowing with sticky notes covered in words, from which they have to select only a few in order to tell the story. Russell has plucked out the distilled core of every story and given the reader the task of imagining what the other sticky notes said. It is a joy to do – especially when Russell has arguably picked the weirdest ones for us to work with as a base.
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43. I’m A Fan (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Sheena Patel
Memorable quote: “Perhaps I am just like everyone else and my disappointment is desiring to be special but not being special at all.”
Synopsis: I think many among us have at some stage been trapped in an obsessive online spiral. Whether clicking through an ex’s new girlfriend’s Facebook profile, or watching the ex’s Instagram story via a friend’s account so they don’t know it’s you, it’s a behavior that is captured remarkably well through both the staccato prose structure as well as the main character’s experience with an irresistible, transparent, married narcissist.
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44. Happy (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Celina Baljeet Basra
Memorable quote: “I feel confident that I have reached a level of excellence in European radish farming. Hence, I want to widen my skill set and actively seek new challenges by exploring other aspects of farming in Italy. This is why I am applying for the open position as a shepherd on the island of Sardinia.”
Synopsis: In a world that seems largely motivated by intolerance at the moment, Happy the book (and Happy the character) managed to simultaneously shine a light on the injustices faced by illegal immigrants (many of whom, to the best of their knowledge, followed the rules), while also providing a much needed tonic to the negativity we so often face – particularly if passionate about this topic.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Foyles | Amazon
45. Between You and Me (Fiction – Contemporary)
By Joanna Horton
Memorable quote: “Sometimes Mari tried to imagine her life without Elisabeth, and what came to her was a disturbing sense of formlessness and lack, random elements that added up to nothing.”
Synopsis: The complexity and wavering devotion of female friendship, love triangles, post-arts degree existentialism, romantic relationships with age-related power dynamics, a cast of dislikable and selfish characters, the intoxicating recklessness of being young, the intoxicating recklessness of being old… Between You and Me has the whole lot.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Amazon
46. Scrappy Little Nobody (Non-Fiction – Celebrity Memoir)
By Anna Kendrick
Memorable quote: “I gave up on being nice. I started putting more value on other qualities instead: passion, bravery, intelligence, practicality, humour, patience, fairness, sensitivity.”
Synopsis: This is Anna Kendrick’s memoir. This is possibly better categorised as a series of personal essays than a traditional memoir, compartmentalised by themes like childhood, her stage career, her romantic life, her film career and overall, her rise to fame from a scrappy little nobody.
Audiobook: I’ll admit that other than Twilight memes and Pitch Perfect, I didn’t even realise how much she had done before listening, let alone that she’d been on Broadway, which is always a pleasant surprise. The familiarity of her voice teeters on being irritating but satisfying and ultimately she presents as funny, self-deprecating and clever, three of my favourite qualities in a person.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Amazon
47. Twilight (Fiction – Young Adult)
By Stephenie Meyer
Memorable quote: “Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved.”
Synopsis: What started as a sorta-joke in book club sparked a curiosity which resulted in a burning desire to re-read Twilight, with the aim of deciding whether we thought reading it as tweens (apologies, I do hate that word but it’s basically Twilight themed and I love that) helped shape our perspective of romance as adults. I’m not going to suggest it’s a literary masterpiece (and by many accounts, grammar included, it’s not), but I also refuse to slam it. Quite frankly, anything that gets a teenager dutifully reading a 756-page book (#BreakingDawn) on their holidays is a success in my eyes.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Foyles | Amazon
48. The Invisible Gorilla (Non-Fiction -Psychology)
By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Memorable quote: “We easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we understand and can explain things that we really know very little about.”
Synopsis: This is based on the somewhat infamous experiment conducted at Harvard University where, by concentrating on counting how many times a basketball was passed in a short clip, half of the people who watched the video missed a person walk across the screen in a gorilla suit. From this, an exploration of the ways in which intuition deceives us.
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Amazon
49. Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit (Fiction – Short Stories)
By PG Wodhouse
Memorable quote: “Does one desire the Yule-tide spirit, sir?”
Synopsis: In an increasingly insane world, I found these Christmas-ish short stories silly, cheeky and charming, which I imagine was also what sparked their success at their time of writing, given that his narratives take place largely in a pre-war society despite the tumultuous political era Woodhouse lived through. A great final read of the year!
BUY THE BOOK: Waterstones | Foyles | Amazon
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