Reading Review 2014

For me, 2014 was a pretty respectable reading year. I achieved my Goodreads Challenge of finishing forty books, I discovered some exciting new authors (especially Helen Oyeyemi and Evie Wyld), and I even managed to make it through some non-fiction. On my travels, I had the time to tackle a few tomes (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch), whereas later in the year when I was busier I sped through shorter novels (Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Graham Greene’s Doctor Fischer of Geneva). With only one or two exceptions, I enjoyed everything I picked up – I certainly identified some all-time favourite reads. So below are just a few of the books that especially stood out for me last year.

Best non-fiction: Gossip From the Forest by Sarah Maitland. Maitland's exploration of Britain’s forests is fascinating in itself, but the magic really happens when she connects natural history with the history of fairy tales, and uses what she’s learned to inform her own creative writing.

Best short story collection: The Rental Heart and Other Fairy Tales by Kirsty Logan. There’s been a lot of buzz about Logan’s debut collection - rightly so, as far as I’m concerned, for her short stories are dark, dreamlike and beautifully-crafted. I devoured them all in just a couple of sittings, not because they were easy reads, but because – like faerie –Logan’s world was difficult to leave.

Best children's/young adult book: More Than This by Patrick Ness. I’m reluctant to choose Ness for this because I picked him last year too, but his writing is so bold and unique that I simply can’t resist him. I’m also reluctant to say too much about this story, because the way it unravels is completely unpredictable and best appreciated without so much as a sniff of spoilers.

Best classic: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. Why haven’t I read this before? It really is a great book, mainly because Anne Shirley is such a fantastic character. As my pal Joely Badger pointed out, Anne is very much a contemporary of Richmal Crompton's (Just) William, in both her earnestness and her knack for getting into trouble. A lovely read.

Most disappointing book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. I'm a big fan of Gaiman's work, especially Stardust, Neverwhere and his short stories. His ideas are big, his writing is clever, but I thought the plot of this one was rather muddled, even dull.

Best reread: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and 3/4 by Sue Townsend. After the sad news of his creator’s passing, I revisited Adrian Mole last year, and found his adventures just as bittersweet, just as awkward, and just as likely to cause ugly snorts of laughter as they ever were.

Best book: The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine. I’m not sure where to start with this one. In fact, at some point in the near future, I’d like to write a proper review of it, because Alameddine has given me such a lot to think about - both as a reader and a writer. So for now I’ll try to keep it short. Hakawati is the Arabic word for “storyteller”, and this is a book about stories. On the surface, it tells the tale of Osama, the grandson of a hakawati who returns from the US to his Lebanese homeland after the civil war. But woven within that story are countless others, ranging from the ‘real-life’ tales of Osama’s family to the fairy tales, folk tales and even religious tales told by the hakawati himself. It’s such a rich and complex structure, so inventive and entertaining, that you can practically sense Alameddine’s glee as he tests how far he can push the boundaries of his novel. I thought it was superb, and there’s no doubt it’s the best book I read last year.

I would, however, also like to mention The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, for they too completely captivated me. Now I write this, I wonder whether I enjoyed these books so much because each of their authors – like Alameddine – approached their respective plots in an original, playful way: Miller’s was a retelling of the Iliad, Fowler revealed hers from middle to beginning to end, Wyld related half of hers backwards, while Atkinson told different versions of hers again and again.

So I suppose, if I've learned anything from my reading habits of 2014, it’s that I like a juicy structure; a book that not only tells a good story, but tells it in the best possible way. It’s a discovery that I’ll be keeping at the back of my mind when deciding what to read in the future, and also one I hope will give me more focus when it comes to my writing.

Five Female Characters

A few weeks ago, on March 8th, it was International Women's Day, and the internet was flooded with inspiring articles and stories by and about women all over the world. For my own response to IWD, I thought about writing a post on all the real-life women I admire, many of whom are writers, but then I decided it would be fun to pay tribute to the pretend ones instead. It was actually a harder job than I anticipated, narrowing the list down, but in the end I decided that the following five characters are the ones with whom I have most connected – and have most influenced me as a writer.

Hermione Granger

'I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could have been all killed - or worse, expelled.'

       - JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Like so many, I grew up with Hermione, and what I always loved about her was, although she is famously clever and bookish, she is also brave, vulnerable, emotional, and stands up unapologetically for what she believes in. Before Harry Potter, I hadn’t encountered such a well-rounded character in a children’s book - certainly not a female one. I believe JK Rowling herself sums it up nicely in this (very interesting) discussion on the women in the series, when she says, 'In creating Hermione, I felt I created a girl who was a heroine. She wasn’t sexy, nor was she the girl in glasses who was entirely sexless. Do you know what I mean? She’s a real girl.'

Lyra Belaqua/Silvertongue

… Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian daemons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound.

 - Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy contains the book that made me want to be a writer (Northern Lights) and the first book that broke my heart (The Amber Spyglass). Much of the story's power is due to its central character, Lyra, a prickly girl of twelve whose special skill is lying. I too was twelve when I read the first book and I had never encountered a personality like Lyra's before – in fact, I’m not sure I have since. She is perhaps my favourite character of all time; fierce and loving in equal measure, she remains achingly human in the face of remarkable situations and fantastical worlds.

Emma Woodhouse

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

- Jane Austen, Emma

The eponymous heroine of Austen’s Emma is a Marmite figure: you either love her or hate her. Generally, I find people much prefer either Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennett or Persuasion’s Anne Elliot. Indeed, even Austen herself didn’t anticipate anyone warming to Emma, saying, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.' It is true, Miss Woodhouse is spoilt, selfish, even cruel,  but she is also witty, confident, loving and determined to better herself. To me, Emma, is loveable precisely because of the flaws in her character and the way she comes to recognise them.

‘Offred’

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something. 

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Atwood's best novel, set in a dystopian society in which groups of women are essentially used as breeding machines, is narrated by the character of ‘Offred’, the titular handmaid in question. As the book progresses, 'Offred' quietly begins to rebel against the system not with her fists, but with her use of language, which gives her a means of mental - and perhaps even physical - escape. I read The Handmaid’s Tale at exactly the right time: I was seventeen years old, in my last year at school, and just about to go out into the world and discover what it was to be a woman. Atwood's words, through 'Offred', showed me a character with a core of strength not immediately visible, and taught me how language could be wielded as a weapon against injustice.

Sophie Fevvers

'And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I.'

- Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

To be honest, I could have picked any number of Carter's heroines for this spot, as so many of them are bawdy and wicked and completely irresistible. But I picked Fevvers, the Cockney circus performer who allegedly hatched from an egg and sprouted wings, because - outside of The Bloody Chamber - she was Carter's first female character I encountered, and I loved her. After all, why should a woman not have wings (or does she)? Why should she necessarily tell the truth (or is she)? Carter initially seized me with her fairy tales, but she keeps me coming back for more and more with fantastical and contradictory characters like Fevvers.

So there you have them: five women who are clever yet vulnerable, fierce yet loving, selfish yet well-meaning, quiet yet rebellious, impossible yet oh so real, and so many other things at the same time. And there are many more of them, of course (I'd love to hear other people's lists/thoughts). Having read an awful lot of classics featuring the angel/monster problem (looking especially at you, Dickens), I think it's so important to take stock of how far fictional females have come. In this way, it's quite apt to celebrate them for International Women's Day: their progress has, after all, reflected that of their real-life counterparts.