Which Books Should You Be Reading This Week?

Your digest of the weekend's newspaper reviews January 21/22

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks, and I’d like nothing more than to take a trip to the theatre to mark it because that is my very favourite thing to do. I saw that Zadie Smith’s THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN is back at the Kiln Theatre, Kilburn, for a limited run, and so tickets for that is what I’ve got my eye on. I’m wondering whether to take my 10-year-old daughter, or whether Chaucer’s original gobsy woman might be too lewd and crude for her. There is only one way to find out, I shall have to buy a copy of Zadie Smith’s THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN from my own bookshop, and you can do so too if you would like.

And so it was with interest that I noticed this weekend that I am not the only person with The Wife of Bath on my mind, in fact, one academic has gone so far as to write a book about her. I mean, as literary figures go, The Wife of Bath is up there, right? She needs no introduction, she is known by one name (ok, four words) like Madonna, or Kylie, but it turns out, in fact, that her name was Alison. So what else do we know about her? According to Katy Guest’s review of THE WIFE OF BATH: A BIOGRAPHY not half as much as we should, and not nearly as much as the author Marion Turner who admits that she has been ‘discussing Chaucer over cocktails for over two decades.’

“Referring to her heroine by her first name throughout, Turner tells us that ‘Alison’ was ‘the first ordinary woman in English literature.’ unlike the allegorical princesses and sorceresses who preceded her, she is a ‘mercantile, working, sexually active woman’, like many of her time.”

Which brings us full circle back to Madonna really, doesn’t it?

Anyway, last time I looked at any Chaucer I was doing my A Levels, and yes, it was The Wife of Bath and it felt impenetrable to a 16 year old, and yet Turner manages to bring it bang up to date.

“Turner explains that the plague, like the first world war, created huge opportunities for women,” Guest continues writing in Saturday’s Guardian. “They did go on pilgrimages… they also remarried… they wrote books, joined guilds and hired apprentices. The Wife of Bath, a clothmaker by trade, would have been entirely familiar to Chaucer’s audience as they listened to her story about ‘what women want.’

“The tale she tells, and the other pilgrims’ reaction to it, would also be familiar. Turner mentions that ‘no other pilgrim is interrupted as much’. Plus ça change,” writes Guest.

When I get my own bricks and mortar bookshop (and reader, I am trying ever so hard and am bursting that I can’t share some current news with you… yet), I hope we’ll re-read some of these classics together and breathe new air into them, but it is people like Turner who will help us on our way, and this book sounds fascinating to me. So if you agree, and you would like to buy THE WIFE OF BATH: A BIOGRAPHY by Marion Turner, you can do so right here.

Now, onto more women behaving badly, did you know that the big literary trend this year is ‘Witch Lit’? It feels ironic given the current state of our politics, or culture wars, however you choose to view them, or perhaps not. I took my daughter to see The Crucible at the National Theatre a few months ago and Arthur Miller’s play felt more contemporary than ever. Seeing as this digest has completely coincidentally turned into a walk-through of my A Level English Literature reading list circa 1993 (Yes, THE CRUCIBLE was on it too), if you would like to refamiliarise yourself with that text you can do so here. (For those who missed it at the National Theatre recently, the stage production is showing in cinemas up and down the country this Thursday (January 26th) and I’d thoroughly recommend it.)

But I digress, Witch Lit is this year’s thing, and in a few weeks I have a Witch Lit curation coming for you from a writer I mentioned in my newsletter a couple of week’s ago, but for now, one of the first out the traps is NOW SHE IS WITCH by Kirsty Logan and it was receiving glowing reviews in many of this weekend’s newspapers.

The review in the Observer’s New Review read: ‘Kirsty Logan’s mesmerising and evocative novel represents an imaginative triumph in this new subgenre.’

The novel’s protagonist is Lux whose mother was – wrongly – executed for being a witch, now an outcast she embarks on a journey with Else, a ‘seductive stranger who is accompanied everywhere she goes by a wolf.’

Laird Hunt reviewing in the Saturday Guardian explains: “in the harsh world of NOW SHE IS WITCH, which would seem to be some version of medieval Europe, most girls and women are possessions of men either to harm or play with. Any who assume agency are swiftly denounced and brutally dealt with, those labelled witches are tied to poles in the sea and left to slowly drown; others guilty of lesser offenses (talking too much, too loudly or indeed at all) are paraded around in scold’s bridles, torture devices deployed to humiliate.”

I mean, if they could get away with scold’s bridles now…

But it’s the Observer’s promise of ‘echoes of everything from the Brothers Grimm to Angela Carter in Logan’s deceptively simple storytelling’ that had me sold. They are not names to be thrown around lightly.

Let’s see how the reviews compare when the Witch Lit market gets a bit more crowded, but if you wanted to be one of the first to the cauldron, NOW SHE IS WITCH, sounds like a great place to start, and you can buy it here.

Next to another book that received several reviews in this weekend’s newspapers, and one which, having read them, I downloaded immediately. I do love a memoir on a dog walk, even more so when it is read by the author himself, and TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD by Don Paterson is just that.

Paterson, to those who aren’t familiar with him, is a leading UK poet, indeed, the only double winner of the TS Eliot prize, poetry editor at Picador, an English professor at St Andrews and an OBE, but his background might surprise you. Paterson grew up on the council estate ‘schemies’ of late sixties Dundee, a childhood not for the faint of heart I would imagine as council estates go.

There has been a bit of a craze in publishing recently for this ‘poverty lit’ with various writers mining for anecdotes back in their impoverished childhood and stringing them together into a book proposal, but this one is the real deal. I am already an hour and a half into it on audio (it was a long, sunny dogwalk this morning), and it delivers in both anecdote and language.

But then Paterson is a poet, who else but a poet could liken their grandma’s custard skin to a ‘trampoline’. And, though I haven’t got to this bit yet, his teenage mind trying to decipher what was going on in porn mags as difficult because ‘everyone had pubes like Afros, and it all looked like fish being sold through a hedge.’ Genius.

You’ll see below that another book I’m currently reading (and loving) at the moment is by a poet, and if those poets are turning to our grubby little prose because, let’s face it, it must be almost impossible to make a living as a poet, then I say that our books will be all the richer for it.

Reviewing TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD in the Sunday Times Culture section, John Walsh writes: “Toy Fights is a memoir in a million, yelping with real-life experience, aghast at the ways human beings manipulate each other and screamingly funny about the absurdity of our pretensions. If a finer memoir is published this year, I’ll eat my own sporan.”

You can buy TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD here.

Salman Rushdie has a new novel out (on my birthday as it turns out), and Hadley Freeman reviewing in the Sunday Times declares that is is ‘joyful.’

We were all devastated by the brutal attack on Rushdie last year, an attack that has something in common with the modern day ‘witches’ who are denounced each day on social media, just to return for a second to our Witch Lit theme, and we should never forget the importance of free speech and this is a theme Rushdie returns to in his new book VICTORY CITY.

The reader is instructed that this book is a translation of an historical epic, but it is, in fact, ‘just’ an epic fantasy novel from one of our greatest living writers who brings this story to life with his usual authority and charm. After witnessing the death of her mother, nine-year-old Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess who tells her that she will be instrumental for the rise of a great city called Bisnaga – literally Victory City. What this means is that Pampa will watch ‘her children age and die, and the folly of kings repeat themselves as history becomes “a cyclical, repetition of its crimes.”’

A book for our times, indeed.

“All this makes VICTORY CITY sound like a sad book,” writes Freeman in the Sunday Times Culture section, “when in fact it is one of Rushdie’s most joyful. The sheer pleasure he took in writing it bounces off the page, from the lush, romantic language to the larks he has with Pampa’s magical powers… if something doesn’t entirely makes sense, well, he writes with a wink, that’s magic.”

Freeman ends her review by summing up the book thus: “…this is a novel by a man who still, in his eighth decade, derives delight in his talent and all that he can do with it. The book is a total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season.”

Sounds like the perfect book to get lost in while we wait for Spring. You can buy VICTORY CITY here.

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

An addition to these digests, I thought I would tip you off with a book I am reading and this week it is ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE by Amy Key. I cannot put this book down, I found myself with twenty minutes spare in a cafe yesteday and could have kicked myself for not slipping it in my bag to keep me company. Key’s tone reminds me of Rebecca Solnit (one of my favourite writers), in fact I can’t help reading it in her voice, and the themes that she tackles are so intimate, so contemporary. I’d say this is a book for anyone whose life didn’t turn out exactly as it was sold which, let’s face it, is pretty much all of us. Perhaps it resonates for me because Key is a similar age to me and so therefore we arrived at key milestones in the same eras. She is searingly honest about the fears and neuroses we usually keep under wraps and she examines all these bits of her life that have fallen short by way of Joni Mitchell’s Blue album which feels like an original take.

It is out on April 6, but Key is one to watch, from the first two pages I knew I would go wherever she wanted to take me, and so I am going to get back to it.

If you would like to pre-order ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE as a little gift for your future Spring self, you can do so here.

• Remember you can still support THE BOOK ROOM while I am waiting to open my physical store again by shopping online. I can order ANY BOOK for you and you will receive it within 48 hours. It has never been a more important time to support both writers and independents bookshops, and by buying from me, you are doing both and contributing to a vital ecosystem.