Friday 18 January 2019

52 weeks 52 books – My Year in Literature


At the start of January 2018, I was in a bit of a funk, feeling that familiar combination of mid-winter-blues-post-holiday-come-down coupled with a slight cold-y under the weather sensation. You know the one. And so I made a beeline for a bookshop. I come from a family of keen readers and books have always been a huge part of my life, and so it is natural for me to turn to them when I am feeling a little low or introspective. 

I had recently read that Mark Zuckerberg had pledged to read a book a week and I thought I would buy a couple of books and see if I could match his reading rate. I duly purchased a couple of comedic tomes – Animal by stand-up comic and actor Sarah Pascoe, and Nomad ‘ghostwritten’ for fictional character Alan Partridge. These, along with The Big Push by feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe, kicked off my literary year.

Some of the books were significant works of literature, ones regarded as classics such as Great Expectations (okay), The Grapes of Wrath (brilliant), and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (misogynistic pro-establishment masquerading as counterculture). Some were light hearted, though probably not enough of them given the challenges of the year. Many of them were consciously or unconsciously feminist, which got my total of female authors up quite significantly, though still not 50% which is something I want to redress in the future. Many of them weighed in at the hundreds of pages long, but the shortest book was a mediocre one called It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be by Paul Arden. If I’m honest, I read it in order to boost my numbers at a point when I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the full 52. I also read the Ladybird book of Brexit but at a whopping 200 words or whatever it was, I left it off the list.

I read fantasy, sci-fi, history, comedy, erotica, drama, booker prize winning, classics and mercifully little pap. I read things that made me want to throw the book in question at the wall. Ken Kesey - you have a lot to answer for. One Hundred Years of Solitude should be entitled One Hundred Years to Read This Book. I read things that made me cry and things that made me laugh out loud and things that made me want to stop reading because they were so horrible. Namely the description of Waris Dirie’s genital mutilation in Desert Flower, and the harrowing real events of Operation Lighthouse, the book written by the brothers who survived abuse and the murder of their beloved sister and mother at the hands of their narcissistic father. But I read every single word, no matter how difficult, because these were people’s lived experiences and we, as compassionate human beings, should not turn away from them.
My list of 100 fiction books from the TES

More stats. Quite unwittingly, although I made a conscious effort to read both fiction and non-fiction, I ended up reading them in an exact 1:1 ratio! My total of female authors came to 22.5 out of 52 or 43% of all books (the half is because one book was co-written by a female and male author). However, of those female authors, most were in the non-fiction section. Because I was consciously reading a lot of classics in order to cross them off my dog-eared list of 100 books all teenagers should have read by the time they finish their GCSEs according to the Times Ed, most of my fiction was written by men and about men and boys. In fact, of 26 fiction books, only 10 were written by women even though I was really trying to read books written by women! I am reminded of my own article about women’s writing as an undervalued and underexposed medium even in today’s supposedly ‘enlightened’ times.

Any surprises? I enjoyed Mark Twain more than I thought I would. And I learned about public speaking , the menstrual cycle, and how to cultivate good gut bacteria. I also tried the fast diet but that’s a blog post all of its own, probably titled ‘Hangry’.

Top book of the year was If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie, just because I have never read anything quite like it before, with its inspirational mix of female- centred Celtic myths and personal story of finding one’s place in a world that devalues women and the qualities of nurturance, cooperation and preservation of nature. This is the text that probably had the most profound effect on me as it further helped to raise my consciousness and confidence. And I will never forget The Grapes of Wrath. I really didn’t like Of Mice and Men so I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for this much more sizeable work by Steinbeck, but I was pleasantly surprised at how compelling it was. Shout outs also to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontё and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, though reading Austen’s Emma was a chore.

One of the nicest things about my year in literature was the way in which I acquired books. Many of them were borrowed from friends, even from my students, some from family, some from book swaps at the local community centre, some from the library, though I purchased several myself.  I deliberately tried to get them from other sources as this would keep costs down, but it also had the added bonus of creating discussions around shared books, some where our opinions differed quite sharply, and others where we found something similar to love.

Rather memorably, I finished my 52 book challenge at about 50 minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve having imbibed some substances which somewhat interfered with my focus and understanding of the work. I will fondly cherish the memory of Germaine Greer’s no nonsense prose dancing around the page with only a few minutes to go before entering 2019.

I admit that during the course of the year there were times when I wished I could just read without the deadline of December 31st looming on the horizon. I am a keen reader by any metric but the target of reading a book a week sometimes seemed impossible as life had other ideas. However, the challenge had me reaching for the written word more often than a screen or remote control than otherwise. I firmly believe that this conscious action gave me more of a calm, focused mind than if I’d passively reached for tech to entertain me. And in an otherwise testing year with plenty of painful truths emerging, books gave me solace and support as well as plenty of painful truths of their own.

And as for 2019, I have joined an online book group that only suggests a minimum of 12 books for the year in all sorts of interesting categories. After reading in isolation, and pushing myself in quite the literary marathon, this should be a pleasure and a relative breeze.

There is a 26 book alphabet challenge though. Tempted.

Here's the list in full, women authors in green and men in purple, with fiction first and...you can probably work out the rest.


1.       The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

2.       Kensuke’s Kingdom - Michael Morpurgo

3.       The Hobbit - JRR Tolkein

4.       The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

5.       Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

6.       Siddartha - Herman Hesse

7.       Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

8.       The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

9.       The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte

10.   Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

11.   An Abundance of Katherines - John Green

12.   Refugee Boy - Benjamin Zephaniah

13.   Emma – Jane Austen

14.   The Daughters of Egalia – Gerd Brantenberg

15.   Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

16.   Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

17.   The Girls – Emma Cline

18.   Fanny Hill: A Memoir of a Woman of Pleasure – John Cleland

19.   The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy

20.   100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

21.   The Story of Tracy Beaker – Jacqueline Wilson

22.   I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

23.   My Sister Jodie – Jacqueline Wilson

24.   Wonder – RJ Palacio

25.   The Sleeper and the Spindle – Neil Gaiman

26.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

27.       The Big Push - Cynthia Enloe

28.       Animal - Sarah Pascoe

29.       Nomad, Alan Partridge - Neil Gibbons, Rob Gibbons and Steve Coogan

30.       No Is Not Enough - Naomi Klein

31.       Healing with Crystals and Chakra Energes - Sue and Simon Lilly

32.       Surviving the Future - David Fleming

33.       Utopia for Realists - Rutger Bregman

34.       Peace of Mind - Thach Nhat Hanh

35.       Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World - Mark Williams and Danny Penman

36.   Deeds Not Words: The Story of Women’s Rights, Then and Now - Helen Pankhurst

37.   The Fast Diet - Michael Mosley

38.   The Clever Guts Diet - Michael Mosley

39.   Delusions of Gender – Cordelia Fine

40.   Desert Flower – Waris Dirie

41.   Testosterone Rex – Cordelia Fine

42.   Cavaliers and Roundheads; The English Civil War 1642-49 – Christopher Hibbert

43.   Freedom Fallacy; The Limits of Liberal Feminism – Miranda Kiraly and Megean Tyler

44.   A Book for Her – Bridget Christie

45.   Notes From a Nervous Planet – Matt Haig

46.   It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be – Paul Arden

47.   Wild Power – Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer

48.   If Women Rose Rooted – Sharon Blackie

49.   TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking- Chris Anderson

50.   Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on our Family’s Devastating Story of Coercive Control – Luke and Ryan Hart

51.   A History of the World in 21 Women – Jenni Murray

52.   The Female Eunuch – Germaine Greer


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