We asked our lecturers in the School of English for their recommendations on books, podcasts and films to get stuck into over the festive season, and here’s a great list of what they came up with:
Reader in American Literature and Culture, Dr Will Norman recommends, “Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories. Nabokov is best-known for his novels, especially the scandalous Lolita. But he was also a wonderful, playful and inventive short-story writer in Russian and English. Check out “Tyrants Destroyed” in particular, for a very contemporary-feeling tale of a boorish and absurd dictator whom the narrator just cannot get out of his mind.
Attica Locke, Black Water Rising. Locke is one of the best contemporary American crime writers. Black Water Rising gives us corruption and murder in 1980s Houston, haunted by the legacy of the radical Black Power movement. It tells a brilliant story of Black postwar history in America, and helps explain how the nation ended up as it is today.
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man. This is one of the great underrated novels of the American post-World War Two era, a beautiful meditation on the truth of love, death and sexual desire. Isherwood’s taut, crystalline prose describes a day in the life of a literature professor in 1960s Los Angeles. Tom Ford’s gorgeous 2009 film adaptation is worth watching too, but the novel is another experience altogether.”
Dr Stella Bolaki, Reader in American Literature, shares her recommendations: “One novel I found myself revisiting this year is Parable of the Sower by American writer Octavia Butler. As a dystopian novel set in the early 2020s, it’s not exactly a festive recommendation, but it’s gained a new readership following the Coronavirus pandemic. Despite being written in 1993, it reads like a prophetic portrait of our times. It’s a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of Lauren Oya Olamina, who is navigating a frightening world with great strength, learning to embrace and shape change.
The book pairs well with Adrienne Maree Brown and Toshi Reagon’s podcast Octavia’s Parables, a podcast that goes through Butler’s novel chapter by chapter and examines it in light of the current state of the world. Butler’s novels explore themes of Black injustice, women’s rights, climate change and political disparity. The numerous podcasts and webinars that have been created this year inspired by her fiction seek to amplify her vision for an alternative and more hopeful future. To find out more about Octavia Butler’s literary life, check out this interactive project by LA Times.”
Dr Michael Falk, Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies says, “If you want something zany, fun, escapist and thought-provoking for COVID Christmas, I would highly recommend Shirow Masamune’s classic manga, Ghost in the Shell (1989). It’s a neo-noir sci-fi thriller set in the near future. Major Kusanage Motoko and her team at Public Security Section 9 fight to protect people from ‘mind-crimes’ in an age where the line between human and machine have been blurred. The visuals are fantastic: Tokyo has never looked so dank and ruinous. The stories are gripping: a CEO is replaced by an android, and his daughter won’t believe it; girls’ minds are stolen to make more convincing pleasure-bots; a mysterious entity appears on the network and calls out to the Major across the void. The characters are wacky and relatable. The philosophy does get a bit silly at times, but still you’ll find yourself thinking—who am I, really?”
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Jennie Batchelor, shares her thoughts, “One of the best books I read last year was The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), a debut by the wonderful Sara Collins. This utterly gripping novel is told in the first-person by a young woman of colour being tried for murder in early nineteenth-century London. But the capital is not where Frannie’s life begins. The chapters that recall her childhood as a slave living on the Jamaican plantation, Paradise, and the atrocities carried out there are simply extraordinary. If you are a fan of gothic novels, of Frankenstein – I would say more, but I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment – of detective stories, of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, or of hauntingly beautiful prose, then you need to read this book. Frannie is a superbly crafted and well-researched heroine: part Jane Eyre, part Milton’s Satan and also very much her own.
If you like your eighteenth century with a little more humour, then watch or re-watch The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) and see how immaculately versatile in all things queen-like Olvia Colman is. So many of my students (and a couple of people in the cinema I saw the film in) have asked me since it came out if the eighteenth century was really like this. Was it so openly bawdy? Were women so prominent in political and cultural life? Were sex and politics so intertwined? The short answer is: yes. See the eighteenth century through the fish-eye lens of this movie and you will never look back.”
Dr Declan Wiffen, Lecturer in Critical Theory and Contemporary Literature, shares his thoughts: “I’ve recently been drawn to texts I can read for short amounts of time, but often. Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t is the perfect collection to read when you need a short, sharp hit of excellent composition and reflection on the maddening character of the world we inhabit. Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay collection, Figure It Out, is a nice companion text, which attempts what it says on the tin – figuring things out – from art and literature to masculinity and being alive – with all its contradictions, schisms and aporias.
2020 has been a year of journaling for many. To see how others in history have tracked their lives in a regular writing practice you could pick up Derek Jarman’s diaries Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion. Both offer reflections on the mundane, the existential, and the natural world as Jarman lives with the health complications from HIV, while gossiping about friends, politics, the art world, and his garden at Dungeness. Lou Sullivan’s We Both Laughed in Pleasure is also a treat, offering an intimate portrait of a crucial figure in Queer History.
For longer texts that take you beyond yourself, try Samuel Delany’s Babel-17, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Brandon Taylor’s Booker Shortlisted Real Life.”