Happy Fem Friday!

As promised, here are my books of the year, just in time for the last shopping weekend before Christmas. I am nothing if not commercially focused.

Non-Fiction

H Is For Hawk – Helen MacDonald

I have the most tremendous respect for people who can write articulately about grief, and Helen MacDonald writes more articulately than anyone else I have read. In case you are unfamiliar with the premise of the book, Helen MacDonald is an accomplished falconer who, after the death of her father, starts training one of the biggest and least predictable birds a person can train, a goshawk. There is an incredible passage about socialising her new goshawk – walking around Cambridge with this enormous bird on her arm – such a resonant image of grief, which you carry around like a physical thing and assume that everyone can see it as clearly as you can feel it. This is my #1 book of the year, and I hope you read it soon so we can talk about it in more detail.

The Underground Girls Of Kabul – Jenny Nordberg

This brilliant and upsetting book is about the Afghan tradition – hitherto unknown in the West and barely discussed in Afghanistan itself – of introducing at least one of a family’s young girls to the world as a young boy. It’s hard to convey how much is covered, and how cohesive it feels as Jenny Nordberg talks about social constructions of gender, the failures of foreign financial aid, Afghan political history and magic. This is a kind and humble book, and since I have read it not a day has gone by in which I did not think about the women in it and hope that they are doing the best they can under their difficult circumstances.

Unfinished Business – Anne-Marie Slaughter

Did you enjoy Lean In but feel like it could have said a lot more about the systemic problems of corporate culture? Maybe you enjoyed Thrive but found it a bit thin on how to actually make time for all of this wonderful sleep. Or maybe you liked both of these books but felt that they focused on the problems of rich, white women to the exclusion of women who are one or neither of those things. Me too! And happily for us, Anne-Marie Slaughter felt the same way!

Fiction

The Awakening – Kate Chopin

When it was first published, this book was extremely controversial and the author’s official position boiled down to, “well, if I’d known these people were going to turn out so terrible I certainly wouldn’t have started a book about them, but what can you do?”. It’s true that none of the characters come out of this very well at all, but this is a beautiful book about coming to the end of triumph, however small or petty or mean that triumph is.

This last book is not feminist – not even remotely – but I enjoyed it so much, it's pacy, the writing feels alive and immediate, and it exists as a record of such an interesting point in Western culture that I want you to read it as well. That is why I am recommending Jonathan Franzen’s Purity as my fifth book of the year.

PSYCH! Hahahahahaha I’d never do that. I just wanted to soften the blow of recommending:

La Bête Humaine – Emile Zola

This novel takes as its themes trains, sex and murder, and really works through all the possible permutations of that. Sexy trains! Murderous sex! Murderous trains! Sexy murder! I know what your question is, because it was my question too; is there a sexy murderous train? You will need to read it and find out. There will be no spoilers here, even of books from the 19^th century.

I’ll give you a clue, though; Emile Zola will not let you down.

One more link

If you – like me – like reading other people’s books of the year, I have one more treat for you. Katie Coyle’s “Year In Reading” for The Millions has a lot more about H Is For Hawk, and is beautiful and a punch in the gut:

To say I’ve been miserable this year is both overstatement and understatement — because I have many good days, more good days than bad ones, and yet when the bad ones arrive they can sometimes seem so dark as to be almost unendurable. To endure them, I read. I read Edith Wharton, detective novels, memoirs by chefs.

http://www.themillions.com/2015/12/a-year-in-reading-katie-coyle.html

Enjoy,

Alex.