Good morning!

Once again, please enjoy my books of the year, just in time for the last shopping weekend before Christmas. It’s this sort of commercial insight that makes Fem Friday such a draw for premium advertisers.

Things We Lost In The Fire – Mariana Enriquez

I have never been so thoroughly frighted by a book as I have by this one. It’s a collection of short stories – the first of Enriquez’ to be translated into English – and they’re all very short and very horrifying. She has an unnerving ability to press all of, certainly my, and maybe your, buttons at once – writing about soured faith, unwanted children, seeing nothing when you expect to see something. Most of these stories walk the line between supernatural and not – sure, there might be a greater evil in play, or maybe it’s just teenagers on acid, or kids playing silly games, or a woman wild with grief. I can’t in good conscience recommend reading this if you are pregnant, have ever been pregnant, or plan on being pregnant.

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

There is no doubt that you will have seen this book repped for elsewhere, but what these reviews might not have noted is what an incredible piece of writing it is on the sentence to sentence level. It’s really astonishing to read passages as bleak as some of the ones in this book and to still not want to even take a wee break from reading it. I feel like this book has been extremely feted and I don’t have a lot to add to what has already been said, but if you are a fan of a good sentence and have been unsure about whether you will like this book, you will like this book.

Flâneuse – Lauren Elkin

This is one of those books (handwave) of social history that are also about the author and the author’s experience, but it’s also one of the most successful of those books that I’ve read. Lauren Elkin captures that lovely sense that you sometimes get in a city that all of the history in the city is happening at once – that George Sand is watching from an upstairs window as a revolution is brutally crushed and that Virginia Woolf is still storming around Bloomsbury. It’s also about building a life and the women who have build lives for themselves in and with their cities.

My only complaint with this book is that it thinks it is too cool to have an index. Every work of non fiction should have an index! Official Fem Friday stance.

The Life Project – Helen Pearson

Longtime subscribers will know that I am an enormous fan of the everyday and this book writes about the power that the everyday has. It’s about the British cohort birth studies – the five studies that follow all of the babies born on a certain day – and their influence on life and policy in Britain since the war. This makes it sound enormously dry, which it is not at all – there are wonderful, personal stories of the people who took (take!) part in the studies and the people who worked (work!) against tremendous odds to keep them going. This was the only book that I cried at this year, and it’s out now in paperback so if you don’t find it under the tree on Monday perhaps you can buy this as a treat for yourself on Wednesday.

At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails – Sarah Bakewell

You know that amazing thing that truly clever people can do, where they make you feel more clever rather than less clever when they are around? This is exactly how it feels to read this book by Sarah Bakewell, whose kindness and braininess radiates through every page of this delightful work. She takes you through some exceptionally difficult philosophical concepts and makes you feel like you know and understand them well enough to form an opinion of them. The existentialists were an inherently interesting bunch as well, so it’s good to read about them on that level too.

Honorable mention also to Joe Moran’s Shrinking Violets and Eimear McBrides’ The Lesser Bohemians. Finally, if you have a small child or children, or are just looking for a gift for same, Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk! has been my go-to since July of this year. It is SO GOOD.

Happy Christmas!

Alex.