10 Amazing Books You've Never Read
Illustration made for Ensemble Magazine by Ellie Gomez Price
I recently saw an article by the Guardian titled: “We have finally run out of television,” referring to the halt in television production caused by the coronavirus pandemic. I understand that the success of print media often relies on a punchy sensationalist headline, but in an age where the news so often evokes ominous feelings of panic and hysteria, I draw the line at this thread of discussion punctuating our news cycle at the moment.
We have not run out of entertainment. Not only do we live in a world that constantly churns out new literature, video content, and television programming every day, but also can you really look me in the eye and say you’ve literally consumed every scrap of media that the Earth’s best and brightest have produced before now?
Leo Tolstoy’s tragic masterpiece War and Peace? T.S Eliot’s modernist chef-d'oeuvre, The Wasteland? The infuriatingly long-winded zeitgeist of early-noughties television that is Damon Lindelof’s Lost?
Yeah right. I have been duped into an iron-clad commitment to daily screenings of Lost since January when my boyfriend chose it as our “couple series of the month,” and we are still only on season two. What is the black smoke meant to be? Is Lock the baddie? How has Evangeline Lily lived on the island for 6 months and still maintained immaculately hairless armpits? Please help me.
For those of you not ensnared in such a covenant, I’m here to highlight some of the fabulous works of mankind that you might have missed. Since this pandemic is giving us more spare time than ever before (and since we are apparently meant to be wringing our hands with sorrow over the death of television as we know it), I will first focus on books as the more neglected means of entertainment in the student’s arsenal. These are the books you’ve heard of, seen on someone else’s bookshelf, or walked by in the shop but never picked up.
1. Bridget Jones’ Diary, Helen Fielding
Every man and his dog should know the gist of Bridget Jones’ Diary, as immortalised in film by Hollywood icon Renee Zellweger. However, the book is undeniably a powerhouse of its own and tragically overlooked by Generation Z. The book is twice as clever and sweet as the film and so funny that I spent the duration of it cackling aloud and gleefully rubbing my feet together like a happy grasshopper at the hilarity of it all. Whilst the film is truly a cinematic classic, Fielding’s writing fleshes out the relationships and characters that made the film such a resounding success – Bridget is twice as funny, Daniel Cleaver is twice as scandalous, and Mark Darcy twice as dashing. What’s more, the book keeps in several delicious storylines obviously deemed as too expensive or inappropriate for the film, offering us more of Bridget’s delightfully wayward world than the film ever could.
2. Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier
Another book that is both a literary and cinematic classic, Rebecca is the story of a nameless young heroine who is rescued from a lifetime of servitude as a lady’s companion by the handsome widower, Maxim de Winter. After a whirlwind romance in the South of France, de Winter takes our heroine back to Manderley, a grand mansion in the English countryside, to resume their life together. But, not only is our heroine plagued by an increasingly distant Maxim and terrifying housekeeper, but als by the malingering presence of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, in every element of life in the house. First written by DuMaurier in 1938, and dramatized by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940, Rebecca is one of those novels that everyone knows about but has never read. Everyone is indeed missing out: aside from lacking in the usual stuffiness or overly complex language of most classics, Rebecca is an unpredictable thrill of a read. With each page of haunting description, DuMaurier masterfully builds the tension to breaking point, forcing us to claim the mounting dread and anguish of her heroine as our own. Not only was I completely spell-bound in this illusion, but also a certain twist left me prone on my university floor, open-mouthed, staring at the ceiling in recovery for several minutes.
3. Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie left me in a similar position for very different reasons. Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, Half of a Yellow Sun tells the story of three people throughout the course of the Nigerian Civil War. Adichie’s three principal characters are: Olanna, the formerly privileged daughter of a Lagos businessman; Ugwu, a young boy who turns from village dweller, to houseboy, to soldier; and Richard, the white Englishman in love with Olanna’s sister. Set against the backdrop of the short-lived state of Biafra, the book is yet another vivid confirmation of Adichie’s skill in people-building. By people-building, I mean the ability to weave such compelling characters with emotions and passions that feel so real as to link my heart to theirs. Three vastly different stories- a refugee, a soldier, and an onlooker- are combined to create an enormously powerful expression of what it means to be a human in wartime: the love, the loss, and the conflict one must face in their very soul. This is one of the books that will stay with me.
4. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
When talking about war literature, All Quiet on the Western Front is one that often springs to mind. Without knowing anything about the book itself, the phrase “all quiet on the Western front” itself has always been heavily loaded – I always knew it was something to do with war and something painfully and unutterably sad. Boy was I right. First published as Im Wesren nichts Neues in 1929, Remarque’s work follows a group of young German schoolboys drafted into the German Army in 1914 to fight in World War I. As the war progresses into what would become a crushing defeat for Germany at the hands of the Allied Forces, Remarque hones in on the devastating individual experiences of Paul Bäumer and his school friends: the patriotic jingoism of the teachers that bully them into service, the grotesque terror of combat, and the intense bonds formed with their fellow soldiers. An absolutely heart-breaking read about boys who should be studying for their Latin grammar having instead to gruesomely murder other boys. In the process, they must become mother, father, and brother to one another. All Quiet on the Western Front is above all a damning condemnation of war itself, and indeed, the book was burned and banned by the Nazis for allegedly doing a disservice to the image of the German soldier.
5. Bird Box, Josh Malerman
Bird Box is its own lesson in horror. Perhaps known to you from Netflix’s cinematic adaptation starring the likes of Trevante Rhodes, Sandra Bullock, and John Malkovich, Bird Box sees the world overwhelmed seemingly overnight by a petrifying phenomenon- after seeing some sort of creature, people lose their minds and become murderously violent. As society collapses, Malorie and numerous other survivors sequester themselves together in a house, shutting the curtains and only ever venturing outside blindfolded. Bird Box carries the credentials of any other worthy apocalyptic story, but this idea of one’s sight making them vulnerable to untold horrors is a unique stroke of genius Malerman plays with. Deemed a suitably haunting psychological thriller by all the critics, for me the book is far more petrifying than the film in that it combines the movie concept with the unfathomable terrors that can be conjured up by human imagination. The whole point of the book is the idea of a completely unknowable threat- what that does to people and to the mind. So, it feels more fitting to let the mind do the legwork when trying to explore the forms that human fear can take. In fact, after a disastrous attempt at creating a model of what the creature should look like, the movie creators cut the only scene where it physically appears (google “bird box baby monster,” for a glimpse). Definitely give the book a whirl, but when you feel suitably fortified and in a room where you can shut the curtains.
6. The Bees, Laline Paull
From the collapse of human society to that of the animal world, Laline Paull’s The Bees feels like a dystopian world of its own. The principal bee in question is worker bee Flora 717. Born into a lifetime of serfdom to the upper echelons of the hive, Flora 717 lives in a brutal totalitarian world. Thus, with each violation of her worker bee status, the thrill of Flora 717’s rebellion against the conventions of her standing in the hive lies not only in a rebellion against her bee society, but also against her very existence as a worker bee: a bee biologically designed to serve. In this way, Paull is not only able to successfully immerse us in the world of an insect, but forces us also to have an emotional stake in it. To this end, I saw one critic describe Paull’s language describing the hive society as “sensual” in nature; and indeed, this sensuality is not just wielded to describe food, drink, or sex but Flora’s loyalty to her Queen, her motherly instincts, and her sense of connectedness with her hive. In this way, Paull is able to convey the dizzying sensation of an animal completely ruled by deeper instinct.
7. Natives: Race and Class in the Aftermath of Empire, Akala
Paull’s The Bees certainly expresses ideas regarding the notions of race and social status in a society- something one can more literally explore in this transfixing non-fiction read by BAFTA award-winning artist and activist Akala. Natives: Race and Class in the Aftermath of Empire is one of the numerous books by black authors on the subject of race that have been catapulted into mainstream public consciousness. It is an essential exploration of both the individual experience of what it means to be black and British, and the history of anti-black racism in Britain itself. This actually was an element of why this book felt so important, in that as a white person attempting to educate myself further about racism in Western society, I have previously learned predominantly about the history of racism in America. Natives, however, opening with the chapter “Born in the 1980s,” tells the stories of the New Cross fire of 1981, the Brixton Riots, and the passing of the British Nationality Acts, and immediately underlines and explores Britain’s shameful past and present of racism and police brutality through a mixture of world history and Akala’s own.
8. Stoner, John Williams
Stoner is a book with an infinitely lower profile – in fact, before I was offered the book as a Christmas present, I had never heard of it at all and left it on my shelf for months before turning to it as a last-resort solution to lockdown boredom. Appropriately dubbed “THE GREATEST NOVEL YOU’VE EVER READ” by the Sunday Times, Stoner completely defied my expectations, namely, that I was embarking upon a very dull and verbose literary venture akin to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (iconic, but dull). Indeed, the blurb itself seems to try and perpetuate this idea, bluntly describing Stoner’s seemingly simple life as a farmer and teacher. However, John Williams paints the life of William Stoner in the most beautiful, simplest, and poignant colours imaginable. Tracing Stoner’s journey as farmhand, student, teacher, husband, lover, and father, Williams stunningly portrays the well of emotions, passions, and ambitions that lie within the ordinary man. Stoner reminded me of The Age of Innocence in its feelings of inexpressible emotion and ungraspable reaches, but unlike The Age of Innocence, it left me weeping openly in my garden upon completion.
9. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is another book that left me openly weeping this summer. Eleanor is a social recluse with a painful family history, whose only contact with the outside world occurs at her workplace and her Friday sojourn to Tesco, where she buys the two bottles of vodka that blur out the empty days until Monday. However, when Eleanor decides that she must gain the affections of a handsome bar singer, she is slowly drawn back into a world which she abandoned long ago. Funny and devastating, excruciating and sweet, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is one of those books that cheekily reminds you of the specks of goodness and kindness that occur in this terrible world. I find myself constantly waggling my battered copy of it to people in a bid to get them to read it.
10. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Set in India, in both 1969 and 1993, The God of Small Things details the life of fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, as well as the family that surrounds them, such as their mother Ammu, their uncle Chacko, and their great aunt Baby Kochamma. In the book, Roy essentially tells the story of a family who has “tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.” Aside from simply being a beautiful piece of writing, the book is also a relatively fresh way of exploring Indian history. Rather than taking in the sweep of India’s history as some sort of meta-narrative, Roy’s book concentrates on one state, one family, two siblings. She tells a story infinitely bigger than the two of them without ever having to extrapolate and in a way that is completely down-to-earth. The sense of both the lingering trauma of colonial rule and the hurt that can be caused by individual action are seamlessly intertwined.
Lizzy Laycock is a fourth year student at the University of Edinburgh studying English Literature and History. She is a regular author at Ensemble Magazine, and you can find more of her writing here.