Sometimes it takes a major event to change our lifestyle or way of thinking and the Coronavirus pandemic has been doing all that and more. It may have locked down the world and forced us into socially isolating from each other, but it’s also given us time to think about the future and the things that matter. For some that means drawing up a “bucket list”, starting or finishing a DIY project or if that’s too much like hard work, reading a load of books to survive the endless weeks of government enforced idleness.
The trouble is that with so many titles available in the shops or online, it’s hard to know which ones are worth picking up or leaving on the shelves. Thankfully the Sunday Times has done the leg work with a compilation of 50 of the best books otherwise known as the Self-Isolation Special. In fairness it’s not the only publication to have done this although the list stands out (in my humble opinion) for its determined effort to cater to a broad range of literary tastes.
For those in search of a good wry laugh then why not start with Nora Ephron’s brilliant Heartburn, an autobiographical novel inspired by her marriage to and divorce from journalist Carl Bernstein? Where’s the humour in a husband having it away with another woman behind the back of his pregnant wife? Nowhere you might think, but Ephron had a wicked way with words and knew where and how to stick in a knife or a boot to cause the maximum amount of damage. No wonder I couldn’t stop rooting for the heroine!
If dysfunctional marriages aren’t your cup of tea, then a memoir might be more to your liking. There are four on the list including Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes and that hardy perennial Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson. This coming of age tale about an adopted girl, raised by working class Evangelical Christians, who comes out as a lesbian is wonderfully written and deliciously poignant.
A good reading list should always have a few classics and the Sunday Times has thrown in some well known favourites including The Portrait of A Lady by Henry James, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, although for the life of me I can’t understand why they added Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre! I know the Bronte’s have a rock star sized following and that over 16 English language film versions have been made of Jane Eyre, but that doesn’t make it a great book. It’s overdone, overblown, over written, and over hyped!
If you want an antidote to a drippy governess, a mad wife locked in an attic and a dark, brooding Byronic hero with “jetty eyebrows”, then go for George Elliot’s Middlemarch. Virginia Woolf described this book, set in a fictional English village in the Midlands, as a novel for grown ups but don’t let that put you off! This story with its timeless themes of failed idealism and frustrated love, is observational, exquisitely structured and shot through with magnificent writing.
Another goodie is Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, a powerful novel charting the rise and tragic fall of Michael Henchard, a man undone by his past and the ruthless hand of fate. Okay, so maybe it is a tad depressing because it channels Hardy’s belief in man’s inability to reverse what is preordained, but that’s okay as life wasn’t meant to be a bowl of cherries!
Finally, my own personal favourite, Gabriel Garzia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude which the Sunday Times has listed under the “Big but Worth It” category alongside Life – A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I don’t recall One Hundred Years of Solitude being a doorstep sized book probably because I was immediately taken in by the magical quality of Marquez’s prose and the complex, elegant sweep of a story about seven generations of the fictitious Buendia family. Utter brilliance from one of Latin America’s finest writers!
