STACK THEM UP: GOOD BOOKS OF 2019

Is it me or is everyone really, really into reading as of late? Friends that hadn’t so much as picked up a book since reading To Kill A Mockingbird under duress at school, are pouring over and sobbing into Hanya Yanagihara’s 720-page A Little Life.

Yes, books are as much a part of the cultural curriculum as Netflix. So finishing one comes with the question of who, of the now many people you’ll pass it on to. Knowing that you shouldn’t thrust it in their hand, saying ‘you really must read this’, despite it already having reached ‘you must read this’ status, but doing so anyway, because you can’t bear not to talk about it, if only to exchange a single: ‘wow’. Or in A Little Life’s case: ‘heartbroken, hbu?’.

Instagram posts of birthdays and breakfasts, have been supplanted by vertiginous stacks of books. Obama's summer reading list is awaited with daunt and glee, and celebrity book clubs have more cachet than new Celine. Florence Welsh will often recommend three at a time (breezy for Barack who - riddle us this - reportedly read for an hour every night throughout his presidency). Meanwhile Reese Witherspoon's band of bibliophiles (currently 1.3 million on @ReesesBookClub) shows no sign of abating.

And so, at any given time, there’ll be more than a few of us contemplating whether Celestial and Roy from Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage were destined to fail. Or what Marianne and Connell from Sally Rooney’s Normal People could have done differently. (You’ll struggle to find a millennial woman who hasn’t read the latter, which is a curiously warming thought). 

the 10 must-reads of 2019

Notes to Self

by Emilie Pine

Pine serves her soul on a platter in this series of acerbic short stories. Centred around notoriously hard-to-talk-about subjects like alcoholism, rape, menstruation and miscarriage, it's impossible not to gobble up compulsively.

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The Testaments

by Margaret Attwood

The much-anticipated, Man Booker blockbuster, and the sequel to the The Handmaid’s Tale (you already knew that), three narrators tell their story of gruesome Gilead. The most adroit is sour-faced Aunt Lydia’s, but those of Agnes (the adopted daughter of the commander and his wife) and Daisy (a Canadian immigrant) will have you turning pages just as quickly.

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