CFS New Year Reading List

It’s the fourth of January. Time to wake up from that party haze, extract yourself from the food coma and dive into your New Year resolutions. (We all need a few days grace!)

If you’re anything like me, you will have put ‘read more’ on that list of things to do this year. I’m not going for any specific number or genre – although I wouldn’t mind getting through 2 novels a month. So while I’m fresh and eager, I thought I’d share ideas for a few decent books to put on our lists.

A concept for a “wall of knowledge” at the Stockholm Library, created by a team of students at the Architecture School of Paris La Seine.

The CFS New Year Reading List:

• How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff. Fifteen year old Daisy thinks she knows a lot about love and life – but oh, how she’s wrong. Sent to England to spend a summer with her cousins, everything deliciously and dramatically falls apart. A short, sweet, heartache for a lazy Sunday afternoon. 
  

• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s 1981 novel won the Booker prize that that year, then went on to win more accolade as the best of all Bookers in 2008. It’s a charming love-song to India’s history and independence, imbued with magic-realism and magnificent noses. Fact: In 1984 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi brought an action against the book in the British courts, claiming to have been defamed by a single sentence in chapter 28, in which her son Sanjay Gandhi is said to have had a hold over his mother by him accusing her of contributing to his father’s death through her neglect.

• The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan. Number 12 in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. He’s dead but the story must go on! Hopefully one of my nerdy friends will lend it to me so I don’t have to buy it…

• Piano Player, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society.

• The Godwits Fly, Robin Hyde. The Godwits Fly is a New Zealand classic (I first came across it in my high school library, and er, now notice the copy I am holding now is the same one). Originally published in 1938, it concerns themes of growing up as a girl, love, heartbreak and the resulting poetry. It’s a beautiful, wistful peek into life in early-twentieth-century Wellington too.

• Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin. Totes ironic Internet fave Hipster Runoff features an exclusive extract from Shoplifting From AA - this should let you know what you’re in for, right?

• Dear Diary, Lesley Arfin. Arfin (who you may know as a Vice/Missbehave/Russh columnist)  looks back into her personal diaries of her teenage years “with the perspective only rock bottom can give you”. I like the fact this is filed under young adult fiction at my local library. YA loves heroin addiction.

• Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth. I am a bit loathe to recommend this to you as I know you are all lovely, upstanding people who generally enjoy tulle and kittens. Roth’s 1995 masterwork is unpalatable and not safe for work nor the bus. However it is one of the finest pieces of characterisation I have ever encountered. Do read this review for a taster of what you’ll be getting yourself into – but as it says, Sabbath’s Theater, while outlandishly filthy, contains some of the funniest, freshest writing of our time.

• Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer. A humorous exploration of the fictional JSF’s journey into Jewish history of Ukraine. Translator Alex will win your heart with his ‘premium’ letters. My edition tells me Everything Is Illuminated won the Guardian First Book Award in 2002 and since has been published in 24 countries (perhaps, including Ukraine). Watch the 2005 film afterward – it stars Elijah Wood.

Happy reading. A decent starting list, non? Have you read any of the above? What’s on your agenda this year, dear bookworms?

Tagged as: books, list, reading