‘Next year I want to focus on reading that is fun’
Sathnam Sanghera
I’ve written three books on the British empire, so have basically just been reading history for about five years. Last year the best was, without doubt, Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day. It was such a great idea to tell this complex history through the prism of one day in 1923, when the British empire hit its peak. Doing so meant he was immediately freed from the inane “balance sheet” view that has British historians forever listing the positives and negatives of the enterprise. What emerges instead is a nuanced and readable book.
But reading so much history I sometimes forget that I’ve also written a novel, and I’m worried that I’ve lost my tendency to think and write creatively. So next year I want to focus on stuff that is fun; books that aren’t about the British empire, genocide or colonisation. I want to focus on human stories that entertain me and amuse me, and maybe get some light in my life.
The first one is The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It’s a comic novel set in Ireland. Everyone’s going on about it, and I feel like I’m missing out. I also want to read You Are Here by David Nicholls, out in spring. I think he’s the funniest writer around and incredibly insightful about people.
I would also like to try Charles Dickens. I’ve never read him properly; I took against him at university. The times I’ve picked him up I’ve found him prolix and hard to get into. The closest I’ve got is watching The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is very good, but it didn’t make me want to read the book. However, last year, Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius really opened my eyes because I’m a massive Prince fan, and it made me rethink Dickens – maybe I was being ignorant in not reading him. So I’m either going to read Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities. I’m slightly put off by the latter because I saw an adaptation of it, which was a four-hour monstrosity set outdoors – it made me want to die. I think I’ll go for Great Expectations, it seems accessible.
Another on my reading list for later in 2024 is Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal. It’s about a woman who tries to escape her life in London by going to study tortoises on a faraway island. So it taps into that fantasy, that desire to escape that I think we’ve all had since Covid.
As told to Ella Creamer. Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera will be published on 25 January
‘I want to read remarkable stories of ancient lands’
Elif Shafak
I am preparing an eclectic reading list guided by the flow of rivers. This year I have been working on my new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky. Writing about rivers and floods, immersing myself in the mysteries of water, made me appreciate how connected we all are across borders.
Mexico’s famous Río Secreto and many underground rivers remind me that I need to read more Mexican authors, especially Valeria Luiselli, Laura Esquivel, Fernando del Paso, Yuri Herrera and the Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros.
South Korea fascinates me in so many ways. The restoration of the River Cheonggyecheon, a great example of daylighting – the practice of uncovering a buried waterway – has inspired me to learn more about Korean literature and culture, and so I will be reading Kyung-sook Shin, Bae Suah and more of Han Kang.
Buried Saharan rivers, ancestors’ tracks, now mostly dried up or forgotten, will guide me towards the remarkable stories of other ancient lands. I want to learn more from the literatures of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Sudan. Bensalem Himmich, Laila Lalami, Leïla Slimani, Tahar ben Jelloun. Also, Yasmina Khadra, Leila Aboulela, Ahdaf Soueif, Alaa al-Aswany, Muhammad Aladdin, Rania Mamoun, Jamal Mahjoub, Hisham Matar and the Sudanese-born writer Nesrine Malik. I will also be rereading Assia Djebar and Albert Camus this year, as I feel like their remarkable intelligence sheds light on our troubled times.
The slow death of Zimbabwean rivers, just like the painful demise of the Tigris and the Euphrates, makes me more eager to read authors from or around the region. I will especially focus on Tsitsi Dangarembga, NoViolet Bulawayo, Petina Gappah and Alexandra Fuller.
It is a large and heterogeneous collection, a diverse reading list that grows by the week, guided by the flow of rivers – those that are still with us and those that we have lost.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak will be published by Viking in August
‘My list includes books about WG Sebald, Jean Rhys and James Baldwin’
Sarah Waters
I’ve always loved reading about authors’ lives, in the form of biographies, diaries and memoirs. But I’ve rather dropped the habit, and plan to rekindle it in 2024. Luckily, there are some terrific looking books to get me back in the groove.
First on my list is Carole Angier’s biography of WG Sebald, Speak, Silence. I find Sebald’s books mesmerising, with their brooding meditation on memory, exile and trauma, and their disconcerting blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. His life seems to have been similarly enigmatic, and, by all accounts, Angier has done a remarkable job of delving through layers of reticence and obfuscation to get to the troubled essence of the man and his work.
Next, another rather slippery character, in the form of TS Eliot. One of my best reads last year was Erica Wagner’s Mary and Mr Eliot, which explores the fascinating relationship between Eliot and his close friend Mary Trevelyan – and incidentally exposes what a self-centred bastard he was. So I’m looking forward to Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl, a study of another of the remarkable women in Eliot’s life, his American muse and confidante, Emily Hale.
Then there’s Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once, a new biography of Jean Rhys. I’m familiar with some of the details of Rhys’s extraordinary, rackety life, which featured periods of exile, heartbreak, alcoholism and literary obscurity. But I know hardly anything about her Caribbean childhood, and nothing about the writing process that produced masterpieces like Wide Sargasso Sea and Good Morning, Midnight. So I’m excited by the prospect of reading Seymour’s book, which promises to supply all that and much more.
An almost exact contemporary of Rhys’s was the novelist and journalist Storm Jameson, and I’m delighted to see that Pushkin will soon be reprinting her 1969 autobiography, Journey from the North. Born in Whitby, Yorkshire, in 1891, Jameson wrote more than 50 books, was active in socialist and pacifist politics, and worked prominently for English PEN, helping refugee writers and their families escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. She was a sensitive, forthright, hugely likable writer, and, as with many 20th-century female authors, deserves to be more widely known.
And, finally, another author whose life and career intertwined with political upheavals and radical social change: James Baldwin. Baldwin was a brilliant chronicler of African American life, and his essays are among some of the finest ever written, with a trenchant understanding of the complicated intersections of race, class and sexuality. Giovanni’s Room, his groundbreaking novel from 1956, is a beautiful, blistering depiction of gay male desire. I’d love to know more about his influences, his early years and his civil rights activism – so will turn with great pleasure to a new biography by Bill V Mullen, James Baldwin: Living in Fire.
Sarah Waters’ novels include Fingersmith and most recently The Paying Guests, published by Virago
‘I’m turning to sci-fi and dystopia’
Sheena Patel
I have a fascination with sci-fi that is purely theoretical. I often think about reading it but never make any attempt to go near such books because I am afraid of the imagination I will find there. Perhaps I haven’t felt I can really access the genre because sci-fi feels like what Black and Brown people can go through on a daily basis. We’re still in an age of empire, even though we are distracted from this knowledge.
I do love sci-fi films though. I had a true epiphany when I saw Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin at the cinema. It was so strange, the alien mixed with the mundane, documentary spliced with fantastical set pieces. Next year I think I will read the Michel Faber book from which the movie was adapted.
In 2024 I also want to tackle Frank Herbert’s Dune books. Earlier this year, I watched the film on my laptop maybe 50 times. At first, I hated it, but then I totally fell in love with it – the visual representation of different worlds opened my mind. Throat singing and nomadic desert tribes could be used as a mood board for the future, but this is already happening now in communities that are regarded as “primitive”. It is the future because it is eternal – such a beautiful thought.
We are fed so much dystopia that reading it in fiction feels hard – but, as the world burns, maybe it is a good idea to hear from artists about where we might be heading. So the other three titles I will try are classics: Octavia E Butler’s Kindred, Stanisław Lem’s Solaris and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. The present feels so bleak, and our vision of the future so foreshortened, it almost seems like tempting fate – but, without science fiction, how can we dream?
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel is published in paperback by Granta
‘I’d like to tackle more fiction in translation’
Benjamin Myers
Winter is the best time for fiction, a season in which I am drawn to all things old, or weird, so 2023 started with a series of big names that I’d previously avoided: The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, which pulled me in and spat me out; the deep dive into time and place of Waterland by Graham Swift; and the perfectly succinct Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas reminded me that certain Scandinavian literature speaks to me in ways I can’t fully articulate. Perhaps it is the Viking blood that a recent DNA test revealed I have within me. The Birds by Vesaas achieved an astonishing trick with a narrative voice that almost made me want to give up writing entirely. Almost. I also found comfort in retreating back into a 20th-century England of fried breakfasts, furtive sexual encounters and infrequent bathing via The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks, The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger, The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor and The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. A new discovery was Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt, a bisexual, occasionally homeless and often brilliant poet, who died by his own hand in a cave near Blackburn in Lancashire.
I slumped in the summer, but, with winter here again, the fire is lit and the fiction tower is wobbling. I’d like to tackle more literature in translation. I’ve yet to read Olga Tokarczuk or Lucas Rijneveld, and have an entire Halldór Laxness backlist winking at me. I often remember a Richard Brautigan character who is reading “the Russians” and think I really should do the same. But then, resolutions are for breaking, and with Ireland seemingly producing an amazing new novel every fortnight, The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry or Wild Houses by Colin Barrett will, I suspect, provide pure reading pleasure as we ease into spring. Two other novels have been patiently waiting for me to pick them up for several years now: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry and Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. Perhaps the time has come.
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers won the 2023 Goldsmiths prize and is out in paperback by Bloomsbury on 1 February
‘I’ll try to meet up with the Latin poets I studied’
Sebastian Barry
My degree was in ancient and modern literature. Next year I might try to start again into the lovely thickets of Virgil’s Aeneid, if I can drum up the courage and strength. I did a degree called ancient and modern literature, and the ancient part of it was Latin. Although I was the worst, or at least the slowest, reader of Virgil in the history of students struggling with spondees and dactyls, I still believe it did me infinite good, as whatever sort of writer I ended up, to make the attempt. I am sure many people who have been through university have that curious bookshelf in their later houses that are the texts – never reread, gathering the dust of decades – from those old campaigns to survive their degrees. I certainly do. All those red-jacketed Loeb classics, even a few green ones denoting Greek, which I never penetrated.
I have a lovely, genius friend called Daniel Mendelsohn, a famous classicist, who told me recently he was going again through the rabbinical texts for the love of it. Well! I think he told me that when he first looked into Greek, another of his acquisitions, as a child, he could more or less intuit the shape and the sense of it, knew the essence and atmosphere of it instinctively. I possess no such assistance from a sluggish brain. But I thought next year I might try to meet up with Propertius again, and perpetually modern Catullus (who died so young), and Horace of the Satires rather than the Odes, although I am probably old enough for the Odes now, God knows. And Plautus, and maybe Terence, who didn’t teach me much about playwriting, maybe, but did indicate that demotic writing existed 2,000 years before television.
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry will be published in paperback by Faber on 1 February
‘I’m craving the immersive experience that a long book provides’
Cecile Pin
I keep tab of my reading on my Notes app. This past year has been a bit eclectic: I read eight books in August, and only one the next month. I favoured fiction, with quite a few Greek myths, classics or retellings in the first half of the year, and debuts throughout. I especially loved Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks and Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery. There was also some poetry (Louise Glück and Anne Carson), and a few science books, mostly research for my next novel.
One detail stands out: almost all the books I’ve read sit under 300 pages, and I know that’s not by chance. Perhaps for fear of commitment, or a shortened attention span in the age of social media, I tend to avoid reading long books. Often, when looking for my next read in bookshops, my eyes avoid the bulky tomes – and I (shamefully) look at the page count before reading the blurb. I’d like to remedy this in 2024.
I’m craving the immersive experience that a long read often provides, with a meticulous sense of place and time, and sweeping character arc. More than this, there is a discipline that comes with reading longer works: you must be more consistent, reading a little each day instead of 300 pages one day and zero for two weeks. I’d like to apply that discipline to other aspects of my life, particularly my writing, which, like my reading, tends to come in fits and starts.
I’ll probably start with Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which I’ve heard only good things about. I also have in mind Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which I’ve been meaning to read for years, In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, and The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. On the nonfiction side, I’m currently reading American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, and would like to read Eve by Cat Bohannon.
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin is out in paperback, published by 4th Estate
‘I’m drawn to nonfiction about climate change and motherhood’
Alice Winn
Lately, I’ve been finding myself drawn to nonfiction, possibly because, with novels, I’ve seen how the sausage is made, so nonfiction feels like an escape. I have a theory that I am more psychologically equipped to think about climate change when it’s cold outside, so am aiming to read The Climate Book edited by Greta Thunberg early in the year. It’s a collection of essays by more than 100 experts, so I figure if one essay depresses me, the next might have a more cheerful outlook.
Aubrey Gordon is a co-host on the podcast Maintenance Phase, about anti-fat bias and the food system generally. I love the podcast because she and Michael Hobbes are funny and personable, but I also really feel they have improved my media literacy. So I’m looking forward to reading Gordon’s new book, You Just Need to Lose Weight: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, which I assume will be charming and informative.
Liana Finck is my favourite New Yorker cartoonist, and she had a baby not long before I did. Her cartoons cheered me up, especially because I found them on Instagram, buried among sponsored posts about how my child would grow up to be a serial killer if she didn’t get enough tummy time. Her new book How to Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood promises to be a mixture of funny essays, lists (“Nesting. The Comprehensive List of What to Buy and Why Getting Things Used Is Dangerous and Unamerican”) and observations about motherhood. I want it!
While nursing my daughter I got into the crusades and read Steven Runciman’s excellent history in three volumes. Baldwin the Leper King! Saladin! Wily Frankish queens! So I’m really looking forward to reading The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf (1984), which draws on primary sources to tell the story from an Arab perspective.
• In Memoriam by Alice Winn is published by Viking
