10 books cultural editor Hannah Silver recommends this winter
We love book recommendations on Wallpaper*, but between screen pop-ups, Bluetooth notifications, and voice plug-ins, it can be hard to keep track of what books your friends are talking about. Whether it’s new, classic, fiction or non-fiction, criticism, social history or novella, I’ve collected some of my favorite books, just for you. Welcome to your winter 2024 list.
Claire Tomalin, My Life
(Image credit: Courtesy of the publisher)
The skill of a health professional is a complex one. How to read dry notes, personal letters, published works, gossip and rumors to create a book that not only provides an accurate biography, but also inspires emotions? Just ask Claire Tomalin, who has brought subjects including Katherine Mansfield, Charles Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen back to life in beautifully crafted works that brilliantly highlight the unseen side of the biographer’s role. That is the place Tomalin faces when he considers himself the subject, and the result My life, free from this necessary separation, it is – without exaggeration – a flawless reading. Covering her time at Cambridge University, her marriage and the death of her journalist husband in a war zone and raising her four children, as well as stories from London’s literary and tragedies dealing with them intelligence, without violating his or someone else’s privacy. We can learn a lot from Tomalin’s ability to share – without overstepping his boundaries.
£10.99, waterstones.com
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Man in Love
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Although a six-book collection that includes Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s every waking thought may not exist. sound exciting, it would be a loss not to provide them. Knausgaard, who traces his life from childhood, to the death of his father, the birth of his three children and two marriages, in unbroken detail, is a master of capturing the ordinary. By paying particular attention to the minutia that make up life, he gives it the respect it deserves. To Man in Love, where he leaves his first wife, falls in love with his second and tries to combine childcare with creativity, he captures the magic of childcare. He writes so well that many pages are written about chewing food, tying a shoe, putting a hand in a coat, changing a diaper, it’s inevitable, nothing pleasant everyday is said about the rush of pleasure.
£9.99, waterstones.com
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories
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For Freud, magic is frightening and familiar, discernible in the creeping fear of the familiar. It’s a sentiment that Shirley Jackson excels at time and time again in her horror stories, and most notably in this collection of short stories. A woman befriends a neighbor, another dresses for her wedding day, a third cooks for a male friend – each short, disturbing story seems innocent, but details the absurd, slyly told, keeps the adrenaline pumping. The final story, The Lottery, is surprisingly depressing, as the happy citizens of a small village prepare for their annual ritual.
£9.39, amazon.co.uk
Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science
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From ‘truths’ that are routinely accepted, without any real justification, emerges dangerous and insidious prejudices. Therefore, from the idea that race has its origin in biology, racism grows, which is an absurdity that was rejected by Saini, who takes the politics of identity, eugenics, history, Social science and DNA genealogy emphasize race as a social construct.
£10.99, waterstones.com
Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport
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It could be one sentence long, and a thousand pages, but I promise you this is not a Ulysses-ian slogan. Lucy Ellman’s masterful work allows us to enter the confused, overwrought mind of an Ohio housewife, who bakes and sells pies all day while worrying about her children, shootings, parents home of the dead, sugar and get out of the house. Being immersed in someone else’s head is a fascinating and unusual thing, which makes one of those books last longer.
£15.97, amazon.com
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Tool
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Who remembers suffering from what it is to mark In a relationship or One person or – trouble in paradise siren! – It is difficult on their Facebook page? For philosopher and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, it’s just one example of how we’ve adapted to fit in with other people. Published in 2011, before we were fully immersed in the digital fluid, Lanier’s powerful thesis argues that the internet is erasing our humanity. It is no longer as controversial as it might have been, however this book is still full of sharp and accurate facts that can encourage small changes for our digital alter egos.
£10.99, waterstones.com
Thomas Morris, we don’t know what we’re doing
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One of the best contemporary novels I’ve read recently, Thomas Morris’s short stories set in Caerphilly, South Wales, are about my favorite subject – not so much. Or are there? At a stag weekend, at a summer festival, at a video store, the locals are jostling, groping and groping for a seamless connection, playing it out the way we’re all used to it. I am devastated, very sad.
£9.19, amazon.com
John Carey, The Intellectuals and Masses
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The old, which should be enjoyed together with the pictures of the modern literature precedes the dismantling. Carey’s 1992 book is withering as it exposes the low personal views of writers and artists such as Virginia Woolf, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, EM Forster and DH Lawrence. Carey connects the eugenic principles so fashionable with the masses of the 1920s, ideas that eventually emerged in Nietzsche’s Superman, a cause enthusiastically promoted by Hitler. This is one that should be counted as one side of the coin, before we go on to revisit the festival of creative freedom that the Bloomsbury team put on.
£7.99, amazon.com
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
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Bennett stepped in with her second novel following identical twins born in South America. After parting ways, we follow their divergent paths, as one lives as a Black woman and the other passes as white, interweaving a personal and emotional drama across a vast history and information.
£9.99, waterstones.com
Janet Malcolm, Forty-one begins to lie
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It’s a privilege to get into the mind of a writer like Janet Malcolm, who has so many amazing insights and references. A great book to read if you’re feeling uninspired, there’s plenty to keep up with in your spare time, from literary and artistic hits to David Salle, Edith Wharton and Bloomsbury Group.
£9.19, amazon.co.uk
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