Tag: The Guardian

The Guardian: Best books of 2019…to date

More for future reference than anything else – given that I usually have a year (or two, or three …) lag, The Guardian has published a list of their best (& reviewed) for the year to date.

A few of the publications I have been aware of, for example from The Guardian’s must-reads from year’s beginning here , like for instance the new books from Ali Smith, Tana French and Toni Morrison, but there are some that are new to me. That part of me attracted to myth, either in narrative form or as scholarly excursus respectful of the “lay” intelligence, takes particular heed of Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships which gives the women of Homer’s Iliad their very own voice (I know women writers dabbling where they don’t belong is being done a lot of late, but we do have two or three thousand years to catch up on!). And for a different sort of myth, if you will: A History of the Bible: the Book and its Faiths by Oxford professor and Anglican priest John Barton sounds to me like an intellectually stimulating and original work, without an agenda beyond putting fundamental interpretation of all persuasion in its place and the joyful exposition of all the splendours of a literary reading-that’s what I understand from their review anyway.

The Guardian has a good preview here of books to be published (in the UK anyway) in 2019.

Some that particularly interest me are:

Fiction:

• Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day – a favourite, who writes about lives that I know or want to know, or have lived.
• Spring by Ali Smith – Problem! I have to read Autumn and Winter first! But I’m getting used to playing catch up.
• Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout – Yes, I have read Olive Ketteridge, sono catching up required here!
• Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys – hopefully a worthy follow up to The Underground Railroad
• Siri Hustvedt’s new book – are there ever enough writing lives?
• A first short story collection from Zadie Smith.
• I love Ian McEwan – from the blurb, Machines Like Me is not necessarily what I would read, but love is love so …
• Margaret Atwood – enough said.

Non-fiction:

• Any bookish sort would find The Library Book from Susan Orlean pretty hard to resist.
• I’m interested in the Bauhaus movement on many levels, so the Gropius biography by Fiona MacCarthy is a must.
• Anything Toni Morrison has to say is okay by me – here a collection of essays.

What I do miss is Hilary Mantel’s final Cromwell instalment, The Mirror and the Light. The Guardian doesn’t seem to have comments running on this, so I did a look around, and at least in the summer Mantel seemed certain of a 2019 publication.  Given the enormous interest, I am surprised that there is no news available.