What We Read in April

All the books we loved — and didn’t love so much — this month

On the back of The Best of Richard Matheson there is a quote from Neil Gaiman which reads

“You know his stories, even if you think you don’t.”

This is because as well as writing the iconic and powerful I Am Legend (which got adapted four bloody times) he also wrote short stories and screenplays and scripts which became the basis for hosts of other films, television and the like. He influenced an entire generation of writers — and not just prose writers. That influence manifests itself in the content of their work, the subjects they address, the structure of a scene and the measure of a plot.

And so, the stories seem so familiar. Part of it was familiarity from the numerous parodies in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes and Futurama’s “The Scary Door”. Part of it was the fact that they’re addressing concepts that have been baked into the public psyche: What would you do if someone gave you money to press a button that would kill someone you didn’t know, on another side of the globe? What if you were getting phone calls every night that could only be traced to the local cemetery?

Each of these stories are essentially about paranoia. The characters worry about the supernatural, the evil, the disturbed. And usually, their worries are actually pretty accurate. Terrible things are always imminent.

I finally read Han Kang’s Human Acts, which I put off partly because I wanted the beautiful American cover. While I never really got into The Vegetarian,I adored The White Book — which is, simply put, a work of genius. Human Acts is less abstract in its plot than her other work, centred around the events and affects of the brutal government suppression of the Gwangju student protests. It’s style is quite detached, though its content can move between brutal and beautiful, and its concerns are totally profound as to be on the level of enquiring about the existence and nature of the human soul.

I also read Alejandro Zambra’s My Documents, a short story collection published by Fitzcarraldo — another book I had put off, though I don’t know why. It was brilliant. Each story is perfect. Stupid though it seems to say it, the stories just feel very real. He writes with the perfect kind of humour, which seems to exist below the story, not in any particular line or tone but just somewhere in the whole prose that’s hard to single out.

— Callum

This month, I finally read Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk after it being sat on my bookshelf for over a year. I don’t know why I left it so long, because I absolutely loved it. I have adored everything else I’ve read by Levy — Billy and Girl, Swimming Home, and An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell — and Hot Milk did not disappoint. I would die to write like Deborah Levy; I don’t know how she manages to create such a rich and affecting novel with such simple language. It’s magic.

“I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.”

I finished Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends this month, which I thought I would be super into, but it was a little underwhelming. This is marketed as a book about four friends and the nuances of their relationships. I am such a sucker for intense characterisation and I love stories that deal with the complexities of friendships in a way that is often reserved for romantic relationships. However, Conversations with Friends was largely focused on the affair between two of its main characters, and although we do get some insight into how this affects the relationships between the others and the group dynamics as a whole, I was just left wanting more. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad book; I really enjoyed the casual tone and humour, and some of the more introspective and gloomy parts were hard-hitting, but it just wasn’t what I had expected, or hoped, the book would be.

I usually read an audiobook a month, and this month I listened to Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking. I quite like listening to memoir-style audiobooks, because I get distracted easily when I’m listening to rather than reading a book. Palmer tells her own story of going from being a living statue, to a musician, and back again, while pondering on what it means to ask for something. What is the difference between asking and begging? Who is even allowed to ask? At what point are you taking advantage? I found this empowering and insightful — if at times a bit repetitive — and would recommend listening to her reading it herself, because she intersperses the reading with her own songs as well. Delightful!

— Lydia

This month required some comfort reading, and Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems was just the ticket, so beautiful and delicate and utterly compelling. It feels a cliché to say Dickinson was ahead of her time, but only because it’s so true — this small collection of some of the fragile, fragmentary poems written on scraps of paper are breathtaking, and challenge our ideas of what poems — especially those of the 19th century — ought to look like.

Xiaolu Guo’s 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth was an interesting read — I had picked it up second hand at a market, and had no prior knowledge of the book or the author, so really didn’t know what to expect. While I took a little while to get used to the blunt voice of the narrator, it was a brilliant read. The novel traces moments in the life of a young film extra, Fenfang, who has moved to Beijing from the countryside.

My favourite read this month was Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, a book I’ve put off reading for sometime, and now regret doing so immensely! The book is collection of essays, all vaguely related to the subject of empathy and pain, and Jamison remarkably articulates so much on this subject without ever falling into cliché. The last essay, ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ particularly struck me, examining many kinds of female suffering and our concerns about the ways this pain is fetished, romanticised, beautifully articulating how the fact of female pain can be lost under our fears about how we represent it. In Jamison’s own words: “We may have turned the wounded woman into a kind of goddess, romanticised her illness and idealised her suffering, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t happen”. So often reading this book I had to pause reading to tell someone about it, and I desperately want to force everyone I know to read it, always the signs of a really remarkable book.

— Emma