Reading List: Five Books to Read This Month

January is the moment of New Year resolutions. “I will hit the gym and scroll less, I will stop binge TV shows and read more,” I tell myself … Let’s see, I suppose. We can but try.

With that, here’s a quite eclectic selection of the best books published in the last month to help you start as you mean to go on.

SPANISH BEAUTY, Esther García Llovet

Foundry Editions, pp. 136

I don’t think you can quite call it a genre, but I seem to have a particular fondness for works of art about Brits on holiday. Whether it’s Jonathan Glazer’s cult classic Sexy Beast, or Martin Parr’s chaotic snapshots of rowdy families in New Brighton, or more recent and sadder How to Have Sex and After Sun— I just seem to have a thing for the languid, charged mood they elicit.

Set in Benidorm, a place whose existence I ignored before moving to the UK, Spanish Beauty is a perfect addition to this very personal canon. Following a bent cop, the daughter of an English gangster and a flamenco dancer, and written in a staccato, almost imagistic style – it is a picaresque romp through the dark underbelly of the Costa Brava and its mainstay population of expats and lowlifes.

Translated from Spanish by Richard Village.

SUZANNE & LOUISE, Hervé Guibert

Magic Hour Press, pp. 144

Narrating the lives of his two elderly great-aunts who led a reclusive existence in a ‘hôtel particulier’ of Paris’ 15th arrondissement – Suzanne & Louise is the only ‘photo-novel’ by Hervé Guibert, author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), the roman-à-clef in which he discusses his relationship with philosopher Michel Foucault and his passing from AIDS.

Originally published in 1980 when the author was just 25, Suzanne & Louise is the result of weekly photographic sessions by which Guibert would ingratiate himself in the relationship between his two great aunts and gain their complicity to the point where he would often ask them to reenact different scenarios. More than a bit provocative in parts, it is less a straightforward character study than an oblique, suggestive look at codependency, and the interesting, often surprising dynamics that sometimes develop between people.

Translated from French by Christine Pichini.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOB: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, Erik Baker

Harvard University Press, pp. 352

We live in an entrepreneurial age. Motivational bromides like “pulling yourself by the bootstraps” or “find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life” are repeated like mantras. Self-help books and TED talks tell us to “unlock our potential” and our social media feeds are filled with influencers and gurus of all stripes peddling their “truths” as to how get out of the rat race, or how they turned their “side-hustles” into thriving, multi-million enterprises.

But where does this mindset come from? And are its effects as beneficial as the climate of opinion that surrounds it suggests? Make Your Own Job by Harvard history professor and The Drift associate editor Erik Baker is a history of how this mentality came about, and how (surprise!) it seems most of all a coping mechanism at the regrettable truth that good jobs are increasingly few and far between. You could call this an important “history of the now”.

OROMAY, Baalu Girma

Maclehose Press, pp. 400

The fictional account of the author’s own role in the Red Star Campaign to pacify Eritrea’s insurgency –Oromay is a political satire-cum-thriller telling the story of Tsegaye, a propaganda apparatchik for the Marxist-Leninist junta ruling over Ethiopia, who is sent to Asmara to help in the effort to quash the uprising, but who is soon swept up by the city’s nightlife and political intrigue spinning all around him.

Originally published in Ethiopia in 1983, where it became an instant sensation before being banned (and most likely resulted in the kidnapping and murdering of Girma who was disappeared the following year by the regime) – it’s the first time that it’s been translated to English and confirms Maclehose Press’s long-standing reputation as champion of literature in translation in the UK.

Translated from Amharic by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu.

THE LOVES OF MY LIFE: A SEX MEMOIR, Edmund White

Bloomsbury, pp. 256

Edmund White is one of a handful pioneering authors whose watershed novels and seminal studies about changing sexual mores and attitudes in America have contributed to putting gay life in literature’s mainstream. 

A no-holds-barred account of what has always been the main inspiration of his literary works, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir is a by turns wild, by turns intimate retelling of the life of the author, who is now 85, as well as an insider’s account of the hallmark events of gay liberation in the US, from Stonewall, to Fire Island, to the AIDS crisis.

Bartolomeo Sala is a writer and reader based in London. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Vittles, and The Brooklyn Rail. Read more of Bart’s writing for Something Curated here.

Header image courtesy of Magic Hour Press.