Good Shit: My favourite books
The top 8 on my shelf
This is Good Shit: the monthly edition of stuff I’ve bought or used (or read or cooked or liked or things I’ve done) and want to recommend to make your life better. Edition themes will vary, they will traverse many niche interests but all are tried, tested and vetted by me.
I get asked semi-regularly for book recommendations from friends and family. There’s something so satisfying about being asked what to read next and nutting out what genre they’re into, what purpose are they reading for (beach holiday, escapism, learning). Some people are really clear on their reading goals, like my aunt, who has such a niche field of interest that she is actually far better equipped than me to be recommending her something to read. The process feels similar to one of those ridiculous quizzes you used to do in Dolly magazine to figure out which naughties babe was your match (Robert Pattinson at the height of the Twilight frenzy) or your perfect date night shoe (a stiletto, obviously), except with better results and an enjoyable reading experience. I’m certainly not the most well-read person and don’t have an exhaustive back catalogue of books just sitting in my brain ready to be plucked from an awaiting neuron, but I like to think I’m good at helping people narrow down what they’re after. How I never ended up working in retail is beyond me.
Sometimes people don’t know what they’re after or are open to many things and this can stump me because I don’t love just recommending the hottest new thing that’s been printed, sometimes the best gems are the books I read years ago and have stayed with me long after. Just this week, my sister-in-law was asking for recommendations for books. She’s a new mum and has a lot of feeding time to fill, whereas I could barely read an Instagram caption let alone a book at that stage. Her only stipulation for genre was no fantasy. I sent her a few recommendations which then turned into a few more and she will likely regret asking this question by tomorrow when I add yet another one to her list because it’s really made me think about the books I’ve read over the years. The ones that have had the greatest impact on me, be it from the writing or the subject matter, or more often, both. The list will probably change in a few months when I read something that leaves me absolutely emotionally shattered or confounded or enlightened but if you’re looking for something new, then here are the top eight books on my shelf.
My Top 8 Books
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Genre: historical fiction
The gist: The book follows Liesel, a girl living in Nazi Germany during WWII and all the horror and everyday things that accompanies that time in history. Liesel loves reading and storytelling, she also steals books and talks to the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
Why I love it: I read this book after a typical long hiatus from reading and remember being completely blown away by it. I picked it up because I love historical fiction, I love going back through time and feeling like I’m experiencing life in that place, albeit in my imagination. This book does not pull the emotional punches and I was balling my eyes out at the end, there is so much tragedy and love all wrapped up in it. But I fell in love with this story because of the writing, the way Zusak made death the narrator and animated the inanimate. I basically wrote a love letter to him about it (detailed in a previous newsletter) and how much he has inspired me since then to break the rules and push the boundaries when I write.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Genre: historical fiction
The gist: Hamnet is the fictional account of the death of William Shakespeare’s son of the same name (and the rumoured to be the inspiration behind his famous play, Hamlet). The story is told primarily from the perspective of Hamnet’s mother and Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes. We follow Agnes through her adolescence, marriage to Shakespeare and her internal and daily life as a mother and woman living in Warwickshire in the 1500’s.
Why I love it: I took this book to Europe with me, thinking it would be an interesting historical read and insight into the life of Shakespeare outside of his fame. I was not prepared to be sobbing on multiple occasions while reading it and being thankful that I didn’t live through the bubonic plague in medieval England and can enjoy the benefits of modern medicine. The descriptions of Agnes and William’s grief in this book are heart wrenching and visceral, they are so effective that I don’t think you need to be a parent to be affected by the story and the writing to appreciate it. There’s a tendency to assume that parents didn’t love their children back in those days but this book does such a beautiful job of weaving together the hardship of life and marriage with the love for one’s children. It is brutality and beauty in one devastating package. Special mention goes to the chapter in the middle of the book which details the journey of the plague-carrying fleas across the world. It seems like it shouldn’t fit, like it’s almost nonsensical but it breaks up the other events in the novel while still holding onto the story. It could have easily made the entire book flop but it actually kind of makes it? I don’t know how else to describe it.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Genre: literary fiction
The gist: This book is about a middle-aged career woman who quits her whole life to go and live in a nunnery in country NSW but does not become a nun. While there, the woman confronts a lot of things about her past growing up in the region, her grief and what is a ‘good’ person. There’s also a mouse plague and it’s also quite funny at times.
Why I love it: I know it sounds boring as fuck but stay with me here. This book was set as reading for another course I did and I put it off for a while because the blurb didn’t really grab me or spark my interest. I picked it up thinking I would just smash it out in a couple of days and within the first thirty pages, two things struck me: one, I was intimidated AS FUCK at how good the writing was and two, how much the book was demanding me to read it the way it wanted to be read, and not the other way around. I have never felt like a book has controlled the way I read like Stone Yard Devotional did. It made me completely surrender to the experience; the writing is haunting and meditative which grips you. I was a bit hesitant reading something with a lot of Catholic shit in it (I grew up in a country town and went to a Catholic school and church like the protagonist) and have mixed feelings about my own faith. But reading it made me see the beauty in religion again, how much it can actually enrich someone’s life. I got to meet Charlotte Wood at the course and found myself tearing up talking to her about it because the book had such a profound impact on me.
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Genre: literary fiction
The gist: This is a story that is told across 24 hours but encompasses events over 50 years as Elle, our main gal, confronts the trauma of her childhood while she grapples with the decision of whether to leave her husband for her childhood love.
Why I love it: This book came to me peak Covid shit show after listening to Pandora Sykes talk about it on The High Low (RIP). I was in yet another reading rut and this fully pulled me out of it and got me seriously thinking about writing again. I have never read an opener like in this book before, I was immediately immersed, like I was inside the TV show adaptation of it, so I wasn’t shocked to learn that the author had worked in production at HBO for many years. This novel also blew me away with how it played with timeline and in a way that didn’t feel confusing or onerous to the reader. She did this by firmly planting the present story in one location (Cape Cod) and kept the central theme clear: who was Elle going to choose? The rest of the novel helps illustrate how the protagonist ended up in her current dilemma and is done so seamlessly. It will be a tragedy if it doesn’t get adapted for the screen not least because the character of Wallis, Elle’s mother, is one of the best I have ever read.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Genre: dystopian fiction
The gist: Offred is a Handmaid living in Gilead aka post-religious conservative coup USA, who’s only task in this dystopian society is to have a child for the Commander and Wife, who’s household she is assigned to. Things get interesting in this repressed society when she gets seperate offers from both the Commander and his Wife, each with their own grim consequences.
Why I love it: I became obsessed with this book after studying it in high school (Year 12 maybe?). I remember buying a copy soon after moving to Adelaide for university when I was 17 because my bookshelf didn’t feel ‘complete’ without it. The writing is spare and incisive and visceral but still makes you feel immersed in the world of Gilead. If anything, the starkness helps paint a clearer picture of it, including the brutality the Handmaids witness and are subjected to. I remember during a reread quite a few years ago, marvelling that Atwood was writing about religious and personal freedom persecution in the mid-eighties. What will I feel if I read it again today after the massive changes to reproductive rights in America along with book banning and the like? This book is ageless and should be compulsory reading for everyone. Similarly, the TV adaptation is one of my favourite series ever. How the production team and writers have expanded upon the book and the world of Gilead always felt authentic to the original text and the acting is impeccable. Don’t waste your time with the book’s sequel, it was so disappointing.
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
Genre: Memoir
The gist: Dolly’s memoir is a book of essays about her navigating life, love and relationships throughout her adolescence and early adulthood. Also has recipes, listicles, hilarious group texts and it will, without a doubt, make you cry.
Why I love it: Like many others, I ‘grew up’ with Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes and their podcast The High Low in my twenties. Dolly, in particular, is like the millennial woman’s touchstone for all things female friendship and platonic love. It felt like a revelation when I heard her talk on the podcast about how important these relationships were outside of your romantic ones. She’s only a couple of years older than me, so I couldn’t not relate to a lot of what she was saying, especially when her book came out to much hype and fanfare. Dolly is unflinchingly honest about the awkwardness of crushes on boys and jealousy and competition in friendships and wrote about these topics in a way that felt normalising instead of berating. I think a lot of women of my generation internalised the message very early on about the importance of the Big Romantic Relationship and while I have always been so lucky and loved in my female friendships, Dolly was the one who really made me sit up, listen and appreciate them just as much as my romantic partners. I often tell Andy that my female friends are the true loves of my life (I’m not sorry).
Something Wonderful by Judith McNaught
Genre: historical romance
The gist: Historical romance set in Victorian-era London between Alexandra, a penniless country gal and Jordan, the Duke of Hawthorne. There’s a couple of major hotties, a ruined reputation, a shotgun wedding, betrayal, drama and ballgowns to boot. It does what it says on the tin.
Why I love it: When I think about my introduction to the world of romance novels, this book and this author come to mind. As a teenager, I used to sneak them from the bookshelf when my Mum wasn’t looking and hide in my room to read, then replacing the book covertly back on the shelf to avoid detection. I’m still not sure why I was so secretive about it. Maybe because at fifteen I figured out that they had sex in them and needed to keep it a secret? Regardless, I fell in love with these books (part of a loosely related series all set in the same era) and the characters and worlds they inhabited. This novel is full of all the topes we know and love and it is utterly delicious, something you can be completely swept away by for a few hours. Is it slightly problematic by today’s standards? Of course it fucking is. But I can still cherish and enjoy them for what they are. These books laid the groundwork for my love for a romance plot/book which endures today and I know I’m not the only one. These novels are the OG Bridgerton and are even better, in my opinion.
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Genre: Tragedy
The gist: Do I need to explain this? Two star-crossed lovers from feuding families from the fair city of Verona fall in love and tragic shit happens (they die).
Why I love it: I’m a fucking cliché, I know, but for better or worse, you never forget your first Shakespeare. I first studied this in Year 10, when I’m sure my English teacher was both highly entertained and exasperated by the sighs and dreamy looks coming from all the young women in his classroom as we read about our young lovers’ deeply fraught romance. Beside this being one of the greatest love stories of our time, I love this play because we got to be nerds about it. We were taught to pull apart a bit of dialogue to understand Shakespeare’s structure and meaning, why he used certain words and imagery and phrasing to convey his meaning. I got the double dopamine rush of history and nerdy language analysis. This lives rent free in my head alongside all the romantasy/faerie smut. I will accept criticism on neither.
Let me know in the comments if any of these are your favourites too. What are the tomes you cherish enough to save in a natural disaster? How do you figure out how to recommend books to people?
Waiting for my psychoanalysis now,
Sian x