The Proof of my Innocence, Jonathan Coe
I keep seeing this in book shops and on review websites, and every time I do, I pick it up and think ‘hmm maybe’. Then I invariably remember that I don’t like cosy crime (I DNF the Thursday Murder Club, as I found it unbearably twee), and put it back down. The cover looks so cool and I think the fact that it keeps bugging me is proof enough that I should read it.
The James Asher series, Barbara Hambly
I’m a big fan of vampires and Hambly’s Sunrise on Running Water, which is set in the James Asher world, is one of my all time favourite vampire short stories. I don’t really know why I haven’t read any of the Asher books yet (it might have something to do with their horrid modern covers), but I feel like I should.
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
So a bit of EF lore, is that one of our GCSE texts was Great Expectations, which I did not actually read all the way through. Now that sounds bad, but I did watch the BBC serialisation which came out not long before, and I did read the parts which were relevent to our coursework, and I did get an A* (not to brag or anything), so ultimately everyone was happy. I actually read Great Expectations a few years later and discovered that it was in fact very funny and charming, and then recently during the twitter drama over Bleak House and illiteracy I read the first chapter and liked it a lot, so that’s where we stand on that.
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
Another piece of EF lore, this one more shameful, is that I have never read anything by Jane Austen or the Brontë Sisters. When I was in year 8 we all got assigned Jane Eyre to read and I somehow managed to get out of doing this (probably by simply not reading it and pretending that I had). I was in the midst of my ‘literary analysis is stupid’ phase which would last for another two years until I read Paradise Lost and stopped being quite such an insufferable twerp. Anyway, as well as being a smug little prick I was also extremely bitter and jaded about being a girl and going through female puberty and being awkward and not feeling pretty and not being like other girls, and so my response to this was to violently shirk anything remotely girly, which included Jane Austen. I’m mostly over my ‘ew girls’ phase but my residual distrust of Austen and the Brontës remains.
I feel kind of bad about this now, even though I still don’t really like romantic novels, so I figure that starting with the satirical Northanger Abbey might be a good way to ease myself into liking Austen.
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
Not much to this one. I love DFW’s essays and I’m not quite brave enough for Infinite Jest.
Eleanor Frances 