Christmas is a time for reading. Are the family doing your head in and you’re in dire need of some alone time? Is it snowing and icy and far too cold to step foot outside without wearing a million layers and catching hypothermia? Have you lost track of the days and you’re bored of watching reruns of dreadful old films that your parents and grandparents try to convince you are ‘classics’? Are you dreading the return to work and looking for some escapism? Or maybe you’re looking to educate yourself for the inevitable conversations about politics? Well, whatever the case, we have got you covered. From cats that play chess and drink vodka, murders, complicated love stories, to feminism, epic fantasy, and some good old-fashioned socialism, here are my top books that you should read this Christmas.
Radical Party Girls
Happy Hour – Marlowe Granados
Who says party girls can’t be political? Marlowe Granados’ debut novel, Happy Hour, follows protagonist Isa, and her childhood best friend, Gala, over the course of one scorching summer in New York. The book follows them as they share a cramped sublet, sell second-hand clothes at a market, and scrape together enough money, and social capital, to pursue their socialite-esque, party girl lifestyle. Granados centres the superficial caricatured socialite: the light, un-serious, unimportant pretty young girls in this charming novel about how to get by in New York City, when charm is your only form of currency, and everyone is rooting for you to fail. Read Happy Hour for a good dose of fun, and charm, lightheartedness, and partying. But also read Happy Hour for a critique of capitalism’s insatiable demand for endless productivity and our tendency to define ourselves by what we get paid.
For the Most Pressing Issues of Our Time
White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism – Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective
White Skin, Black Fuel, by tackling the most pressing issues of our time (climate change, refugees, the rise of the ultranationalistic far right), is a call for urgent and collective action. It is a comprehensive study of “fossil fascism” and an interrogation of the role of the far right in the climate crisis, from past to present, with hypotheses of how they are likely to act in the future as the climate crisis continues to worsen. White Skin, Black Fuel is both a historical-political exploration of the link between the recent history of climate change and the far right’s nationalistic policies, and an attempt to construct a series of possible outcomes of the climate crisis under capitalism and far right nationalist governance.
Crisp and seasonal with a hint of murder
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
If there’s one thing this time of year is screaming out for, it’s a good murder mystery. Well, Donna Tarrtt’s The Secret History isn’t exactly that; it’s an inverted detective story – the murder occurs within the opening pages, and we build, sequentially, to the events that led to the crime, and its aftermath. At an elite university, tucked away in quiet, sleepy New England, the insecure and poor, Richard Papen joins a selective Classic Greek studies course, with a group of intelligent, eccentric, and privileged students: isolated from the rest of the student body, imbued with a sense of exceptionalism, in search of transcendence from the mundane and guided by an increasingly questionable moral compass. The Secret History follows the groups rapid fall into despair, madness, and murder, which alters the trajectory of their collective lives forever. It’s an unputdownable, gripping read.
Surrealist political satire
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Feeling disillusioned with politics? Looking for a surreal mind-bending romp? Look no further than Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita. The Devil and his motley crew arrive in Stalin’s Moscow to wreck some havoc and leave a chaotic mess in their wake. This book defies categorisation: it combines the supernatural with political satire, dark comedy, and Christian philosophy. Written between 1928-1940, The Master and Margarita mocks the bureaucratic absurdity of everyday life in Stalin’s Russia, whilst more acutely commenting on the author's own experience of artistic censorship under the same regime. It’s confusing and complex, a meandering pointless and plotless novel, yet it’s lighthearted and whimsical and actually funny. If you want something that is distracting, cerebral, ludicrous and pointless, then this book is for you.
The Obligatory Celebrity One
My Body – Emily Ratajkowski
Emily Ratajkowski is a model, actress, a social media phenomenon, feminist, and now a writer. She made waves when she wrote "Buying Myself Back: When Does a Model Own her Own Image?" for The Cut in September 2020, an article response to a series of photos taken of her that appeared in a photobook without her consent. What followed, a year later, is her first book My Body, a collection of personal essays which explore feminism, sexuality, and power, of men's treatment of women, the fetishisation of girls, the oppressive nature of ‘beauty’, and the exploitation of the fashion and film industries. It’s an empowering and highly personal debut work that will find its home in the hands of young women who, though not supermodels or actresses, know the omnipresence of the male gaze and the oppressive restrictions and contradictions of the patriarchy.
For the Lovers
Normal People – Sally Rooney
If you haven’t already gotten onto the Sally Rooney hype, then this is the season to do it. It all started with her second novel, Normal People, but feel free to start with Conversations With Friends, or her new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? (I would recommend all three!) Following the complicated development of the relationship between two protagonists, Marianne and Connell, from high school to university, Normal People is a book about love and relationships, about codependency, a rejection of individualism, but also about mental illness, gender dynamics, and class. It’s refreshing and heartbreaking and universal and intimate. And yes, Rooney is worth the hype. Plus this Faber & Faber Members edition (it’s free to join!) would make the perfect gift for any Rooney fans, or as a treat for yourself - because who doesn’t judge a book by it’s pretty cover?
A Sprinkle of Fantasy
A Song of Ice and Fire series (Book 1: A Game of Thrones) – George R.R. Martin
With the disappointing end to the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones still etched into our collective consciousness, let’s rejoice in the fact that the book series on which the show was (loosely) based, hasn’t yet been completed (yes it’s been ten years since the last book was released and yes it hurts). If you’ve been putting off reading them, daunted by the sheer size of the undertaking, or if you loved the show (and/or hated the ending), I think now is the time to get stuck in. The A Song of Ice and Fire series is an epic fantasy story: the principle story being the struggle for control of the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms between Westeros’ Great Houses, whilst there is an overarching storyline of an existential threat coming from the North, beyond the border. The time between Christmas and New Year is the perfect time to get cosy, settle down, and delve into a magical world of fantasy and politics, with gripping storylines and complex characters, and unexpected and controversial plot twists galore to keep you on your toes.
What is Love?
Essays in Love – Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love is an intriguing mix of a collection of philosophical nonfiction essays about love and relationships (but also about self and identity), wrapped into the fictional ‘love-at-first-sight’ story of two twenty-somethings who meet on a plane from Paris to London, start dating, and fall in love. Read this if you are single. Read this if you’ve just met someone new and you’re excited. Read this if you’re in love in your relationship, or if you’re falling out of love in your relationship. Read this if you’re newly single (by choice or not), if you’re heartbroken, if you’re feeling nostalgic about past lovers. Read this if you’re downright confused about love. Just read this.
An Education
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is the quintessential anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist, socialist text. Educate Yourself has been the tagline for the past few years, and if this is something that you haven’t done, this book is a fantastic place to start. It’s part historical analysis of the underdevelopment of the African continent, and part revolutionary Marxist call to arms. Rodney explores how capitalist development and growth of Western European nations could only occur because of these nations simultaneously intentional underdevelopment of African nations. Rodney seeks to empower his intended African readership into wrestling back control over their own destiny and development by removing themselves from the wider global market and focusing on their own needs, through a Sociaist revolution. Written in 1972, Rodney’s scathing and unapologetic attack on capitalism and his analysis of African underdevelopment as a necessary result of capitalist wealth accumulation, and the problems he seeks to address through this work, remains hyper relevant.
For Hibernating in the Christmas Limbo
My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
It’s that time of year, the one between Christmas and New Year, where everyday blends into another, where the concept of time ceases to exist. Where the left-over turkey and stuffing makes endless sandwiches for days, chocolates are consumed for breakfast, and the G&T’s keep making an appearance earlier and earlier. All in all the perfect setting for Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Our narrator, rich, young, white, privileged with a capital P, and frankly unlikeable. She decides to take a whole year off from her life, locking herself in her apartment and putting herself in a drug-induced sleep, with the aim of returning to civilisation renewed and rejuvenated, a whole new person. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a must-read novel, a comedy and a satire, whose compelling exploration of grief and identity is just waiting to be discovered.
The New Feminist Classic
The Right to Sex – Amia Srinivasan
Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is a collection of essays which examine and interrogate the politics and ethics of sex under its current conditions (patriarchal, capitalist, abelist, white supremacist) whilst simultaneously positing questions and examining ways in which we can rethink and reimagine sex as something truly liberating. From essays about pornography, incels, desire, sex work, rape, and consent, The Right to Sex asks us to interrogate more closely our discussions about sex and our understandings of desire, whilst reframing sex as a political phenomenon, rather than a private act, untouched by the outside world. With this, Srinivasan hopes we can create a world where a real sexual revolution will occur and we will all be set free.
For Christmas Eve
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Maybe it’s cliche to include the most famous Christmas story of all time, but frankly I think Christmas is for cliches. The more cliched the better. It goes without saying but A Christmas Carol is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a measly old miser, as he is visited by three ghosts (past, present, and future) who are determined to make him change his ways. Scrooge becomes a kinder, more compassionate, more caring, more generous man: and couldn’t we use a lot more of that in the world right now? So put on your Christmas pyjamas, snuggle up around the fire (or candle) and dive right into a festive classic.
Edited by Callum Sinclair ( Sub-editor )
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