As the UK enters what may be the final stages of lockdown and as World Book Day 2021 is upon us, literary experts from the School of English have assembled five impressive reads to help see you through lockdown:
Dr Ben Hickman, Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry, recommends:
- John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions(1623)
‘Donne’s series of meditations, written in the grip of an illness he suffered in middle age, is the single text in the language that speaks most to the time of Covid. The bedridden Donne, a love poet lothario turned clergyman, takes us through the stages of an illness, each occasioning reflections on what it is to have a body, on our reliance on others, and on the meaning of spirituality and forgiveness in a state of absolute vulnerability. It is a beautiful commitment to our non-identity with ourselves, for how we find ourselves in others, and of how the single is always many, the many single. There are lessons here we haven’t had occasion to learn in our decades of improving health, but we could do a lot worse than turn to Donne now.’
Dr Michael Falk, Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies, recommends two books:
- Christina Stead’sLetty Fox: Her Luck (1946)
‘Letty Fox is the funniest and most exuberant work of the curmudgeonly Australian novelist Christina Stead. Letty is a brilliant, funny, hopeless, amorous, spendthrift, heartless, free and loquacious adventurer in the glitzy world of 1930s and 40s New York City. She throws herself into life with extraordinary gusto, and tells her story in the most brilliant, crystalline language. This is one of those long books, filled with characters, that you can lose yourself in for days on end. Stead had a particular gift for dialogue, and you’ll hear the characters’ words echoing in your mind for weeks after you’ve finished. If you want a book to take you far, far away from lockdown, you can’t do much better than this.’
- Wisława Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems, translated by Clare Cavanagh (2016)
‘Szymborska was one of Poland’s most famous twentieth-century poets, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her poems are magical creations, of great precision, tact and wisdom. She takes the most ordinary experiences and turns them into moments of insight and confusion. If you need a book to dip into, and lift your spirits, or to help you reset and look at the world in a different way, then Szymborska might be just what you need. If you are one of the many Britons able to read Polish texts in the original, then you have an additional pleasure in store.’
Dr Bashir Abu-Manneh, Reader in Postcolonial Literature, recommends:
- Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth(1961)
‘This is Frantz Fanon’s political testament. Regarded as “the bible of decolonization”, the book captures both the hopes and limits of the global anti-colonial movement last century. In passionate and intense prose, Fanon dissects colonial violence and ruminates on the nature of what it means to be free. His core message is clear: decolonization should be humanist and it should meet the social and economic needs of the majority of people. An unapparelled revolutionary perspective on global affairs.’
Dr Ryan Perry, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature, recommends:
- Russell Hoban’sRidley Walker (1980):
‘If you don’t know it, it’s a post-apocalyptic tale set in Kent that draws simultaneously upon the idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage, upon art that we still can find within the cathedral (the painting of St Eustace) and in which the language reminds us of both Chaucer’s Middle English and the rhythms of a working class Kentish dialect. Above all it is about how humans in this post-apocalyptic world use storytelling as part of a preserving precious oral memory. Stories are the memories of humanity in what is a new Dark Age. Ridley Walker is a story wherein people attempt to hazily preserve lessons from a past in which technology has brought about wholesale destruction, and which at the same time celebrates the capacity for human connectedness to the landscape and to wildlife.’
Library, Medway Campus