Turning over a new leaf? The best books for a new year
I have a suspicion about 2021. Even though it has only just started, I’m guessing it will turn out to be a year that contains joy, pain, excitement, fear and every other possible human feeling. If I’m right, then 2021 – despite being a new beginning – will be much like 2020, which also contained the full range of wonderful-to-terrible emotions.
I’ve heard many say “Good riddance to 2020” and I understand why, but it also makes me want to correct the misunderstanding. A year is a moralvalue-free and agenda-free unit of time. It has neither agency nor culpability. It’s merely a container inside which we have experiences.
For anyone keen to turn over a new leaf in their reading life, I have some recommendations. I would urge every sentient being to read all six of Agatha Christie’s gripping Mary Westmacott novels: Giant’s Bread, Unfinished Portrait, Absent in the Spring, The Rose and the Yew Tree, A Daughter’s a Daughter and The Burden. Each of these is, in its own way, concerned with a new beginning, for good or ill – and sometimes very ill indeed. They are often described as romantic novels. In fact, they are fascinating explorations of interpersonal relationships and the human condition. Discovering them has enabled me to experience a new form of Christie fanhood. I had not read these books until very recently because I assumed they couldn’t possibly be as brilliant as her crime novels; I was wrong.
I would strongly recommend that everyone pre-orders Girl A by Abigail Dean, about a girl whose new life starts when she escapes from an abusive family. It’s a riveting page-turner, and full of hope in the face of despair.
Another superb novel about creating a new life with a new identity is Philippa Gregory’s Zelda’s Cut.I first read it more than a decade ago and it’s still vividly imprinted on my memory, as is its lesson: that we can always choose who we want to be, and never have to let others define us.
New starts require new thoughts and beliefs, for which I recommend Finding Your Way in a Wild New Worldby Martha Beck, a self-help book about how to move more deeply into experience-without-language-andopinion. One of the routes to enhanced peace of mind, Beck argues, is to work out the precise way in which the opposite of whatever you believe is also and equally true. I tried it. It worked!
I also had a love-at-first-read experience with The Enchiridion by Epictetus (to whom I was introduced by the brilliant podcast Philosophize This!). Epictetus was a slave and a Stoic who believed that “men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by the opinions about the things”. We can’t control what happens in the world, or even to our own bodies, but Epictetus believes we can always control our own minds by, for example, deciding to like (or at least be at peace with) whatever we cannot prevent from happening. And yes – Hellenistic philosophers and American life coaches really do sit side by side on my shelves, and I am delighted to see them hanging out there together.
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I had a love-at-firstread experience with The Enchiridion by Epictetus