Matt Haig
I have been very dark and gloomy with my reading habits this year, perhaps in tune with the social mood. Like a pig sniffing for truffles, I am going to hunt out humour and hope in the new year, and plan to reread Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quartet, which I haven’t done since I was a teenager.
I have been told that Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi is very funny, so I will get that too. I also want to read Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things as I am a fan of Neruda and have never read it. It is about the pleasure we can take in everyday items in the world around us, from soap to tomatoes, and I am thinking it will be the perfect antidote to all the big-picture worrying the world is encouraging us to do. I feel a lot of us need to reconnect with the immediacy of the world around us, and so I will seek out books like this, in order to stay (relatively) hopeful about life.
That said, I will also be pre-ordering The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, which will be a must-read for anyone interested in the politics and practicalities of the next stages for the environmental movement. Figueres was the public face of the Paris climate agreement and knows better than anyone the political landscape of environmentalism so it should be essential reading.
Matt Haig’s Notes on a Nervous Planet is published by Canongate.
Cressida Cowell
I don’t have reading “resolutions”, because it’s reading for the joy of it that’s important – both for children and for adults. This is top of my Children’s Laureate Charter: if reading feels enforced then we know from academic studies that we don’t get the same benefits. Enjoyment is the key. But I am looking forward to reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, because her writing is wonderful, and I adore Shakespeare. Akala’s first book for young adults, The Dark Lady, sounds intriguing. It’s an adventure story set in Elizabethan England, and I love the idea that reading is a superpower.
If you haven’t read Onjali Raúf’s The Boy at the Back of the Class, it’s a great choice for new year optimism – a brilliant book for encouraging empathy.
The school holidays can be a great time to reset if you are struggling to get your children into books. Reading together beyond the age your kids can read for themselves can be an incredible tool – it sends a message that books are important, because they can make my mum laugh or my dad cry. Just 10 minutes a day can make a difference. I remember every book read aloud to me in an adult’s voice.
Cressida Cowell’s Emily Brown and Father Christmas is published by Hodder.
David Olusoga
Next year I’m making a documentary about African literature for the BBC, so I’m looking forward to rereading novels I first read as a teenager: Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. My own writing is non-fiction, so my pile of books to read in 2020 is dominated by history titles. At the very top is William Dalrymple’s acclaimed The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. When I get a holiday I’m planning to read We by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. Reading Dan Jackson’s The Northumbrians, I was reminded that Zamyatin had based aspects of the dystopian future society he creates in that novel on my home town of Newcastle, where he spent time during the first world war. As a historian the one genre I never allow myself to read is historical fiction. But I gleefully break that rule when a new Hilary Mantel novel comes out. So like a lot of people I am counting down the days to the publication of The Mirror and the Light, the final book in the astonishing Wolf Hall trilogy.
David Olusoga’s Civilisations: First Contact/The Cult of Progress is published by Profile.
Patrice Lawrence
Next year, I need books to remind me how funny, compassionate, resilient and lyrical my fellow human beings can be. First, I want funny. Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier will bring me that. Its hero, Not Sidney Poitier, was delivered after a 24-month pregnancy following an immaculate conception. I think I’m going to like him.
Next, back to my life’s work of sussing out my Trinidadian side. I’ll be sucking up the beautiful prose of Trini writers Anthony Joseph and Monique Roffey. Joseph’s The Frequency of Magic is about a butcher who has been writing his novel for 41 years but “distractions are aplenty”. The cast of Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch includes a mermaid, a fisherman, an artist and a benevolent white landowner.
I am a sucker for London books. Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man is a tough but necessary read. Set in 1968, the year of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, it is about an elderly Indian widower befriended by an English woman, until their life is shattered by racist violence. On a completely different note, I am shamefully excited about False Value, the next book in Ben Aaronovitch’s fantasy series Rivers of London, out in February.
Finally, I’ll be diving in and out of the African American poet and activist June Jordan’s Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America. Because.
Patrice Lawrence’s Rose, Interrupted is published by Hodder.
Jenny Colgan
I am looking for jollity in 2020. If Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time is half as brilliant, gossipy and revealing as his book about Princess Margaret, I will be delighted.
I am truly hoping that the new television series based on All Creatures Great and Small will reawaken Britain’s love for James Herriot. I have never lost it, but he seems to have rather fallen out of fashion, which is a shame as I find his gentle, funny stories a balm in difficult times.
Although it sounds strange, I’m also looking forward to reading a novel in the form of a journal by the only woman to survive a massacre by Bigfoot. Devolution is by Max Brooks, who wrote the stone cold classic that is World War Z, so I will follow him pretty much anywhere. Few things are pleasanter to read when cosy in bed than utterly dreadful dystopian things happening to somebody else.
Pleasingly, Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins are bringing out The Chrises, about who is the best: Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pine or Chris Evans. The frankly deranged level of detail this is going to have to go into to fill a whole book makes me think it will be impossible to read without being cheered up: the very idea of it is cheering me up right now (Hemsworth, durr).
And finally, if we get Neil Gaiman’s mooted sequel to Neverwhere in 2020, well, that cannot fail to lift the spirits. Every time I take a DLR train out into east London I think of what he could do with Gallions Reach and Pontoon Dock, and I absolutely cannot wait.
Jenny Colgan’s An Island Christmas is published by Sphere.
Elif Shafak
When politics get depressing, it’s time to turn to books for refuge. I love novels of ideas, the big canvas that gently helps us to shift our cognitive angle. The characters, the connections, and above all the voice. Literature takes us out of our own mental ghettoes and comfort zones, and we urgently need that now.
This year I am planning to read more female writers. From different corners of the world. No country is the centre of the world, no country is exceptional, and reading novels will help us to see that better. I am interested in books that take risks, challenge our basic assumptions about life and ourselves and, especially, “the other”.
It is also always worthwhile visiting or revisiting the classics for a dose of sanity. Victor Hugo or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Ivan Turgenev have a lot to say about our own strange times.
I usually read fiction and non-fiction simultaneously. Political philosophers can help us to refuel ourselves. Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Zygmunt Bauman, Bertrand Russell … This year I will be judging the George Orwell prize and I am looking forward to the pile of non-fiction in front of us. I also love reading comics. Graphic novels that dance a waltz with either the past or the future are the best in times of crisis.
Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is published by Penguin.
Damian Barr
It’s very easy to retreat into nostalgia, to hide in the past. I want my new year’s reading to be diverting, inspiring and empowering. That’s what I think we’ll need a balance of in 2020, because it’s going to be a challenging year, and reading is an act of resistance.
I like a diverting read, and I’ve got a very nice boxed set of EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels. Although they’re frothy, there’s an interesting subtext in there to do with class. Inspiring for me will be a book I reread every few years: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. I think if Celie can get through her life in that society, then I can get through anything. And I would like to read Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde, which I’ve seen quoted in lots of places but have not read myself.
I’ll also be rereading Richard Holloway’s On Forgiveness. He’s the retired bishop of Edinburgh and writes persuasively and powerfully about our need to forgive ourselves in order to forgive others, and how what we’re forgiving is people, not deeds. It humanises, and one of the things that worries me about the year we’re going into is that politics is seeking to dehumanise and “other” people. So in that regard it’s hopeful.
And I’m looking forward to We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib, her memoir of being queer and female. She’s an Ahmadi Muslim and it’s about her journey to find and accept herself. I want to read stories where people are pulling through, where people are resisting, even if that’s a small act of resistance.
Damian Barr’s You Will Be Safe Here is published by Bloomsbury.
Gina Miller
I am going to have a holiday, which is quite unusual, and my three books are already packed. I didn’t want them to be too heavy – after everything, I want to read things that will make me smile.
So firstly I’m going to reread A Tale of Two Cities, which I think probably has some parallels with today about the best of times, the worst of times.
Next in my suitcase is The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It’s one of those books I like to read when I can really enjoy it, almost eat the words – I call it a delicious book. I love the series, but all Alexander McCall Smith books are lovely to read.
The third, which I haven’t read before, but so many people have told me about, is Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. When I was a free climber, it took me to a different place and perspective, because I had to concentrate on climbing, and that’s what I’m hoping this book will do. I love the thought of it being a conversation with a friend – walking and friendship and the Appalachian Trail.
Gina Miller’s Rise: Life Lessons in Speaking Out, Standing Tall and Leading the Way is published by Canongate.
