Jenny Davidson's Reading List

"Persuasion is an unusually brilliant novel, just in terms of its style of narration. Out of all of the novels Austen published in her short life, this one feels most to me like a real love story. It tells a story set years after an initial period that’s looked back on retrospectively, in which the protagonist, Anne Elliot, turned down a marriage proposal from Frederick Wentworth, a man who genuinely loved her. A close family member had advised her not to marry him on the grounds that his social class was not up to snuff. It was a difficult decision at the time; she genuinely loved him. What’s more, the advice to wait for a more suitable suitor led to disappointment: Anne received no more marriage proposals. The novel describes a new encounter between these two characters and the set of misunderstandings that they have to go through before they unite at the end of the novel. Pride and Prejudice may be more widely regarded as Austen’s most romantic novel. Of all Austen’s romantic heroes, Mr. Darcy is the one whose mold is most often followed. In the modern Regency romances we often have a gruff, superior-seeming man, a very handsome and very rich man, who turns out to appreciate the heroine’s hidden qualities. That dynamic, which Austen deployed in Pride and Prejudice , has always struck me as having too much wish-fulfillment to ring true. “Out of all of the novels Austen published in her short life, this one feels most to me like a real love story” Whereas in Persuasion , we are in a world that has a huge amount of emotional nuance, a world where bad decisions are foregrounded as things that a character might have to weather to find their best possible partner. Persuasion teaches us that love can be the end of a long road paved with regrets."

"The love story that is told in Cyrano , with its bittersweet, heartbreaking ending, is one of the most powerful I’ve ever encountered. The eponymous character is an incredibly intelligent and funny man who has the misfortune of having an extraordinarily hideous nose—a nose that is so prominent and so unattractive that it is hard for anybody around him to take him seriously. He’s in love with his beautiful cousin, Roxane, whose eye is captured by a young man who, like Cyrano, is a cadet in the French army. This young man, Christian, is remarkably handsome but not at all eloquent. Christian enlists Cyrano’s help in wooing Roxane with words, by writing his love letters. The play is the story of a three-way love affair. Roxane thinks that she is being courted by Christian, but the words that enrapture her have all been composed by Cyrano. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, this is a completely sentimental 19th-century play; it’s really over the top. After the passage of fifteen years, years during which Roxane has pined for Christian, Cyrano is dying. Too late, Roxane realizes that it is Cyrano’s words she loved, and she declares her love to him. Cyrano is too delirious to hear but Rostand concludes with a memorable redemptive detail. Cyrano always prided himself on a white feather, his panache . He retains this white feather flourish. ‘Panache’ is his dying word, and the last word of Rostand’s play. Many of our modern myths were created during the last decades of the 19th century. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dates to that era, the story of two personalities in a single body and a monster within unleashed. The period also gave birth to Sherlock Holmes, a character with superior powers of discernment and detection who solves crimes using scientific techniques so effective as to seem almost preternatural to those around them. Certain popular storytellers in that era (Bram Stoker’s Dracula is another) boiled narratives down to their absolute essentials. These characters had creators who were unafraid to think schematically and structurally and give their protagonists near-mystical powers. Rostand’s Cyrano , the character and the play’s plot, are so brilliant that emulation is inevitable. In Cyrano , the main character in whom we’re emotionally invested is forced into the position of bystander rather than participant: he’s assigned a minor role in the courtship as Roxane understands it, but assumes his true central place in the story for those of us watching. The brilliance and ingenuity of that story structure captivated audiences in the nineteenth century; it should be no wonder that it always stayed with us."

"This is my favorite novel by James Baldwin ; it was his last one, published in 1979. You don’t hear as much about it as you do about his early novels. I’ve always been a bit grumpy that Another Country and Giovanni’s Room get so much more attention. It’s probably because, as memories of the heyday of the civil rights movement faded, Baldwin was no longer considered by many as in touch with the central voice of the culture. Maybe his positions were too complex for his novels to fit popular tastes. “Baldwin shows us that one can repair oneself with love” The novel’s set-up involves the main character (also the narrator) telling the story of his beloved and charismatic young brother Arthur, who is gay and has a glow about him. That, together with his remarkable musical talents, enables an enormous career as a singer. It’s an amazing story about the way that siblings retain love for each other in a world that puts that love to the test in many ways. It’s also about the beauty of sexual love between two black men, Arthur and his one-time bandmate Crunch. It’s a lovely novel, but also a pretty dark one. One of the main characters is sexually abused by her father at a young age, but all the characters have been damaged by abuses and societal pressures in ways that you might think are irreparable. Baldwin shows us that one can repair oneself with love. Love stories often raise issues of social class and wealth. Love stories often involve disparities, whether it’s beauty and the beast or princess and pauper. The title on my list that really interestingly exemplifies this is A True Novel ."

"Mizumura does something absolutely brilliant; she bases A True Novel on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , a novel about class prejudice and the way that sexuality can be used to gain power in the world. The world of romantic passion that Wuthering Heights presents is quite dark, and the same can be said of the world created by Mizumura. She transplants Brontë’s plot to 20th-century Japan. It’s a story of an upper-class young woman who loves and is beloved by a man who is beneath her socially. The story gets started just after World War Two. The Heathcliff equivalent in the novel is a sort of stepchild. He is an outcast within the family he lives with and an outcast within society at large because he’s not pure Japanese; his father was Manchurian Chinese. The love story starts as one between a girl and boy, and it grows as they grow up. In explaining to the reader how these characters relate to one another, Mizamura is never writing about it as a strictly personal interaction. She details how socioeconomic changes in Japan in the post-war years—the relative status of the different families in the novel and the changes in Japan’s status around the world—shape the fate of her characters and the dynamic between them. Love is also the source of a great deal of comedy, a form that traditionally ends with the coming together of two people in marriage. Shakespeare’s comedies, As You Like It for instance, often end with the joining together that marriage represents. Love is often literature’s resolution to all kinds of conflicts. It’s a satisfying pattern for the human mind to follow. “Love is often literature’s resolution to all kinds of conflicts. It’s a satisfying pattern for the human mind to follow” That said, when we think of the truly greatest love stories, an awful lot of them are tragic. There are so many stories of impossible loves wherein some poison acts from outside to destroy romantic pairings. We like the satisfactions of romantic comedy , but we are maybe even more drawn to the stories of doomed love that we get in Othello , Anna Karenina and many of the other works that jump to mind when we think of love stories."

"Diana Wynne Jones is a really underrated novelist, perhaps because she is most popular among children and people of all ages who read children’s literature. Young adult books often cut to the heart of human relationships. Literature for young people sometimes simplifies things by making them metaphorical, by moving them into a fairy-tale world. That often means YA stories give us some of the most profound stories of human relationships. Howl’s Moving Castle is a story of this caliber. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It both hews to and subverts the conventions of fairy tales. Our main character, Sophie, is the oldest of three daughters. She systematically underrates herself: in a fairy-tale world, it’s only the youngest daughter who gets to have interesting adventures. Very early in the book, she encounters a wicked witch who transforms her into an old lady. This transformation literalizes her feelings of worthlessness. Mortified, she hides from her family and finds a new home in the castle of the title. Its proprietor, Howl, is charming and brilliant, but also bad-tempered and apt to regard young women he encounters as disposable love objects. The fact that Sophie inhabits an old woman’s body allows him to see her true self. It follows the fairy-tale pattern of magical disguise or false appearance providing a window into people’s essential self, beyond the outer level of appearances. Sophie’s terrible transformation also frees her to become her true self, to speak out and have adventures and do all the things she’s ruled out for herself up to that time. What makes it fit so well in the category of love story is that the relationship between these two imperfect characters leads both characters to become their best (or at least better) selves. A former student, now an editor at Time , recently emailed to ask what I might know about the 17th-century practice of assigning valentines by lot, in other words, names pulled out of a hat. Although I’m not expert on the folk history of Valentine’s Day, I would say that All Hallows’ Eve and Christmas are more widely present in literature than Valentine’s Day. The love story, whether it’s one of the great romantic tragedies or a comedy that ends happily, is one of the three or four most popular patterns for plots (crime and coming-of-age are two other obvious ones). The tristesse inherent in many of these stories is captured best for me by the philosophy of love attributed to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium . The premise is that gods cleaved in half two-parted humans (some male-male, some female-female, some female-male—listen to Stephen Trask’s “The Origin of Love” for a magical reinterpretation of the concept), leaving us often to spend a whole life in search of that missing other half, with the hope that we can restore ourselves to that elusive feeling of wholeness when we achieve true love."

"Giovanni Boccaccio was inspired by the fact that he was writing in the wake of a major epidemic that hit Florence in the 14th century. The premise of the book is that a group of young noblemen and -women, people of great privilege who have been able to flee the plague-ridden city, are telling each other stories to while away their time together in the luxurious villa to which they’ve retreated. The description of the plague in the frame narrative is very vivid and quite horrifying; it sets a dark tone. But the stories that the characters tell each other are bawdy and humorous, with a carnivalesque feel. The Decameron captures the fact that the suspension of normal realities that happens in a tragic situation like a pandemic can, paradoxically, produce a special protected environment for storytelling and its appreciation. Sex is central to almost all of the stories in The Decameron . A lot of them involve playful scenarios. The one that I think of most often is a story where a lascivious monk tricks a young woman into having sex with him. She knows that sex is wrong, but the priest calls the activity that he asks her to do “putting the devil back in hell,” a wonderful euphemism for the act of penetrating her vagina with his penis. She dutifully assists him in the project, putting the devil back in hell whenever he asks. Pandemics seem to introduce into life and literature conditions of unusual license."

"Defoe is better known as the author of novels like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders . Here, there is an even thinner line between fact and fiction. When Defoe was writing in the 1720s, the novel was a new and emerging genre. Novelists were hungry for good material, so Defoe looked back sixty years to the bubonic plague that struck London around 1665, the year before the Great Fire of London. So A Journal of the Plague Year is a historical novel , and its pretext is that this narrative is a live journal of the epidemic by somebody living through it. The title page suggests that it’s been discovered in manuscript. “The suspension of normal realities that happens in a tragic situation like a pandemic can, paradoxically, produce a special protected environment for storytelling and its appreciation.” One of the most striking aspects of the book is that its storytelling mechanism incorporates early versions of the same kind of epidemiological data that we are paying attention to during the coronavirus outbreak. Bills of Mortality were the 17th century reporting method by which individual neighborhoods in London tallied up each week’s deaths and assigned them causes. Defoe incorporates those data to convey the arc of a disease on the rise, a disease which only relented after near total societal breakdown. That’s not representative of the book as a whole. Both the narrator and Defoe are interested in the mob mentality which took hold during the disease and how often people behave badly once the ordinary conventions of human interaction are suspended. The novel presents a bleak scenario, with even drastic quarantine measures being ineffective, because people behave as though rules don’t apply to them. People persecute strangers who come to their community because they’re afraid that they’re disease carriers. It’s not a Pollyannaish picture."

"Albert Camus’s The Plague probably remains the best-known novel on the topic of epidemic disease. It tells the story of those involved in an epidemic in a North African setting. It is very interested in the details about how quarantines are enforced and the role not just of the government, but of individuals who band together into groups to manage the epidemic. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Published in 1947, shortly after World War Two , The Plague is, in some ways, primarily an allegory for the spread of fascism. It works well both at the allegorical and the literal level. This book is very vivid in conveying what it feels like to be in a city hit by an epidemic and what it feels like to be in quarantine. It also conveys how important it is to retain our humanity and our sense of connection to others in times when so much is at stake."

"This is a whole series of books by one of the most popular writers in science fiction and fantasy working today. When the first book came out, I devoured it. The premise is that we’re in a near-future United States where two man-made viruses (the first a cure for the common cold, the second a cure for cancer), have combined to create a new virus that can spontaneously turn people into a version of the classic zombie that we know from apocalypse movies. The two main characters, a brother and sister, are part of a news team in a world in which people are very, very hesitant to come into contact. They’re reporting on a presidential campaign in which there is corruption and manipulation at the highest level, not least concerning the virus. It’s a very good and very vivid page-turner. The science fictional premise is exceptionally well-rendered, and so is the worldbuilding around living in a time when contact is dangerous. In the world of Newsflesh , precautions are extreme, and every time you venture outdoors you must do a blood test when you return, shower in bleach and so forth. Communication is almost entirely virtual. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The intersection between the media, politics and contemporary society is definitely in the author’s crosshairs. We could say that about all of these books: in any situation of epidemic, we have to really pay attention to how we get our news. The quality of the information we’re getting affects our lives in a much more immediate way than it would normally; it becomes a matter of life or death."

"Severance deservedly got a lot of attention when it came out in 2018. It’s a brilliant book, the one on this list that I most strongly recommend to people trying to take their mind off the news. It takes the issues that the Newsflesh books also consider and politicizes them in a different way. It is about the intersection of immigration and global capitalism in modern cities and the breakdown of human communication and meaningful human contacts that occur as a consequence. Golden age mysteries and other classics of escapist fiction are another route, but even the best escapist fiction deals with weighty issues. I hope that these books might suspend, for a little while, some of the anxiety we feel while following moment-by-moment news of disasters in the media. Personally I find that entrance into the world of immersive fiction itself offers pleasure and relief from stress, even if the novel’s content is dark or dystopian."