My favourite book of 2021 – I’m buying it as a Christmas present for everyone I can think of – is Peter Davidson’s The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered. It’s a sustained meditation on its subtitle, taking examples from poetry and fiction and visual art (beautifully reproduced) as well as Davidson’s own experience: Davidson is the best advocate I can imagine for the nights drawing in.
In poetry, three collections I’ve enjoyed enormously: Hannah Lowe’s The Kids, a collection of sonnets which give the best insight I can imagine into the UK education system (sounds weird but it works perfectly); Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective, demonstrating that Glück has magnificently evaded the so-called Curse of the Nobel; and Paul Batchelor’s long-awaited The Acts of Oblivion, poems which really blew me away when I first read them in the LRB and elsewhere.
One book which is on everybody’s list: Rachel Roddy’s An A-Z of Pasta. Why nobody had this idea before is beyond me, but Roddy is the ideal writer to carry it out; I can’t think of another cookbook where I can open it at random and find something I’m immediately in the mood for.
One book which I read around this time every year: Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, translated by Marianne Moore. A little fable of the Alps and two children in difficulties. There is nothing like it in the shop or in the world.
From the publisher:
Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson…
From the publisher:
The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends - pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record - they forced the…
From the publisher:
Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal is a Christmas story and a story about the heart of the ice, the crystal.…
From the publisher:
Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are 'The Kids', her students, the teenagers she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child…
From the publisher:
This is the story of pasta. In it, Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italy's favourite food in a practical, easy-to-use and mouth-watering collection of 100 essential…
From the publisher:
Louise Glück's thirteenth book of poems is among her most haunting. Here as in The Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the…
Latest booklists
Latest booklists
