Pages of Hackney is an independent bookshop in east London. It regularly hosts readings, discussions, debates, screenings, art exhibitions, performances and
parties and recommends books on its website as well as hosting a monthly book club. In its basement is a second-hand section full of Penguin Classics and children’s books from previous generations. Follow @Pagesofhackney or visit pagesofhackney.co.uk. The shop can be found at 70 Lower Clapton Road, London E5 0RN.
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt Leo Hertzberg, a New York-based art critic, looks back over his life with the distance and serenity with which he used to approach paintings. This is a fine book about subjectivity, art, time and relationships that is ambitious and touching without crossing over into melodrama.
Chavs by Owen Jones In a passionate and articulate investigation of the myths and reality of working-class Britain, Owen Jones analyses the shift in perception from ‘salt of the earth’ to ‘scum of the earth’, and engagingly traces the complex etymology and proliferation of the ‘chav’ stereotype in modern Britain.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami Set in Tokyo during a fictionalised 1984, the parallel lives of an academic asked to rewrite the debut novel of a dyslexic prodigy, and an assassin who avenges female victims of domestic abuse, slowly come together. 1Q84 holds the 1995 Subway Sarin attack in the peripheries of its vision.
And, the Camden Girls’ coice …
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace “This was our pick of the bunch – a superb suggestion. A collection of essays by such a talented and influential writer as Foster Wallace is just the thing to generate lots of lively discussion in the group. Reading him is always rewarding; sharing the experience will be more so.”
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
In Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, the character of Leonard may or may not be based on Foster Wallace. This collection of non-fiction is the best place to start with a writer who manages to be both deeply philosophical and warmly human.
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy We feel this was robbed of this year’s Booker Prize, which The Lighthouse was also shortlisted for. Deborah Levy’s first novel for more than a decade captures the manic trappings of depression in prose set against a backdrop of a middle-class, mid-1990s villa holiday taken by a poet and his family.