JENNIFER PLATT | If you loved it the first time around, chase that feeling again

We read books over and over for a number of reasons. This past year, I mostly reread for comfort. It was about being in my book bubble — reliving a good part of my past and not being in today’s messy world, or wrapping myself up in a warm childhood memory or just hanging out with a much-loved character and going to a favourite setting. It’s no longer Hogwarts. Thanks, JK. 

Peace Adzo Medie has written one of the best novels to escape to this year. Her book, His Only Wife, transports one to Ghana with a wonderful character named Afi, who is in a troubled arranged marriage. It starts with a wedding and throughout the novel there are mouthwatering descriptions of food (yam stews, which I Googled to get recipes), bustling markets, beautiful homes and flats in Accra. But best of all it’s all underpinned by a warm, coming-of-age-tale mixed in with a subtle takedown of patriarchy. If that doesn’t convince you, it’s also a Reese Witherspoon pick for her book club, Hello Sunshine.  

When I spoke to Medie earlier this week via Zoom (she is a lecturer in gender and international politics at the University of Bristol in England), one of the things we chatted about was those books you go back to regularly.

“One of my favourite books is Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I love that book, I read it every few years,” she said. “When I started writing, it was only for myself because I ran out of books to read, so as a kid I would just write novels for myself. In my early teens I read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I haven’t read a book before where I had a physical reaction. I was like, whoa … I think that I am now just chasing that high. I want to feel the way I felt the first time I read it.”

I did a quick Google search to see what other authors reread. Nikesh Shukla, author of Brown Baby, one of the most important memoirs to read this year, told Buzzfeed: “Every year I reread two short story collections: Aerogrammes by Tania James and Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer. Both are brilliant in the way they illustrate the lives of people of colour. The construction of each short story in both collections is considered and precise and delicate, and the stories themselves, in both collections, veer wildly between the internal and the external, the contemporary and the long ago, the funny and the sad and mostly complex, nuanced, difficult people of colour navigating things like race, mental health, family and, often, themselves.”

Ali Land, author of Good Me: Bad Me, a chilling novel about being the daughter of a serial killer, said in the same article that her favourite is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. “The literary love of my life. From the opening lines that, to me, are perfection, to the wordplay, the tricks, the double consonants and the allusions to Edgar Alan Poe. It’s the layers of Nabokov’s genius that keep me coming back to Lolita. There’s no forgetting, and neither there should be, that the subject matter is dark and criminal, but there’s also no escaping the flamboyance and brazen personality of the book. Nabokov’s glee at alchemising language shines throughout, and each time I read it I uncover something new which makes me fall in love with it all over again.”

Meanwhile, Nobakov shared with The Paris Review a list of what he considered to be great literature: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and “the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time”.

Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” There’s also no high like the first reading of a book or chasing that feeling and falling into a comfy book bubble.