JENNIFER PLATT | Whether on noted lists or not, these books should be on yours

There are certain books I like to pretend, even to myself, that I have read. That list of 100 you must read before you keel over. I read most of them studying English lit at varsity, but honestly, some I have not finished and others I don’t remember. James Joyce’s Ulysses is one, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon is another (there are loads more). I still have no idea what those novels are about thematically or otherwise. I don’t think I will revisit them, so they will always remain a big question mark for me. But I’ll happily tick them off as being read when I look at those lists.

There are different lists, though. Most famously are those of The Guardian, BBC, Time Magazine, Goodreads and Amazon. What is telling is how they slowly change over time. Now we have books such as Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green sitting alongside classics such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and The Odyssey by Homer. 

There are many books not on these lists that I think should be, but there is a separate one for them. Google #Woke books and they will appear. You will see White Tears, the brilliant thriller by Hari Kunzru, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, among other fantastic titles. All, I think, are must-reads before you die and should not be on a separate list. 

And those are only the international titles. When I look at the longlists for The Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards (they will be in the publication’s Lifestyle section this Sunday, so don’t miss it), the number of must-reads is astounding. Then there are the winners of the past 30 years and you cannot help but be proud of the books SA has produced and is producing.

Besides these, there are a few you can pre-order.    

African Europeans by Olivette Otele (Jacana Media) will be released at the end of this month. Prof Kate Williams calls it “a magisterial book — brilliant, humane and gripping, and a call to arms for an end to violence and subjugation. Otele explores the individual lives of African Europeans against great shifts of history, and the result is a masterpiece.”

In May, Damon Galgut’s long-awaited The Promise (Umuzi) lands. It tells a story in four snapshots, each centred on a family funeral in a different decade.

Also next month, writer, speaker and man of many other hats Kojo Baffoe releases his collection of essays, Listen to Your Footsteps (Pan Macmillan). The blurb promises: “Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be ‘a man’.”

In June, look out for Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola’s new work, Female Fear Factory (Melinda Ferguson Books), which “shows how seemingly disparate effects, like driving bans, street harassment and coercive professors, are the product of the ever-turning machinery of the female fear factory, and its use of fear as a tool of patriarchal subjugation and punishment”.

I don’t know if these books will ever be on the 100 books to read list, but they should be on your books to read now-now list.