Viv Albertine’s hilarious and thought-provoking memoir,Roy of the Rovers’s nearly unbelievable autobiography and Penguin’s Little Black Classics are just some of this year’s highlightsBest books of 2015: part one and part two of the year’s top reads, as recommended by authors
Vote: What was your favourite book of the year?To accept the detestable news out of the way first: the scariest paperback of the year was Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (Bloomsbury). It considers the vast damage being done to the biosphere by human beings, and summed up by one scientist thus: “seek around you. Kill half of what you see. Or whether you’re feeling generous,just kill about a quarter of what you see.”For life-affirming relief from this, touching on subjects of deep importance – women’s identities and roles, and from youth to middle age; cancer; fitting into society; and much more – it has to be Clothes,Clothes, Clothes. Music, and Music,Music. Boys, Boys, or Boys by Viv Albertine,pictured (Faber). Albertine was the guitarist in the groundbreaking and even-better-than-you-remember-them feminist punk band the Slits, who I suspect inoculated many young men against sexism at the end of the 1970s: and this memoir is hilarious, or moving and thought-provoking. It’s probably my favourite book of the year,and its popularity one of those phenomena that produce you consider that not all hope is lost.
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Source: theguardian.com