Wow! Where did October go? It’s already time for our next instalment of the Her Campus Book club, and this month we’ve got some truly amazing reads for you to curl up with as the temperature drops.
Fiction Book of the Month: The Confession, Jessie Burton
This is a beautiful novel which delicately explores the intimacy and fragility of friendship. The story opens in the 1980s with Elsie, a young and naïve woman, who meets Constance or ‘Connie’, a writer. Elsie follows Constance to Los Angeles, where her book is being turned into a movie, but quickly feels overwhelmed by life in the city and begins to fall out with Constance, who feels much more at home in Hollywood.
The story then jumps forward to 2017, where we meet Rose, Elsie’s daughter, who is desperate to understand why her mother gave her up. Rose’s search for answers leads her to Constance, who has since recalled from the limelight and chosen a more solitary lifestyle, and under false pretences Rose infiltrates her life. Just like her mother, Rose is drawn into a friendship with Constance, and they build a relationship that changes both of their lives forever. Burton’s characterization is excellent, and you quickly become attached Elsie, Constance, and Rose. In short; this is a vividly emotive novel that you can’t help but immerse yourself into. Well worth a read!
Non-Fiction Book of the Month: It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (and Other Lies), Scarlett Curtis
From the mind behind Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies, comes yet another brilliant collection of essays and tales, this time focusing around the issue of mental health.
Matt Haig, Naomi Cambell, Sam Smith, and Emma Thompson (among others) join Scarlett Curtis in discussing mental health, sharing their own experiences and shattering the stigma that surrounds mental health issues. Split into five key sections, ‘It’s okay not to be okay’, ‘It’s okay to shout’, ‘It’s okay to be vulnerable’, ‘It’s okay to ask for help’, and ‘It will be okay’, this is a book bursting with inspiration and encouragement. It’s refreshingly honest, fabulously witty, and beautifully passionate.
What are our writers reading this month?
Anna, 2nd year Politics & IR: I’m reading Misbehaving by Richard H Thaler. It’s a book all about the rise of behavioural economics in recent years. In 2017, Thaler won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences for his contributions to the field, and he co-authored the international bestseller Nudge with Cass R Sunstein (which is also well worth a read!). It’s a brilliant insight into the history of behavioural economics and the theories which changed economic politics forever.
Laura, 4th year Law: I’m reading The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, which is a small selection of essays from the activist and writer Audre Lorde. It contains five of her essays, in which she covers the topics of feminism, racism and homophobia, and how these intersect for her as a black lesbian woman. One of the essays that I found particularly interesting was ‘Uses of the Erotic’, which describes the erotic as something that, while often used against women by men, is in fact a resource ‘firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling’. Lorde confronts these issues in such a powerful and thought-provoking way – I would recommend her work to anyone. They don’t take too long to read and you can find a lot of Lorde’s essays online!
Christy, 4th year French & Italian: Soviet Milk is a book from my course – the original is in Latvian but I’m reading it in translation. It’s a narrative that jumps between the perspectives of a daughter, her mother and her grandmother. As well as depicting life under Soviet rule in the Baltic states, it also grapples with mental health, the world of work, and motherhood. It also allowed me to learn more about Latvia, which is a country I know very little about.
What are you waiting for? Get reading! Don’t forget to share your reviews with us on social media. We’ll see you next month!