Viv Albertine’s hilarious and thought-provoking memoir, Roy of the Rovers’s almost unbelievable autobiography and Penguin’s Little Black Classics are just some of this year’s highlights
To get the bad 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, summed up by one scientist thus: “Look around you. Kill half of what you see. Or if 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, from youth to middle age; cancer; fitting into society; and much more – it has to be Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, 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, moving and thought-provoking. It’s probably my favourite book of the year, and its popularity one of those phenomena that make you think that not all hope is lost.
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