This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
As Arts Curator at Latitude Festival, Tania Harrison has the enviable job of reading the year’s top books with a view to booking the summer’s most talked about authors. Here, she shares her favourite books of 2014 and explains how they will each play a role at the three-day event later this month.
By Tania Harrison
As anybody who’s ever been to Latitude will be able to tell, I love variety. My interests cross many different genres and art forms, as I believe a lot of people’s do these days, as we’re exposed to such a diverse range of media from an early age. It’s a situation I wanted to reflect when programming Latitude, which offers a kind of tasting menu for people who want to try a lot of different cultural experiences over the course of the weekend. The whole event is about helping festival-goers navigate a path between theatre, literature, comedy, music and so on.
Books form the starting point of a lot of the arts events at Latitude. Writing a book is still probably the best way to explore an idea or subject very deeply, and many authors have a great gift for making the strange, obscure and unsettling totally fascinating. This year is no different, and many of the events I have planned for this month’s festival started with me reading a sensational book. Here is a short list of some of the books that have inspired this year’s festival and why I think you should read them too.
Alexandra Heminsley – Running Like A Girl
Alexandra’s book is a real life-changer. Her story of how she got off the sofa and started running marathons has inspired so many women I know to put their trainers on, try running and learn to love it. She captures the highs and lows of running perfectly in a book that manages to be both honest and funny. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Alexandra at this year’s festival as we’re doing something different with her event. She’s going to lead a run around the Latitude site on Saturday morning, followed by a talk in the literary arena. This should be a fun and unusual way to explore what she writes about in the book.
Patrick Barkham – Badgerlands
Badgers have been in the news a lot lately because of the controversial badger cull, so I first turned to Patrick’s book because I was interested in learning the facts behind this elusive creature. I was fascinated from the first page – I never knew, for example, that there are more badgers per square kilometre in Britain than any other country in the world. Britain is the home of the badger, yet most of us have never seen one alive and in the wild.
In Badgerlands, Patrick follows in the footsteps of his badger-loving grandmother to meet the feeders, farmers and scientists who know so much about the animal. He takes the story of the badger right through from their arrival in prehistoric Britain to the persecution they’ve suffered at human hands over the centuries. This is another book we’re bringing to life in a dynamic way at the festival, as Patrick is going to take a group of festivalgoers on a special badger hunt around the festival.
Rob Evans – Undercover
The theme of this year’s festival is Secrets & Lies and I’m programming a whole stream of events at Latitude that explore the relationship between the private and public spheres and look at that fascinating grey area between concealment and deception. Rob Evans’ book Undercover, which he co-wrote with a colleague of his at The Guardian, Paul Lewis, is a first-rate work of investigative journalism that documents how undercover police officers have infiltrated political groups in the UK in the past 40 years. The book is full of stories that are so shocking that I had to keep reminding myself as I read it that this wasn’t some kind of thriller. I’m very much looking forward to Rob giving us his thoughts on the wider ethical and moral issues that undercover policing raises.
Meg Rosoff – How I Live Now
Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now has become an iconic work of young adult fiction and is now a hit film too. The book itself tells the story of 15 year old Daisy whose world is turned upside down when a trip to visit relatives in an England of the near-future is interrupted by an unnamed aggressor invading the country. Daisy’s experience of occupation are painful and unflinchingly realised by Rosoff, who reflects the confusion and danger of the book’s events in spare prose. Rosoff will be joining a panel of other writers, including Tim Lott and the columnist Laurie Penny, to talk about why dystopias are so popular in fiction for Young Adults and what our worst nightmares tell us about today’s society.
Elizabeth Pisani – Indonesia Etc
Elizabeth is another author appearing at Latitude as part of our Secrets & Lies theme. In her book Indonesia Etc, which she’s reworking into a performance piece that Elizabeth will present in the Shed of Stories, she’s looking at the lies that people tell themselves about themselves, their countries, their homes. In her book and performance, she looks at our tendency to self-deception through the lens of Indonesia, a country she has known well for over two decades, and the rich repertoire of lies she told about herself while travelling around it. I can’t wait to see it
Jon Ronson – Frank
Jon Ronson’s memoir of his time playing keyboard for the eccentric Frank Sidebottom in the late 1980s is the latest of his writings to have been turned into a hit film – albeit in a fictionalised form, starring Michael Fassbender and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Now Frank is set to take on a third lease of life, with Jon’s one-man show, which recounts the true story of how he travelled the country playing oompah versions of I Should Be So Lucky wearing a huge papier mache head, and when it all started to go wrong. It’s a moving tribute to those outsider artists who are too wonderfully strange to make it in the mainstream world.
Lauren Beukes – Broken Monsters
The latest thriller from South African writer Lauren Beukes is Broken Monsters, the terrifying follow-up to her best-seller The Shining Girls. It casts the crumbling city of Detroit in a central role, giving a new twist to the serial killer novel. It has everything: a world-weary detective heroine, a killer with the touch of an artist and a setting that echoes the decay of the American dream. It’s edgy, scary and has a lot of interesting things to say about the effects that social media is having on our culture.
Nikesh Shukla – Meatspace
This is another book I’ve programmed at Latitude that picks apart how the web and social media are changing us as social animals. Meatspace’s down-on-his-luck hero Kitab Balasubramanyam seeks his validation and self-expression online, but without much luck. When the nobel opens Kitab’s Dad has more luck with women (and Facebook) than he does, and his brother has left him to go to America. It’s at that point that his only internet namesake turns up on his doorstep and insists they should be friends. I loved this book: it’s a hilarious and often troubling analysis of what happens when our online personas become more interesting than real-life.
J.P. Bean – Singing from the Floor
Another aspect of the Secrets and Lies theme that I wanted to explore at the festival was secret or hidden sub-cultures. This book is a perfect example of one of those worlds that exist parallel to the mainstream. It tells the story of the UK folk club scene from the 1950s to the present day, through interviews and contributions from everyone from Billy Connolly to Richard Thompson and Christy Moore. This is the first book that Jarvis Cocker commissioned as editor-at-large for the publisher Faber & Faber and, as you might expect, it’s a wonderful piece of left field writing.
Daniel M Davis – The Compatibility Gene
Last year at Latitude I programmed a whole strand of talks and events on neuroscience, which is a subject that fascinates me. I’m continuing the scientific theme this year – so much so that The Wellcome Trust even have their own tent – and this is one of my favourite factual books of the last year. In The Compatibility Gene, Davis tells the story of the crucial genes that define our relationships, our health and out individuality. From this book I learned that our genes are integral to everything from how attractive we are to how we combat disease and the likelihood we’ll reproduce. Seeing the author bring those themes to life at the festival promises to be a very special event indeed.
Thanks, Tania!