‘What was that book featured on the radio the other day?’
BBC Radio 4’s rather splendid ‘A Good Read’ with Harriett Gilbert this week featured art historian Kate Bryan and comedian Mark Steel – both talk with Harriett Gilbert about their favourite books.
Kate Bryan has chosen ‘Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency’ by Olivia Lang
In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.
‘Never has a publication been more timely’ – Dazed
‘A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art’ – Telegraph
Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their roles in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time.
We’re often told art can’t change anything. In Funny Weather, Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world, it exposes inequality, and it offers fertile new ways of living.
Mark Steel has chosen ‘Stalin Ate my Homework’ by Alexei Sayle
The Sayles might not have been the only Jewish atheist communist family in Liverpool, but Alexei knew from an early age that they were one of the more eccentric.
Born on the day egg rationing came to an end, Alexei was the only child of Joe, an affable trade unionist who led the family on railway expeditions across eastern Europe, and Molly, a hot-tempered red-head who terrified teachers and insisted Alexei see the Red Army Choir instead of the Beatles.
Perceptive and hilarious, this is a portrait of a family, a city, a country and a continent going through enormous changes.
Harriet has chosen ‘Ghost Wall’ by Sarah Moss
Teenage Silvie is living in a remote Northumberland camp as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is an abusive man, obsessed with recreating the discomfort, brutality and harshness of Iron Age life. Behind and ahead of Silvie’s narrative is a story of a bog girl, a sacrifice, a woman killed by those closes to her, and as the hot summer builds to a terrifying climax, Silvie and the Bog girl are in ever more terrifying proximity.
