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The Booker longlisted author on the book that made her think differently about sex – and the one that made her faint with revulsion and awe
The book I am currently readingI like to have more than one book on the go but got on a train to the continent this summer, travelling so light I forgot to bring any book at all! A reissued 1950s anthology was my desperate solution at a bookstore in the Gare Montparnasse. Short stories sure have changed. These seem pretty fusty, and prone to annoying plot twists right at the end. The only story I’ve really liked so far is Frank O’Connor’s “The Man of the House”, about a boy who drinks his sick mother’s medicine after walking all the way to Cork to collect it for her. Luckily, I knew Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote was awaiting me at my destination. Now, that’s a fun book.
The book that changed my lifeValerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. It’s not well written and it’s highly repetitive but it did open up for me a whole new subversive 60s world. I still find it amusing, outrageous and gutsy. Continue reading...