Readers on their favourite books of 2020: I’ve given it to everyone I know Guardian readers
In Caste, Wilkerson explains why racism thrives and not just thrives, but is actively institutionalised and why white privilege must be recognised … reading Caste helped me see the inequities within MY own society, how many patriarchal cultures and religious blackmail are a serious detriment to the progress of African societies and how, if we do not change the system, we will continue to be disenfranchised and held back in chains forged by our own hands.
Umaymah Abdullahi, Nigeria
Shuggie Bain takes the crown for me this year. I think about Shuggie and Agnes almost daily, and the cycle of poverty, addiction and abuse. I quit drinking in April during the initial lockdown and read it in September and it really struck a chord. It’s incredibly well written and devastating but beautiful at the same time.
BOOK REVIEW
Heather Clark charts Sylvia Plathâs trajectory to become one of the most brilliant writers of her generation
By Valerie Duff Globe correspondent,Updated December 10, 2020, 2:54 p.m.
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biographer Heather Clark describes Sylvia Plath facing her husband Ted Hughesâs abandonment with a poem by British writer Stevie Smith taped above the desk. She is writing the groundbreaking poems of âAriel.â It is just months before her suicide. The Smith poem ends, âGreat is Truth and will prevail in a bit.â
Plathâs readers have now waited almost 60 years (more than âa bitâ) for more of that Truth, plowing through previous biographies colored by the misogyny of the times, sensationalism around her death, or the early womenâs movementâs fanatical search for a face. In âRed Comet,â her massive, insightful new Plath biography, Heather Clark seeks an objective balance those earlier books were missing.