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Bill Bryson first shambled onto our shores from his native US in 1973, an instinctive anglophile. Since then he has turned a kindly and satirical eye on everything from the rationing of hot baths in coastal B&Bs (Notes from a Small Island, 1995) to the elusive genius of Shakespeare (2007) and the fiery birth of the planet Earth (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003).
Having graduated from genial travel writing to popular science , Bill Bryson wields a childlike determination to keep asking questions until he understands something well enough to explain it. How do you weigh the Earth? How does a human blood cell work? Why can’t we live forever?
Curiosity is the driving force of science – and in Bryson’s case that also rings true of science writing. At a time when you can’t throw a crystal without it hitting an anti-vaxxer, an antioxidant moisturiser or a marginally qualified wellness guru, his latest book is particularly welcome. In The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bryson brings all his usual powers of poetry and precision to “the warm wobble of flesh” that is our enigmatic home.
As usual, the book is filled with enough factoids to fuel many a late-night conversation in the pub, but here are a few of my favourites.
1. You cost £96,546.79 to build. Or at least a human of the same dimensions as Benedict Cumberbatch does, according to a Royal Society of Chemistry calculation that Bryson cites. As The Body makes vividly clear, we are both mundane and miraculous: composed of a bunch of mostly everyday elements, pieced together in astonishingly complex systems that scientists today are still a long way from understanding.
To run the numbers: you are 61 per cent oxygen (£8.90) and 10 per cent hydrogen (£16), mostly bound up together to make water. It gets pricier when we get to carbon, which costs £44,300 for the 30lbs’ worth we typically contain. Calcium, phosphorus, potassium and a smattering of rarer elements make up the rest. But as Bryson writes: “It hardly matters. You could call together all the brainiest people who are alive now or have ever lived and endow them with the complete sum of human knowledge, and they could not between them make a single living cell, never mind a replicant Benedict Cumberbatch.”
Benedict Cumberbatch attends "Dr. Seuss' The Grinch" New York premiere at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on 3 November, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images) 2. You get cancer every day. Or you would do if your natural defences weren’t cellular stormtroopers. “Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turns cancerous and your immune system captures and kills them.”
And there isn’t just one “immune system”. Every individual’s immune system is both unique and changeable: it varies if you are stressed or exhausted. Little wonder, then, that our understanding of so many illnesses remains murky. While techniques that harness the body’s immune response are proving successful against some types of cancer, in other areas we remain woefully stumped. Auto-immune diseases – a category including allergies in which your own immune system works against you – remain poorly understood and largely incurable. As Bryson writes, it’s a “grossly sexist” type of illness: 80 per cent of sufferers are women.
3. Race is one millimetre deep. Intrepidly attending the dissection of a corpse, Bryson quotes the surgeon who pulled back a minute layer of skin and said: “That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.” As we spread across the world, some people are thought to have evolved lighter skin in order to glean vitamin D from weaker sunlight. Throughout human history, people have “de-pigmented” and “re-pigmented” to suit their environment.
Biologically, skin colour is just “a reaction to sunlight”, Bryson quotes the anthropologist Nina Jablonski as saying. She adds: “And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the colour of their skin.”
Show all 40 1 /4040 books to read while self-isolating 40 books to read while self-isolating Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
40 books to read while self-isolating Catch 22, Joseph Heller It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage.
40 books to read while self-isolating Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming.
40 books to read while self-isolating Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work.
40 books to read while self-isolating 1984, George Orwell The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind.
40 books to read while self-isolating To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum.
40 books to read while self-isolating Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
40 books to read while self-isolating The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book.
40 books to read while self-isolating Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts.
40 books to read while self-isolating Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life.
40 books to read while self-isolating Lord of the Flies, William Golding Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile.
40 books to read while self-isolating Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities.
40 books to read while self-isolating Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb
40 books to read while self-isolating Middlemarch, George Eliot This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously.
40 books to read while self-isolating Secret History, Donna Tartt Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home.
40 books to read while self-isolating Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch.
40 books to read while self-isolating Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door.
40 books to read while self-isolating Beloved, Toni Morrison Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history.
40 books to read while self-isolating Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language.
40 books to read while self-isolating Dune, Frank Herbert You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised.
40 books to read while self-isolating Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond.
40 books to read while self-isolating A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece.
40 books to read while self-isolating Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides.
40 books to read while self-isolating Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed.
40 books to read while self-isolating Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read.
40 books to read while self-isolating Dracula, Bram Stoker Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men.
40 books to read while self-isolating Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963.
40 books to read while self-isolating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy.
40 books to read while self-isolating Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side.
40 books to read while self-isolating Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad.
40 books to read while self-isolating 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Trial, Frank Kafka “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance.
40 books to read while self-isolating Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker.
40 books to read while self-isolating The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.
4. You just aren’t built to walk on two legs. When our ape-like ancestors came down from the trees, there was an evolutionary advantage to walking upright: we could cover more ground and see further. But our skeleton is still largely engineered to cope with life on four feet, not two. As Bryson writes: “Becoming upright put extra pressure on the cartilage discs that support and cushion the spine, in consequence of which they sometimes become displaced or herniated in what is popularly known as a slipped disc.” General back pain is ridiculously common: some 60 per cent of adults suffer from it. Our knee and hip joints are nothing to brag about, either, giving out with dispiriting frequency.
But where we have really paid the price – as anyone who has been anywhere near a labour ward can testify – is in our ability to give birth. At a time when the cult of natural childbirth makes women feel as though they are perfectly formed to expel a baby with only a scented candle and a visualisation exercise or two for comfort, this is vital stuff. Bryson writes:
“Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much.”
5. You shed half a kilo of skin flakes every year. Enough said. Read The Body , just don’t read it over a bowl of pasta with shavings of parmesan.
The Body: A Guide for Occupants is out now
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