100 books like Falling Angels

Speaking of authors who combine stylistic daring with profound emotion, I give you George Saunders. Saunders’s strange and funny stories prompted me to try my hand at writing fiction, and his first novel is one of my favorite books.

Inspired by the true story of Abraham Lincoln sneaking, on multiple occasions, into a Washington D.C. crypt to cradle the corpse of his young son, Willie, this book also breathes life into a sizeable cast of ghosts squatting in the “Bardo”—a liminal space between life and death. As the American Civil War rages, President Lincoln and the unwilling ghosts must all come to terms with the inevitability of death. This book is a great American novel, equally hilarious and heart-breaking.

This amazing account of the Edwardian struggle for women's suffrage was published in 1911, in the thick of it. While doing research for Sally Heathcote Suffragette, I discovered a review of it in Votes for Women, the official paper of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). It weaves the stories of three fictional women into what were then very recent events in suffrage history, bringing them to life. The Sally in the title, like my Sally, is a maid-of-all-work A coincidence? Yes, but not really surprising. Domestic service was the most likely form of employment for a woman of no means before the First World War; Sally (from Sarah) was a common name then and it alliterates well with ‘suffragette’.

Purple, white, and green are the colours of the WSPU regalia. Suffragette ephemera fascinates me, especially their merchandising (soap, chocolate, board games, chinaware - all sorts of things). I first heard of it at a presentation by Diane Atkinson. This book is the catalogue of an exhibition she put together when she was a curator at the Museum of London. An excellent resource, it's full of images with pointers for where to find more. Ephemera is great for giving a sense of period, so I asked the artists on the graphic novel to cram in all they could.

That suffragette who 'threw herself' under the King's horse. Supposedly. Emily Wilding Davison was trampled on the Derby Day racecourse at Epsom on June 4th, 1913. Two WSPU flags were found pinned inside her coat. She died on July 8th, without having regained consciousness. When she was carried off the racecourse, she also had her pockets full. She had the return part of a rail ticket, notepaper, envelopes, and stamps, a race card marked with her fancies up to the fateful 3 pm race, and her helper’s pass card for the WSPU Summer Festival in Kensington, valid for 2.30 to 10.30 pm that day.

It isn’t clear that she was planning suicide. Indeed, she’d placed bets on horses and arranged to be an official at the festival later on. If this kind of detail fascinates you too, this book is a must-read.

If you're looking for a meticulous account of the day-to-day life and work of a women's suffrage campaigner, this is the book to turn to. I was intrigued by the diarist's accounts of well-known historical events, such as the funeral procession for Emily Wilding Davison, which she participated in, even though she herself was a constitutional suffragist rather than a militant suffragette. The diaries are edited by a leading researcher and archivist in the field and full of explanatory notes that contextualise the daily entries.

Given that she’s covering 199 cemeteries in 224 pages, it’s not surprising that Rhoads’ condensed descriptions sometimes sound like canned information from brochures and websites. It’s also focused on the Northern Hemisphere: the U.S. and Canada account for 100 of the 199 cemeteries, with another 55 in Europe, leaving 44 cemeteries for the rest of the world. Despite these limitations, 199 Cemeteries is a handy bucket list to noteworthy burial grounds around the globe. Rhoads goes beyond standard churchyards and cemeteries to include sacred spaces like the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco, the Anglo-Saxon burial mounds of Sutton Hoo in England, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Her book is a worthy successor to John Francis Marion’s landmark Famous and Curious Cemeteries, out-of-print but available used. 

If you like visiting cemeteries, then this slender, profusely illustrated volume is a necessity. Keister, a professional photographer, covers an impressively wide variety of topics. He outlines key architectural forms and defines the meaning of floral, animal, and religious iconography. Keister goes beyond the standard New England skull-and-crossbones to identify symbols used in various regions and cultures, and discusses Hebrew, Islamic, and Chinese, and Japanese religious icons in addition to Christian motifs. He also includes handy features like an alphabetical list of acronyms of societies, clubs, and organizations to help decipher mysterious abbreviations. A concluding chapter on “Final Impressions” profiles unique and unusual memorials from around the world. Keister’s excellent photographs illustrate the various symbols succinctly. 

I love a story set in a time and place I have scant reference for. Based partly on the English author’s experiences visiting Hollywood (during the filming of Brideshead Revisited), this book features a hyper-specific look at British expat life in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Sure, why not?

Things really get moving when the pet funeral home and love triangle plots begin a catastrophic entanglement that can only end in tragedy (but, like, in that ironic way, that’s fun to read about).

If you are going to read Orwell you need to know something about what Mckibbin calls the “fundamental mentalities and structures” of English social and political life. This is the best, covering Orwell’s life-span. These were the years when England first began to see itself as ‘democratic’, and yet, “the great mass of the English people was unmoved, or unmoved directly, by the cultures of the country’s intellectual elites”. Enter George Orwell.

Becky Sharpe is a character impossible to forget.

Through all the twists and turns of this plot, Becky shows herself to be both conniving and resilient in her quest to use those around her for her own gain. While not an attractive rendition of human nature, she forever has a wolf at her door and does what she thinks she must to stay one step ahead.

One gets whiplash from sympathizing with her one minute and being appalled by her lack of scruples the next, but, like all the characters she hoodwinks, we are captivated by her as someone who is never boring. She hops from one doomed circumstance to the next, and we are along for the ride.