Belle's Bookshelf

Now Belle would be curious about anything. And by anything, we really think it would be /everything/. Including the history of cannibalism.

Bill Schutt's sensational non-fiction piece answers some baffling questions: why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. But he goes into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species--including our own. Cannibalism places a perfectly natural occurrence into a vital new context and invites us to explore why it both enthralls and repels us.

There was certainly no Internet in 18th century France, but you can bet that if it existed then, Belle would be interested to know how this ~magic~ worked. How do webpages load on the internet? How does information go from one end of the world to another? Andrew Blum's Tubes takes us on a journey from the mega data centers to the wires that are piped under the ocean, to find out just how you can even load and read this.

In a huge castle deep in the forest... on a dark and stormy night.... there's nothing better than a good crime novel that will scare the bejesus out of you. The Wickey Boy is a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London. You got to have at least one good chilling tale in your library.

The love story between Belle and the Beast is certainly one that's... as old as time (ba dum tsh!). But what would they be like in the modern context today? And how would you define yours? David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary is an intimate window into the great events and quotidian trifles of being within a couple, giving us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time. Could Belle #relate?

We think Belle herself would be fascinated and interested in the inspiring stories of others. The ones who overcame the odds, the ones who fought to make it work, and the marginalised ones who broke the system.

Girl in Glass is Deanna Fei's record of the price of her daughter's life. Born nearly four months premature, Fei's daughter had to live her life over months in the hospital. But a year after she brought her daughter home, the CEO of her husband's company publicly blamed the medical bills of the beautiful, now-thriving little girl for a cut in employee benefits and attached a price tag to her life, setting off a national firestorm. With luminous prose and an unflinching eye, Fei explores what it means to save a life, the state of the American healthcare system and most importantly, how love takes hold when a new life defies all expectations.

Belle would be a feminist - no doubts about that. She'd be asking why beauty was important in measuring the worth of a woman, or why it was a factor at all. She'd be asking if erotic capital would be okay, or questioning if your feminist stance was intersectional. And she would have Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth under her huge feminist section.

In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife.

The publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.

And yet another book in her large feminist section. Through funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay brings us Bad Feminist -- a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.

With firsthand experience of a village turning against her loved one, and with a love that overcame the Beast's curse, Belle is one who knows about how extreme the human condition is.

Losing Found Things is the raw, unforgettable debut collection of fifteen short stories from award-winning writer and novelist Brett Garcia Rose, who takes readers past what lies on the surface and into the darkest corners of human experience.

Now with England as a close neighbour to France, Belle certainly must be familiar with the geopolitics of these two countries (and more of its neighbouring ones as well!). We bet her history section must be stuffed with riveting reads (no dry history books please!)

Princes at War is a riveting portrait of these four very different men miscast by fate. Deborah Cadbury draws on new research, personal accounts from the royal archives, and other never-before-revealed sources to create a dazzling sequel to The King’s Speech and tell the true and thrilling drama of Great Britain at war and of a staggering transformation for its monarchy.

Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a life of addiction, from the epiphany of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behaviours. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of the dependency and offers a brilliant disquisition on the psychopathology of addiction.

When ideas fail, words come in handy. But sometimes you can't find the right word, and what you want to say can't be found in the dictionary. English has its limitations, but the expression you're searching for may exist in another language. In Other Words is a unique collection of well-known and absolutely obscure “untranslatables”-linguistic gems that convey a feeling or notion with satisfying precision yet resist simple translation.

Alienation, ostracisation, banishment. Belle knows those all too well. And we bet her literature picks are wide ranging, such that they, too, would include the voices of the marginalised.

The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.

With all the reading that she does, we think Belle must be one creative and inspired person. But as a practical girl, we think she'll have this book in the case that one day, she's facing a creative block.

The Artist’s Way reveals how you can discover a way to unlock latent creativity and turn dreams into reality. Through a comprehensive 12-week program, recover from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.