Triple Choice Tuesday: Bookish Beck

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form!

Today’s guest is Rebecca Foster, who blogs at Bookish Beck.

Rebecca is from Maryland, USA but has lived in England since 2007. She works as a freelance proofreader of academic writing, and as a literary critic for BookBrowse, Foreword Reviews and Shelf Awareness. Her book reviews have also appeared in the Church Times, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Times Literary Supplement and Wasafiri.

A former library assistant, she volunteers at her local library and curates her neighbourhood’s Little Free Library. She especially enjoys following literary prizes and has three times been a manuscript judge for the McKitterick Prize for debut novelists over 40.

Without further ado, here are Rebecca’s choices:

A favourite book: ‘Sixpence House’ by Paul Collins

I rarely reread anything, but my three choices are all books that have stood up to a reread.

Apart from some childhood favourites, Sixpence House is probably the book I’ve read the most, usually corresponding with visits to Hay-on-Wye, Wales (eight times so far, between 2004 and 2023). Collins, with his wife and young son, moved to Hay from San Francisco in 2000, hoping to make a life there. As they house-hunted and he edited his manuscript on inventors whose great ideas flopped (Banvard’s Folly), he was drawn into working for Richard Booth, the eccentric bookseller who transformed Hay into the world’s first Book Town.

The memoir is warm, funny in a Bill Bryson-esque way and nostalgic. I first read it in 2003, whetting my appetite for study abroad in the UK.

Each time I visit, Hay has changed: bookshops have closed or opened; the main streets have gentrified, with hipster eateries and coffee houses; and the castle has gone from a ruin to a proper tourist destination. I often wonder what Collins (and Booth, who died in 2019) would make of it today.

Sixpence House also inspired me to make pilgrimages to other Book Towns in the UK and internationally.

A book that changed my world: ‘Conundrum’ by Jan Morris

This was one of the books that helped me to move beyond the conservative Christianity of my upbringing and understand sexuality as a continuum rather than a fixed entity. It’s also one of the very first autobiographical works I remember reading. These days, life writing makes up a huge proportion of my reading.

Morris was a true trans pioneer. Her concise memoir opens: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

It took many years – a journalist’s career, including the scoop of the first summiting of Mount Everest in 1953; marriage and five children; and nearly two decades of hormone therapy – before surgery confirmed her gender identity. Morris describes feeling like she’d been a spy in privileged all-male circles. She also speculates that her travelogues arose from “incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.”

The focus is more on her unchanging soul than on her body, so Conundrum is not a sexual tell-all but a record of a spiritual quest toward true identity. There is joy in new life rather than regret at time wasted in the ‘wrong’ one.

A book that deserves a wider audience: ‘The Sixteenth of June’ by Maya Lang

This playful literary debut has flown under the radar since its release nearly a decade ago. Set on the centenary of the original Bloomsday, it transplants many characters and set pieces from Ulysses to near-contemporary Philadelphia. But even if (like me) you’ve never read James Joyce’s masterpiece, you’ll have no trouble following the plot. In fact, Lang dedicates the book to “all the readers who never made it through Ulysses (or haven’t wanted to try)”.

On 16 June 2004, brothers Leopold and Stephen Portman hold their grandmother Hannah’s funeral at the local synagogue in the morning, and their parents’ annual Bloomsday party at their opulent Delancey Street home in the evening. Between the two thematic poles – genuine grief and regret on the one hand, and superficial entertainment on the other – the story expands to build a nuanced picture of three ambivalent twenty-something lives.

The third side of the novel’s atypical love triangle is Nora, who is Stephen’s best friend from Yale – and Leo’s fiancée. Nora, a trained opera singer, is reeling from her mother’s death from cancer a year ago. During my rereading, I was captivated by the portraits of loss, and the characterisation and dialogue felt fresh as ever.

What do you think of Rebecca’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

I have to admit that these are all new titles to me, and they all sound fantastic, particularly the Joycean-inspired The Sixteenth of June, which has gone straight onto my wishlist!