With Selected by.... we offer you a selection of books that our exhibiting artists have picked out. We are delighted to present Pippa Garner’s selection. Fiona Alison Duncan tells us more about the artist’s choices:
‘Frustrated there isn’t more in this tradition, Pippa Garner loves to read classic narrative literature by women. Preferring to read about life before the assembly line became a global standard, when more objects in the world were unique than not, she finds the male novelists of her favorite era, the 19th century (for example Balzac or Flaubert) to be uninspiring in their cool determination to be right. Garner prefers female voices, she says, because they are warm and sensitive to emotional social dynamics. One exception to her gender preference is the humorist Henry Fielding, whose book The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Garner has been reading in bits and bites over the last year and a half. Ivanhoe is another – she loves the court jester character.
Legally blind, reading is not easy for Garner (she can only read for short stints on grey e-ink displays), and yet she reads every day that she can.’
Here are some of the books she has read and enjoyed in recent years:
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Emma, Jane Austen
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding
Ivanhoe: A Romance, Walter Scott
Middlemarch, George Eliot