As the Service95 Book Club turns three, we’re celebrating reading the world differently together, across 34 Monthly Reads handpicked by Dua, by taking a moment to reflect on how books can guide you through every twist and turn life can bring.
We’ve asked some literary friends of Service95 to share the books that capture specific decades in life, from your twenties to your sixties (and beyond). Here, author Anton Hur, 45, lists the books that have shaped his forties.
Forty is where middle age begins, and middle age means “old enough to have the wisdom to change and yet young enough to have the energy to change”, I’d say. Your forties is when you have no choice but to accept that life means change, nothing stays the same, but with a little effort and a lot of luck, you might be able to surf this transition and revel in its brilliant chaos without losing your soul.
There’s one book that has stuck with me through life – The Waves by Virginia Woolf, who (aptly) wrote it in her late forties and which I read in my early twenties. I still remember the surprise I felt – like the shock of icy rain on a hot summer day – when I realised what the author was doing on the page and followed, hardly drawing breath, her experiment to its invigorating conclusion. The work of an artist in her prime, which she could not have written in any other decade of her life.
I was a late bloomer, which is very common in the literary arts – AS Byatt, whom I named myself after, once declared novel-writing a “middle-aged profession” – and so books and stories about unexpected change, human flourishing and older people falling in love have always been, for me, the maps of the heart that showed me the way. These are the ones that have, for me, captured this phase of life.
A Feminist's Guide To ADHD: How Women Can Thrive And Find Focus In A World Built For Men by Janina Maschke
Many people with ADHD, especially women, are diagnosed later in life, as their masking behaviours are so successful that they seem like highly functional adults on the outside but struggle with focus, productivity and memory on the inside. An impulse purchase that ended up changing my life.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
As a literary translator, I am exasperated by English readers being so neglectful of short story collections when some of the best fiction being written today is in the short form. This queer, sexy and churchy collection of stories cohere into a vividly lived narrative of women on the cusp of change.
Spawning Season: An Experiment In Queer Parenthood by Joseph Osmundson
‘Am I going to have kids?’ was not a question I thought I would be seriously asking in my forties. What are the possibilities of family for queer people in 2026? What are the previously unimagined joys and heartaches ahead in such uncharted territory?
That Summer’s End by Lee Seong-bok, translated by Anton Hur
These are love poems about the happily ever after, the long stretch of life (and afterlife) in the lasting echo of youthful passion and, at one point in the collection, the twilight of civilisation itself. You’ll live a whole life of love in this book.
The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, And The Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Ever heard of galaxy-brain? This book, which combines rigorous science with vigorous metaphor, will give you universe-brain. The older you get, the harder it becomes to understand new things, but the more such things, once learned, stays with you. Some may even call this wisdom.
