I am writing this essay at the end of November. The Delta variant overran the country almost as soon as our borders reopened. Our hospitals are overwhelmed.
For my pleasure reading, I needed books I could trust, the safe, soothing hands of favorite writers. I started with the treasured galley I’d been saving of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
The Journal of the Plague Year was a gift from friends who had social-distanced with me around a heater in my airy garage in the dead of the Covid winter.
I was hoping the vaccines would end the pandemic, that life would return to normal, and that I’d start making time for the things I cared about that had fallen by the wayside, like reading.
It's been a wonderful year for visions and dreams—while most requirements from society faded in the background, it became easier to decipher subtler voices.
How many did I read? Not counting plays, not counting books started and not quite finished—forty five. Next year, I’ll fail better. Even if the number’s higher, the number will be the same: not enough.
In early summer, I discovered a special category I’ll call “books that sustain you while packing and moving to another city during a pandemic while parenting a small child.”
The lowest standard I hold for a book is that I want it to be so psychedelic, so completely discombobulating, that I am torn asunder. I want to read words that turn my bones to dust.
My mother’s death really impacted my ability to read. To stay focused. I didn’t read as much as I normally do in a year. But I did read—I did find occasional solace in literature as a means to heal.
Here's what's in the running for my 2021 Golden Breast Pump Awards: books that managed to break through my sleep deprivation and haze of postpartum fog.
Life in 2020 felt scary and small; this year it feels liminal, perhaps irrelevant. As in 2020, I'm still scared: less by Covid and more by...everything else.
Representation in today’s media is questionable in many ways. But Othello does provide us with a rule of thumb: we have to speak of others as they are.