The world is nowhere near normal, or this is the new normal, or it was never normal. I’m not sure, but I’m learning how to return to myself, a writer, a reader.

In Cleveland, the first 30 pages of so many novels. Susan Miller’s tweets. E-mails from my landlord about the mice.

As a new mother, whose body and brain and constitution were being pulled in every direction, I didn’t want to be seen. What the best books do is see you, meet you where you are. I couldn’t do that, not yet.

I’ve been writing my second novel for a year and a half now, starting in May 2020, the peak of the pandemic lockdowns when time was crushed into a colorless smear of minutes, hours, and days.

Throughout these months, I’ve turned to story, as I always do, for advice about life, for models of family and togetherness.

We stopped at the Topaz Internment Camp, where my wife’s family was held during World War II, near the tiny town of Delta, Utah. We found the apocalyptic remnants of one of our country’s great shames.

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.

I had bought a used copy of Wide Sargasso Sea from Powell’s. I opened it two years later, and found a world within of alienation, love, and madness.

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.

And so, I’m giving myself a little grace, as we all should. We are all doing our best; I keep reminding myself of this.

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.

Each of these books taxonomizes the passing of anything that even remotely looked like it could be described naively as the "American Dream."