MANILA, Philippines – It’s okay not to read at a time like this. It’s okay to be anxious, to despair about an increasingly vague future. A Harvard Business Review article says what we’re feeling is collective grief. We’re aching at “the loss of normalcy, the fear of economic toll, the loss of connection.” We’ve lost our peace of mind. We are compulsively refreshing our feeds for new updates about lockdowns and deaths and possible cures every minute.
But once you get even just a semblance of calm, maybe pick up a book. There is a pandemic, but books have hardly changed – they can still offer solace or escape. They can also help us make sense of the disquiet and isolation we are all simultaneously feeling right now.
Here’s a list of books that can perhaps help you do just that. They, one way or the other, touch on the theme of isolation while also offering the possibility of hope.
(Editor’s note: All of the books may be purchased in e-book form online.)
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Maybe a book eerily set in “Year 20” in a post-pandemic wasteland might not be the most enticing thing to read right now, but do reconsider. Unlike the film Contagion that perturbs with its verisimilitude, Station Eleven is literary and speculative.
The book follows the journey of the so-called Travelling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians, across the American continent ravaged by a flu that killed 99% of mankind. In Mandel’s post-apocalypse, Shakespeare persists, but so does Star Trek and comics, inviting questions about what kind of art endures in a desolate world. Though it has a discernible plot and what can be considered a conventional villain, the book draws suspense less from action-packed pursuits and more from its characters’ recollections of the past.
Though Mandel’s fictional future might seem distant in its bleakness, when she writes, “Hell is the absence of the people you long for,” it seems like she is speaking directly of our current crisis.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Maybe a book about Jesuits who go to a distant planet to meet extraterrestrial life can help with your plans to momentarily escape from Earth. The Sparrow revolves around a secret Jesuit mission to a planet called Rakhat, whose inhabitants had been sending radio broadcasts of their music to an observatory on Earth. At the very start of the novel, we learn that the expedition is a tragedy, with only one survivor from their team. The book alternates between 2060, as the lone survivor confronts his trauma and guilt, and 2019, as the group makes initial contact and later makes seemingly innocent decisions that eventually spell out their doom.
Through these two timelines, The Sparrow is able to tackle hefty, philosophical themes, like the existence of God and human suffering, while also painting a full, well-rounded picture of what alien life and culture might be like. The extraterrestrial characters in the novel seem just as real as the ones from Earth, with their own languages and cities and ways of life.
The novel has been used in many a theology class to explain the concept of theodicy, or the question of why God could allow evil to exist. The Sparrow does not claim to know the answer, but “God will break your heart,” its main character says.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Prepare to be charmed by ghosts in this experimental novel set during America’s Civil War.
The novel takes place in 1862, after Abraham Lincoln loses his son Willie to typhoid fever. Willie’s spirit doesn’t immediately go to the afterlife, as he finds himself in the bardo, a Buddhist term for the liminal space between life and death, along with other ghosts. The ghosts have no idea they are dead and only believe themselves sick, even referring to the cemetery as a hospital yard and their coffins as “sick boxes.” But the more they stay in the bardo, the more disfigured they get.
Typically, a novel about grief deals with those left behind. But Saunders’ conceit is to make the dead accept their own death, which is its own kind of grief. The format of Saunders’ book is unconventional, as it switches between dialogue among the ghosts and historical accounts – both real and invented – of the Civil War era. The book won the 2017 Man Booker prize, celebrated for being “a thrilling exploration of death, grief and the deeper meaning and possibilities of life.”
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go is a bleak, depressing novel about 3 friends who grow up in a bizarre, secluded boarding school that grooms its students for a simultaneously noble and cruel purpose. They grow up together, learn art and literature and how to be persons in a world from which they are sheltered, all the while unaware of the role they are expected to play when they come of age.
It takes page upon page to discover the tragedy of this novel, as the author builds a lot of suspense around the truth of the boarding school while also deepening and complicating the relationship between the 3 friends. But even with the tension, the prose maintains a chilling, almost Gothic, calm and gives the reader some space to think about how we treat others, especially the vulnerable.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
After the death of her father, Helen Macdonald decides to master her grief by training a goshawk. Introduced to hawking in her youth by her late father, she decides that training the wild raptor would be a way of connecting with him as she mourns his absence. The resulting year of training the goshawk she names Mabel is what we read about in Macdonald’s memoir. She generously lets the reader in on her grief as she remembers her relationship with her father, and elaborates on the difficulties of training a creature such as Mabel.
Beyond these two threads, Macdonald also takes particular interest in the author TH White, who himself wrote about hawking. Fascinated by the author’s life, Macdonald learns of the personal struggles that led him to seek a sort of peace in hawking, just as she did to overcome her grief. H is for Hawk is not only an affecting memoir about loss, but it is also an incredible work of nature writing. Macdonald is a known naturalist, and her writing also paints nature as an important salve to human grief and heartache.
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
In this part memoir, part lesson in art history, writer and critic Olivia Laing takes us on a study of loneliness through visual art. Looking at the works of Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz, among others, Laing makes sense of these artists’ loneliness as well as her own as she navigates life in the bigness and inevitable sadness of New York. She looks back on the artists’ lives and explores the personal and political roots of their loneliness, painting a partial picture of what pushed them to produce the work that they are remembered for.
Writing with empathy and curiosity, Laing raises a lot of questions about human connection, social pressures, and technology. Far from mere navel-gazing, the book proclaims, “We are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice…Loneliness is personal, and it is also political.”
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
In this collection of essays, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino reveals an acute awareness of what it is like to live in the 21st century. Trick Mirror covers multiple themes that run through millennial life, from the despair of always being online, to the consumerist logic of fitness and wellness regimes often aimed at the so-called modern woman.
Tolentino is sharp when she talks about these grand things, but her voice is just as arresting when she delves into the more personal, like her ambivalence towards marriage and her conservative upbringing laced with hip-hop and drugs. Tolentino’s lucidness is admirable and enviable, and it brings up as many questions as it does answers, making it a good companion for times when we have a little more room to be contemplative.
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
A global pandemic does not arrest the world’s other problems, and now is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that sexual harassment continues to torment victims.
In Know My Name, Chanel Miller comes forward with her story of assault by a Stanford student athlete and details her difficult, often solitary, path to justice. Her journey perfectly shows how the justice system retraumatizes victims by framing their experiences as something they could have avoided rather than something that should not have been done to them at all. She candidly opens up about her depression after the experience, and reflects on the ways in which her loved ones were also affected by the cold and unbending nature of the legal process. But most of all, Miller offers a hopeful voice to other victims: “The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom.” – Rappler.com
There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.