Corona-Summer Reading
When libraries and bookstores closed in March, I realized I was stuck with the books I had on hand. It was a bad moment.
A lot of people read before bed, but I do my reading first thing in the morning. I make coffee and sit on the couch and read for half an hour before anyone else in my house gets up. The end table where my coffee sits is usually stacked with books: books I’m reading, books I’m waiting to read, and books I’ve mostly (but not completely) given up on.
In mid-March, that stack was small. I felt somewhat desperate. How was I going to get through the privations and fears of the pandemic without more books?
Reluctantly, I picked up a novel I’d briefly tried, then discarded: “The Resisters,” by Gish Jen, a novelist whose 1991 debut, “Typical American,” I’d loved.
The early scenes of “The Resisters” are sad and odd. A father worries about his preemie newborn, strange words and terms must be glorked from context (the Netted, DroneMinders, iBurrito), and ominous platoons of Canada geese patrol the neighborhood. Initially I didn’t have the fortitude to make it through those pages.
With my options limited, though, I decided to try again. This time, within a chapter or two, I found myself under the spell of Jen’s odd, lively language and inventive imagination. Of her spiky, clear-sighted humanity.
I know some of you are thinking, “Why didn’t Rachel just go find her Kindle?” I might have, eventually, if I’d gotten more desperate. But this is a story about how some books need a little patience. It’s a story about how sometimes the mood and the book don’t match until, unpredictably, they do.
I was a novelist long before I was a newspaper editor, and I also taught fiction writing for many years. I’ve thought persistently and continually about the question “What are novels for?”
Not that I have an answer. Mostly what I have are more questions.
Is fiction escapist? If so, is that bad?
Are novels educational? If so, is that bad?
Should we judge a novel more by the immersiveness of its storytelling, the beauty of its language (whether austere or lyrical), the depth and humanity of its characters, the inventiveness of its form, or some other metric?
Why do so many people seem embarrassed when they tell me what books they love and what books they’ve never read? And why do so many people tell me they know I’ll love a certain book when they have no idea what kind of books I love?
Mostly I’ve made my peace with the fact that these questions are largely unanswerable. Fashions in literature change. People have individual passions and particular needs, and these change with time, and age, and — who knows — maybe the weather. Sometimes I want a book to challenge me. Other times I want a book to comfort me.
Amidst a global pandemic, and mass unemployment, and nationwide reckonings about racism, I find myself hungry for both comfort and challenge. Maybe you feel the same.
Fortunately, the pages of this newspaper are brimming with recommendations to suit many moods and tastes.
Fortunately, the library and the bookstores are open again.
Recommended
(F) The Resisters by Gish Jen. Girls playing baseball, baseball as an act of resistance against authoritarianism, and knitting.
(F) Kindred by Octavia Butler. Even friends who don’t usually like time-travel books mostly make an exception for this compelling story of a woman who keeps traveling back to the slave plantation where her ancestors were born.
(F) Red Clocks by Leni Zumas. Set just a few years in the future, when Roe v. Wade is overturned, the stories of five women in a cliffside town in Oregon overlap and intersect.
(F) Writers and Lovers by Lily King. An immersive novel about a young writer/waitress trying to figure out love and art.
(F) The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. Does anyone read Wharton anymore? They should! She’s a half-forgotten writer with a quite contemporary sensibility. This story of women, ambition, class, and marriage is a wonderful case in point.
