For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on Earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
— Anne Lamott
With the contours of our world having been reshaped, the past freeze-framed like a still from a poor 1980s music video and the future some sort of aberration of Elon Musk’s mind, we find ourselves trying to see the horizon from a sinkhole and find our footing on a sheath of invisible ice. How, in this time, when something smaller than a sliver of breath can loom larger than unhemmed edges of the night sky, can we remain steady – moored while unhinged?
If you’re in a bunker, with limited light and few possessions, and the world outside feels threatening, why not turn to the written page, that world between two ends, the jumping-off place: the plunge into page one?
We were told to shelter in place. We were told, if possible, to stay at home. We were told, among many things, to wash our hands and stay away and keep our mouths covered. So how else could we find one another? How else could we find the slipstream that let us escape long enough to get some perspective on where in God’s name we’ve been and where it is we might want to go?
“That’s the thing about books,” says author Jhumpa Lahiri. “They let you travel without moving your feet.”
What are people reading?
As a lover of literature, I’m interested in what other people are reading. This pandemic capsule can get claustrophobic at times. I’m curious as to what people have been drawn to and why. The political theater we’ve been living in resembles a bad Orwellian dream starring Benito Mussolini.
Whether or not we want to be at this particular show, there is no turning away from the worldwide protest against racial injustice and the righteous demand for equality, while the stage we’re all standing on is catching fire due to the rapid acceleration of climate change. And that’s just the overarching scaffolding of life in 2020, not the individual narratives that are living, breathing, thriving and dying within it.
My librarian friend sent me a meme that said something to the effect of “I wish the election would be over so that I can stop doomscrolling and get back to reading books.”
Well, the election is over (for most), and the reading has begun, or continued, those dogeared pages returned to or revisited.
What books have readers been immersed in, what have they reread, and what has resonated with them?
Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of Omega Institute who lives in Woodstock, said that her favorite book of the year has been “Elena Ferrante’s moody, funny and intense new novel, The Lying Life of Adults.” The book, set in Naples, Italy, centers around a teenage girl who learns that all the grownups in her life have been lying to her. “The whole book is about lies,” says Lesser, “lies as a way of not doing inner housecleaning – what I would call ‘shadow work.’ But it’s also about lying as an artform, and learning how to read people as they construct their versions of reality.”
If that’s all the book had been about – the construction of a compulsion to lie – that would have been enough, but there’s more. “[The] writing is so delicious, that I often had to stop and go back and read sentences aloud to myself, especially when they contained the names of streets in Naples. I can only imagine how radiant the experience would be if one could read the book in Italian.”
Keeping things in perspective
Theresa Fall, owner of Jar’d and the Parish in downtown New Paltz, said that since March she has been reading voraciously and/or listening to audiobooks while on long runs and bike rides. “I look to escape through reading, but I also doubled down on nonfiction [memoirs and self-help], aiming to better myself.”
In doing so, she read Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. “I cannot recommend Burnout enough,” said Fall. “Every woman I know needs to drop what they’re doing and read this book. I finished it and immediately went back and listened to two of the chapters I found most useful. It’s about stress and the toll it takes on us. and ways to release it from our bodies. It is insightful, validating and helpful.”
Other nonfiction books Fall loved included the memoir Educated by Tara Westover, Becoming Michelle Obama and The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin. “This book guides us through the author’s childhood and college years in Jamaica, being shuffled around and unwanted by the adults in her life. I laughed and cried in equal measure listening to her.” She said that Unbroken, the World War II story of one man’s unyielding desire to live and an inability to surrender his soul despite conditions that would kill most, helped her add “many extra miles to my runs and rides, not wanting to stop listening.”
The book gave her a sense of how others cope. “Somehow, reading and listening to the stories and struggles of other humans who overcame adversity in some of the harshest circumstances has reassured me and has helped me to keep things in perspective,” Fall reports.
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger of New Paltz and New York City added a book that he found particularly resonant and “perfect for our time,” Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, by Arthur Herman. “These were two immensely strong men who also had powerful visions that were vastly apart,” said Sulzberger. “But looking back, each played a critical role in leading our world to a better place. Don’t we need that leadership in our world today?”
Rich Gottlieb of Highland, former owner of Rock & Snow in downtown New Paltz and an outdoor enthusiast, said that his chosen read of the year thus far has been Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, which gives a masterful portrait of how America has been shaped throughout its history by a hidden caste system and a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
He shared a quote from the book: “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power: which groups have it and which do not.”
Said Gottlieb, “Until this country comes to terms with its past and present and we all work harder for equality, we will be unable to deal with many of the problems we face.”
A reminder to be grateful
High-school freshman Julia Napoli of Gardiner said that A book she has read “over and over” during the pandemic is Five Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott. The book centers around two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who are living with cystic fibrosis. They are not allowed to come any closer than six feet to each other, so that they don’t make each other sick with opportunistic infections. The book’s title reflects their decision to take back that last foot and make it five feet apart in order to regain some control over their lives.
“During this pandemic, it is really hard for us to social distance and stay six feet apart from our friends and families,” said Napoli. “But these teenagers in this book had to live their whole lives social-distancing from each other and their best friends, just so that they could stay alive. The book was a good reminder to be grateful, and that we all need to work together to get through this really hard, but temporary, situation. How we act during this time says a lot about our character.”
There are books that we return to, and we’re not even sure why. For Julie O’Connor, longtime editor of Almanac Weekly, it is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, about a character caught up in a tumultuous time in American history who has to overcome great odds.
For me, it’s been a homecoming to those books that have helped me be able to filter the world, make sense of it, and be able to hold the pain and the beauty in the arch of a sentence like this one from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson: “When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”
The novels of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison continually haunt and entice, like a worn vinyl blues album melted by the heat or a wildflower peeking out from a crack in parched pavement, aware of its imprisonment and beauty in equal measure. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes: “All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.”
We are here, like that arrow on a map trapped behind plexiglass on a wooden kiosk along a well-trodden trail,
I’m also called back to books that are written about where we live in the Hudson Valley, or take place in some fictional version of it. The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon illuminates the lives of radical antiwar castaways who were forced to go underground after their political actions ended in criminal violence. The main character is a single father trying to raise his daughter in the foothills of the Catskills and in the bucolic comfort of this region, while constantly trying to cover his tracks and block out his past. An intrepid reporter from Albany is a wolf at his heels. As we follow him, our heart pulses and breaks a little more, because we recognize the places, the towns. and the waterfalls where he seeks refuge.
As the author Jean Rhys put it, “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
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