Books that will soothe your pandemic angst — maybe
The semi-religious reading of coronavirus numbers, coronavirus charts, coronavirus graphs and coronavirus chyrons of impending doom is still no one’s idea of a good time, one would hope, but reading in general, by which I mean the habitual consumption of books, has a soothing quality that actually intensifies in a pandemic.
Sez me.
Your results may vary wildly depending on a multitude of factors, obviously, and while some readers of my acquaintance have described cases of poor concentration in a culture of high anxiety, I’ve found the opposite.
Typically, I resolve to read 12 books each year, which might seem modest to an audience of readers such as you, but I read slowly, both out of respect for authors who I know are virtually bleeding over a single balanced line of prose (so I’m not going past it at 100 miles per hour) and because I don’t always have the comprehension of the average bear.
No ground rules are fastened to the annual bookshelf, except that I like to read history on vacation and — perhaps counterintuitively — often reserve that time for heavier lifting. Last year’s vacation volume was part of the Rick Atkinson World War II trilogy, “The Guns at Last Light,” which was heavier than a small bag of dog food. Didn’t finish it until November, reading three books in the meantime.
Anyway, here it is Aug. 4, and I’m ... done.
Well, not done; I’ll keep going, but our general entrapment has evidently accelerated my habit. Here’s my pandemic book shelf, offered just in case you might see something that would prove soothing.
When the virus shut us down in mid-March, I’d just completed Book 3, a fairly recent Stephen King brick called “The Institute,” in which still more supernaturally clairvoyant children are kidnapped and milked for their precognitive talents at a remote, um, institute. Troubling, as usual. Book 2 was “Say Nothing, A true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland,” Patrick Radden Keefe’s penetrating examination of Ireland’s “Troubles,” delivered as a detective story about a cold-case abduction. Rich in political and religious intrigue, its imagery is Ireland-stark and Ireland-ironic — a teenage IRA operative carrying an AK-47 into a Belfast intersection one minute, then getting pulled home by the ear by his mam the next. Book 1 was “A Warning,” the one by the senior Trump administration official who’d earlier debuted as the New York Times’ op-ed bomber known as Anonymous. In “A Warning,” Anonymous cautions a feckless, uninformed, egomaniacal chief executive might one day get America into trouble. Preposterous, I know. The first full volume I devoured in the pandemic, Book 4 then, was “Race Against Time,” in which veteran newspaper reporter Jerry Mitchell agitates tirelessly for belated justice in some of the most infamous racial crimes that exploded across the South in the 1960s. Mr. Mitchell literally risks his life to pry open some legal windows that were painted shut decades ago. His petrified wife might kill him if what’s left of the Klan does not. A sizzling read.
Book 5 was the Harlan Coben exercise “Run Away,” some high-gloss pulp fiction in an anfractuous narrative draped on metropolitan drug violence, perverse family histories and DNA genetic testing and analysis, now an emerging theme in modern crime stories both fiction and non (see “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark”). Book 6 was a bit of a lark, “The Beatles From A to Zed,” a zany ride through the free associative mind of Peter Asher, an intimate friend of the band since 1963 when Paul McCartney, then dating Mr. Asher’s sister, moved into his house. Mr. Asher, better known as half of Peter and Gordon, went on to a music production career of serious influence and demonstrates here in the breeziest of styles there is always plenty you don’t know about the lads.
Book 7 was “Yogi, A Life Behind the Mask,” which is Jon Pessah’s definitive biography of baseball and malaprop Hall of Famer Yogi Berra. I generally steer away from sports books, but Yogi is an important figure, not only because he was in the Normandy Invasion, but his dynastic New York Yankees teams were always on the television at my grandparents’ house. Even at more than 500 pages, enthusiasts won’t regret another trip around the bases with the guy who once instructed his pizza maker to cut his pie in six pieces because “I can’t eat eight.”
After five nonfiction works in the first seven, the pandemic perhaps has driven me away from reality. It’s been all fiction since.
Book 8 was my introduction to Sally Rooney, whose “Normal People,” was on the list for the Mann Booker Prize in 2018, and is about students in Ireland who are not precisely normal, but normalize themselves through the intricacies of their own relationships. I think. Ms. Rooney, at least in this volume, does not use quotation marks when her characters are speaking, which annoyed me way too much.
Book 9 was also an introduction for me to British fiction-slinger Ruth Ware. “In a Dark, Dark Wood,” is an effective bad-place novel that doubles as a whodunit, and it was easily good enough to send me back to Ruth for Book 12, “The Turn of the Key,” also an effective badplace novel that doubles as a whodunit. I don’t know what Ms. Ware’s “The Woman in Cabin 10,” is about, but I have my suspicions.
Book 10 was among the more obscure Stephen King vehicles about another vehicle (Hello “Christine”), this one a ’50s era Buick Roadmaster. “From a Buick 8,” has a genesis story in Butler, near where Mr. King stopped on a drive from Florida to Maine and nearly fell into a creek. King fans will enjoy, especially the horror master’s presentation of Western Pennsylvania characters in the state police.
Book 11 was the latest Michael Connelly construction, “Fair Warning,” in which Mr. Connelly’s recurrent crime-writing hero chases down a serial killer who has been unleashed by a corrupted DNA-analysis network. A worthy Connelly page turner with chapters that are, in some cases, shorter than this column.
So there are my 12. Hope you might enjoy one or two.
Next up: “Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
What ever could that be about?