What we should read right now
Overwhelmed by the news? Authors recommend books to enter a new decade
Anew decade dawns, and rarely has it felt like we’re at such a critical turning point. The U.S. Senate opened an impeachment trial to determine whether President Donald Trump abused his power and obstructed Congress. American foreign policy has been upended and nationalism is on the rise globally, even as climate change threats grow. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have cracked open difficult and important conversations that will continue as we head into the November election.
With all of this in mind, I asked a wide-ranging group of authors what books we should be reading as we start 2020. The query wasn’t intended to solicit the latest nonfiction tome on the political moment, but rather, put simply: What book do you turn to in uncertain times?
Sharing book recommendations is a communal act, one that can prove as contagious as panic — and hopefully more so. — Jennifer Day, Tribune books editor
Here’s what I read for relief: Poets like Barbara Crooker, Naomi Shihab Nye, Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. I love James Crews’ anthology “Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection.” I read the essayists who focus on the charm in humanity that can always be found if we will just look: E.B White, Joseph Mitchell, Rick Bragg and Garrison Keillor .I am lifted up by novels with heart and hope, like “The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted” by Robert Hillman, and the work of Anne Tyler and Kent Haruf. Cookbooks cheer me up quite a bit, especially Ann Hodgman’s “Beat This” and “Beat That,” with wonderful recipes and very funny commentary; try her apple crisp and roast chicken, and it may put the giddy-up in your serotonin level.
— Elizabeth Berg, author of “The Confession Club”
I spent Christmas alone at what I termed “white lady camp.” It is one of those places that Oprah has visited where one pays homage to the earth’s vibrations. After four straight years of constant publishing, traveling and teaching, I needed to read a book. White lady camp seemed as good a milieu to escape the incessant drumbeat of war, chaos and willful ignorance as any. The challenge was what books? I chose Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People,” because the masterful scale of her intellectual history is an antidote to smallness of the current media cycle. The book contextualizes the idea of whiteness, as a people, an idea and a set of beliefs. It is very useful for understanding Donald Trump’s fascination with his lineage and the Western world’s dance with authoritarianism. These ideas about whiteness provide an intangible cognitive protectionism for people and always have. Grand narratives, written fiercely, comfort me. They offer context — times really have been worse. They also offer pragmatic hope that whatever world survives our attempts to destroy the earth, a writer will be there to turn our felonious foibles into allegories that future generations may heed.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of “Thick”
It was a privilege meeting Czeslaw Milosz, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He’d survived both the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland and regarded his work as resistance to “the practice of the lie.” He said that during the Warsaw Uprising, poetry was second only to bread. One fed the body, the other the spirit. His words resonate in a time of climate change deniers, when democratic institutions are being undermined by Russian interference and “alternate facts.” An American writer of a poetry as basic as bread was W.S. Merwin, who died last year at 91. When the American Writers Museum opened in Chicago in 2017, it honored Merwin’s work with a gallery that featured a living palm forest where visitors interacted with his poem “Place” that begins: “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.” School kids came and added their lines in response to his beautiful poem and to our jeopardized future.
— Stuart Dybek, author of “The Coast of Chicago”
At times like these, when the demolition of patriarchy is so urgently necessary, I turn to Jane Austen. For instance, “Pride and Prejudice.”
“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
And so begins one of the angriest scenes in English literature — one of the sexiest too. It isn’t polite at all. Elizabeth Bennet blasts Darcy with his (supposed) faults, and concludes thus:
“I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
That term, “prevailed on”, sums up the 19th-century marriage market, a lottery in which women’s desires rarely took precedence over their dowries. But the TONE is not subjugated at all, but brave and free as hell. She really lets him have it! To write so devastatingly about the rights and privileges and maneuverings of upper-class women, Austen must have read Wollstonecraft. But it’s this book and this scene in particular that are the true start of feminism in England.
— Lucy Ellmann, author of “Ducks, Newburyport”
We’re living, we are told, in Orwellian times. The namesake of this dark era, George Orwell, is known best for his painfully prescient novel, “1984.” Yet Orwell was also a magnificent essayist. “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell,” spanning the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, are treasure caves shimmering with verbal gems. Spelunk further and you encounter a humane and curious soul making his uncertain way through an uncommonly cruel stretch of history. He changes course occasionally, but his moral compass always points north, and he never loses sight of the pleasures that make life worthwhile. “Spring is here,” Orwell writes, “and they can’t stop you enjoying it.” Atom bombs pile up in factories and lies stream from loudspeakers, “but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”
— Daniel Immerwahr, author of “How to Hide and Empire”
There is so much to fear in this world right now, so many things to make us rigid with dread, and I find my single best antidote to all of it is to stay curious. Things change shape when you can keep asking questions about them. Monoliths break down, foregone conclusions become less so, and even dictators show their seams. Coming from a place where there is always more to unpack, more to understand, gives me the mental flexibility required to imagine better outcomes. Enter Lynda Barry’s “Making Comics,” a book that is every bit as much about creative problem solving as it is drawing. What I love most about Barry is not just her exercises, but the way she thinks about thinking, How do we learn? What is the relationship between a thought, a dream, a memory, and a story? Reading “Making Comics” makes me want to wade into the areas I feel unsure about, which at this point is … everything? And that’s the whole point.
— Mira Jacob, author of “Good Talk”
One book I’ve returned to a few times is “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto. In a completely different life years ago, I was in Hong Kong on a business trip, when I happened across the U.K. edition in the Page One bookstore (I never really liked the U.S. cover). I knew it was the book for me from the opening paragraph, in which the narrator mimics the sound of light bouncing off kitchen tile (“ting! ting!”). This novel is about a young woman Mikage whose last living family member, her grandmother, has just passed, and she begins to improvise a new life with friends she’s just met. It’s about these adventures, but I think it’s also about how catastrophic pain can sensitize you to beauty and pleasure even when you’re grieving. “Kitchen” is melancholic but not despairing, gentle in tone but aware, comforting without false adages. Reading it for the first time in a foreign city, the experience was like encountering someone very familiar but unplaceable.
— Ling Ma, author of “Severance”
Bertholt Brecht once asked if there would be singing in the dark times and he concluded that yes there would be singing, because we would have to sing about the dark times. I think it is one of the primary jobs of literature to excavate the heartbreak of the world around us. In the course of that excavation we, as readers, try to find some beauty in the rubble. We sift through and find consolation, sometimes in the smallest, most unlikely moments. I find this music in just about every book I read. At this moment I am reading Ariel Dorfman’s extraordinary new novel, “Cautivos.” Even though it is set in the final years of the 16th century, in the world of Cervantes, it is a novel about today and the discovery of song in the dark times. Great books open up the lungs of the world for us. We are never the same when we read the right words put down in the correct order. I constantly turn to writers like Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Louise Erdrich and so many others. Literature is where I find my faith.
— Colum McCann, author of “Apeirogon”
Point of view, voice and focus are very important to me right now. It’s easy to get lost. The book that I’ve gone to in the last few weeks is “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return” by Marjane Satrapi. Its lessons are so profoundly relevant. It’s a graphic novel memoir about an Iranian woman growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. A girl then woman faces, interacts with, talks to her country, religion, culture. She leaves. She comes back.
There is terror. There is resistance. There are consequences. There is helplessness. There is growth. And through it all there is laughter. The whole book is a great big reminder. Satrapi said it well: “The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”
— Nnedi Okorafor, author of “Binti: The Complete Trilogy”
Perhaps it seems counterintuitive to suggest turning to horror literature. In a horror story, a terrible truth is typically revealed. Hope springs from the shared, communal recognition that something is indeed monstrously wrong. Ultimately, we will not survive, yet we choose to go on anyway. With all that in mind, my recommendation is John Langan’s “The Fisherman.” It’s a sprawling, time-hopping epic that opens quietly, with two widowers attempting to simply go on in the face of their depthless grief. In their search for the Dutchman’s Creek that doesn’t appear on any map, they discover a wild legend, one that cracks the novel open. “The Fisherman” manages to be contemplative, rollicking, terrifying, empathic and ultimately redemptive. Langan’s characters (and we the readers) realize the impossibility of going on in the same manner as we had before because of the truth: We’ve always been living in uncertain times.
— Paul Tremblay, author of “Growing Things”
I always teach Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” so I reread it for each new class. It’s one of the most virtuosic novels I’ve ever encountered. There’s so much chaos in those opening sections, people dumbfounded at how their lives have ended up. And then, in a section called “A to B,” Stephanie says to her brother, “I feel like everything is ending,” and Jules, just out of prison for a horrible transgression, tells her, “Sure, everything is ending … but not yet.” And in the second half of the book, the characters transform themselves, find new endings that seemed impossible before. I love that acknowledgment that, although we don’t have much time left, there’s still an opportunity for redemption. I don’t know if my students, so young, feel the weight of that moment, but it always kills me. Egan makes me believe that there’s still time left for all of us.
— Kevin Wilson, author of “Nothing to See Here”
“Fifty-Two Stories” by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A face in a photograph destroyed by a child with a needle, a middle-aged landowner tearfully chewing the sour green fruit of his gooseberry bushes, an adulterous woman’s underwear reminding her boyfriend of fish scales; it doesn’t matter if it one reads Chekhov during the Trump or the Nixon or the McKinley administration — his stories condense the chaos of experience into an intoxicating liquor of lucidity that always pours smooth, reminding us that life really is worth living, regardless of when. Written astonishingly quickly, serialized in 19th-century Russian magazines and gathered by generations of humans in countless incomplete collections, you could spend your whole life trying to read them all and be pretty sure you haven’t, but new English translations of 52 of them by 21st-century time travelers Pevear and Volokhonsky out in April will certainly offer a reason to stay alive long enough to try.
— Chris Ware, author of “Rusty Brown”
E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web,” which I read with my mother when I was 6, was the first book I ever cried over. The death of that spider was very affecting, yet somehow not depressing. There was a hopefulness at work.
Fast-forward 30 years, when I read “Charlotte’s Web” with my own child. At the end he cried, and I did too.
In this frightening, enraging political moment, I am a little wistfully envious of my friends who have young kids, for they know that despite the perils right now, it’s important that they go home and read to their children. Parent and child have a chance to be enclosed, and to be reminded of what matters: to feel empathy together for other lives. Good literature can do that. “Charlotte’s Web” certainly does. I think I’ll read it again now.
— Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Female Persuasion”