Editor’s letter

Ancient Crete. Seventeenth-century Bohemia. Revolutionary Cuba. The planet Gethen. Those are just some of the places that books have allowed me to visit over the past year, even as the pandemic has largely kept me locked down at home. When the first wave of the coronavirus crashed into the U.S. last spring—and the reality of a world with no school for the kids and no nights out for the parents kicked in—I decided that I needed a reminder of how much worse things could be. So I picked up a suitably lengthy history of the Thirty Years’ War and, transported to the many miseries of Europe in the 1600s, felt distinctly grateful I didn’t have to deal with a plague and pillaging, pike-wielding armies of Swedes and Spaniards. My other book-induced getaways have been considerably more pleasant, including trips to alien worlds with Ursula K. Le Guin and a swashbuckling spin through 1890s Havana with Elmore Leonard. Next up, I might let Chang-rae Lee take me on a wild ride through 21st-century China. (See The Book List, p. 22.)

Elizabeth Bernstein notes in The Wall Street Journal that there are real psychological benefits to this kind of page-turning escapism. When you’re truly submerged in a book, the brain’s default-mode network—a web of brain structures that are activated when we’re not doing anything, and which can reverberate with worry and anxiety—is thought to calm down. But reading is much more than a stress-reducing sedative. At a time when so many of us are struggling with the mundanity of Covid-era life, deprived of restaurants and vacations and get-togethers with family and friends, books can provide us with some desperately needed novelty, surprise, and excitement. That is surely why 2020 was a bumper year for the publishing industry, with sales of print books up 8.2 percent over 2019 and e-books up 17 percent. “There is no frigate like a book,” poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “To take us lands away.” I’ll see you out there on deck.