What a strange, strange time. For the first installation of our Housebound blog, we thought we’d reach out to friends to ask for some reading recs. Some of us have had a hard time focusing and reading, and others have been able to take advantage of the upped alone time. Either is understandable, neither is ideal. Below are some conversations and recommendations from friends, here’s hoping that they offer solace and respite amidst this storm.
– The Editors
Aatif Rashid
During these pandemic times, I’m slowly making my way through Mathias Enard’s Zone (2008), a French novel about a guy on a train traveling through Italy and thinking about his past as a soldier fighting for Croatia in the Balkans in the 1990s and a spy working for the French throughout the Middle East. The whole thing is written as one run-on sentence, and while there are chapter breaks, there aren’t really any natural stopping points, so you can pretty much dip in and out as you see fit. It’s dark and very depressing, but I find that reading about war and human atrocity puts our own COVID calamity in perspective and reminds us that, while it may feel like the world is ending right now, a lot of people throughout history have had to face trauma and catastrophe. “I’m not taking this trip for nothing,” the narrator says, “I’m not curling up like a dog on this seat for nothing, I’m going to save something, I’m going to save myself despite the world that persists in going forward laboriously at the speed of a handcar operated by a man with one arm…”
Daisy Alioto
Last year, Helen Rosner asked Twitter for short novel and novella recommendations. I saved a link to the thread for periods when I don’t have the attention span to read something hefty or when I want to get through a novel over the weekend. Out of this thread, I learned of the book Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata which I read shortly before we all went into quarantine. The novel is narrated by a non-neurotypical woman who keeps her job at a convenience store well into adulthood even though her friends and family frown on it. She finds comfort in the little ecosystem of the store, and lovingly catalogs the details of the retail environment. I found it soothing when I read it, and even more so now that I can’t shop outside the Internet for the foreseeable future.
Juliet Escoria
My favorite genre of book, in terms of escapism, is "big fat book spanning decades." My all-time favorite in this category is East of Eden, and my most recent favorite is The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames. I also had a lot of fun reading Flush by Virginia Woolf a few weeks ago. I normally think Woolf is boring and pretentious (sorry not sorry!), but this biography of a dog was so good and weird and cute, and also I love dogs. I was sad when Flush (the dog) went away. Rest in power, little Flush. Right now, I'm reading True Love by Sarah Gerard, and I don't want it to end-- it's so wonderfully written and slutty (we need more slutty books in this world). I'm really jealous of Gerard's writing, and also the book's cover. Finally, I will use any opportunity to recommend anything by Lisa Carver, particularly Drugs Are Nice and I Love Art.
Lauren Lauterhahn
I told myself during self-isolation I’d get so much reading and writing done. But none of the books on my shelves are good enough right now, and I haven’t written jack shit. Then last week, Elizabeth Ellen, a friend and mentor of mine, emailed me her latest unpublished manuscript— a short story collection called Her Lesser Work. “If you have time and feel like reading this before the world ends…?” she asked.
Reading seventeen unpublished stories by someone who is the most fascinating, devoted and talented writer alive right now is basically the best thing ever while quarantined during a pandemic. Elizabeth Ellen consistently writes stories like I’ve never experienced before. She disregards any kind of writing rules with an unconventionality that makes her fiction seem so damn easy. She produces stories that are both experimental in form and style yet explore the subjects that all the best writing is about— love, heartbreak, isolation, ego, desire, sexuality, abandonment, longing— but Ellen does this better than most writers. In my opinion, of course, which is what you asked for. Two stories that are favorites so far— one called YOLO, and another called Snatch Shots— are so well crafted with the sharp point of view that EE’s writing is known for. I sent her a text last night about another story called G.O.A.T. saying ‘I love 80% of the plot but 100% of the writing.’ I can’t wait for everyone else to read Her Lesser Work, which will be a contemporary classic. In the meantime, I urge everyone to read her other collections, Saul Stories and Fast Machine, as well as the masterpiece Person/a.
Michael Mungiello
I'm reading Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, a perfect alone-in-your-head book. The whole thing mostly takes place in the main character's head, or at least everything that's important happens there; the "plot " is so preposterous as to be effectively non-existent. Court houses, mineral hunts, scandals, large sums of money moving hands, airports, divorce, death and more death. The hubbub has an ultimately flattening effect. When anything can happen, it doesn't really matter "what happens," which is maybe the point, that actual events matter less than the impression we let them leave on us. It's nice to think about it that way, given the actual terrible thing that's happening now. "The weight of the sense world is too heavy for some people, and getting heavier all the time." That's true.
I'm watching everything happen and I can't do anything about it, except by staying home, doing nothing, reading Humboldt's Gift. If people are lucky, their worst burden now is making peace with a useless void at the center of things, tuning in at a distance to something enormous; and Bellow's good on that too. "At the center of the beholder there must be space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing but a nothing reserved for everything." Reading now when so much of what we want to do is impossible is maybe a way of remembering that this nothing isn't empty.
Charles Theonia
Looking up from yourself, you realize what you're holding in your hand. A part of your hand is missing. Her mouth is open—something's about to come out. Apsara Engine, Bishakh Som's absorbing graphic short-story collection, follows the swell of getting caught up in something you're not at all sure is what you want. Sometimes, this means taking the unknown up on its offer. As Onima, a cartographer, says in one story, trans geographies are "a way to chart possibilities, ways of being that have yet to manifest themselves." Som's precise, delicate drawings balance softness and angularity, a reflection of our bodies' inseparability from the spaces where we live. In some stories, the images could operate as schematics for building alternate queer and trans worlds. In others, they force a confrontation the characters are trying to avoid. Whatever it is, it's time to stop looking away. Apsara Engine asks us to face our emergent realities and map the world we want to live in.
May-lee Chai
I'm re-reading Zone One by Colson Whitehead. It's his zombie pandemic novel set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. It's suspenseful and has beautifully rendered sentences, of course, but what I really love is Whitehead's witty satirizing of government jingoistic propaganda used to rally the ravaged population. "Early in the reboot, Buffalo agreed on the wisdom of rebranding survival. ...It was a new day. Now, the people were no longer mere survivors, half-mad refugees, a pathetic, shit-flecked, traumatized herd, but the 'American Phoenix.'" (p. 79) There's even an anthem: "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar?" and self-help books for dealing with P.A.S.D.--Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. I need a laugh, and this book is helping me with my own PASD.
Chelsea Hodson
I really enjoyed this Amphetamine Sulphate bundle I bought last month, which got me both Christopher Zeischegg's The Magician and Audrey Szasz's Invisibility: A Manifesto. I've been a fan of Zeischegg's writing since Body to Job, his book about working in the porn industry, and his new novel, The Magician, is a nice extension of that book in many ways. It's part California noir, part horror film, and says some interesting things about the darkness inherent in contemporary society. I'm new to Szasz's writing, but it was great to read Invisibility: A Manifesto and be reminded of how feral and wild a book can be. Amphetamine Sulphate is an independent press that's still sending out orders, but order from them directly because they're not on Amazon.
Nina Renata Aron
I find it very calming to read about quotidian objects and relationships, so I am drawn to fiction in the register of the everyday and the domestic. One book I keep picking up is August by Romina Paula (translated by Jennifer Croft). It's a story about a young woman who travels from Buenos Aires to her hometown in rural Patagonia five years after her best friend committed suicide. She's there to scatter the friend's ashes with her family and she stays in their home—in her dead best friend's bedroom—going through her stuff and alternately feeling her energy and her absence. “It’s neither yours nor not yours," the narrator thinks about the room. "I don’t know exactly how to explain it: it’s yours, but neutralized, taken down a notch. And yet you’re still there in certain things.” The book, one long address from the living friend to the dead one, is quiet and moody and filled with the details of a deep friendship. There's something soothing about this reminder of the ways that personal effects—sweaters, posters—take on great significance in relationships and often remain after death.
Cheryl Pappas
The only book that’s been able to hold my interest during this chaotic time is Helen McClory’s short story collection On the Edges of Vision. It helps that most of the stories are flash, so I can read one or two in between dinner and dishes, kids’ lessons and work. The other flash collections I tried reading before this didn’t hold because they were too grounded in pre-pandemic reality. McClory’s stories, though, blend the mundane with the supernatural, seamlessly and naturally. We see characters maneuver between worlds with hardly a shiver: a dead girl, on break from a crime drama, climbs out of the television set to grab a smoke and coffee; a waitress encounters the devil in the form of an old man at a late-night diner; a woman lives alone in the desert and every night disassembles her body and burns all the fragments in a campfire, only to wake up whole the next morning. These stories match the irreality of our current existence in a deeply satisfying way. But more than that, what draws me into these stories is the poetry on the sentence level. I find myself wanting to read a story again right after I’ve finished it, just for the sheer pleasure of it, with sentences like “Blood got all over the gingham tablecloth, but as it was wipe-clean, no real harm done” and “At night she would get the fire going, pull out her folding chair, swallow a one-two of bourbon, and sit patiently for what would happen. Around midnight, the moon might be there.” There’s a meditative, patient quality to the writing, and it’s clear that McClory considered every word. It’s the kind of patience I need right now, and I find it a relief to know it exists.