Reading in a Plague Year

This essay was originally posted elsewhere.

Every year since 2015 I have tried to read 95 books from January 1st-December 31st. This is not my idea, but follows the example of Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jonathan Ball, who started the #95books challenge in 2009. Some years (2016, 2017) I succeed, but more often I fail (2015, 2018, 2019, and now 2020). I read 63 books in 2020 while, among other things, buying a house, managing a new job, and completely reorganizing my life in the wake of work from home orders in March. This year it feels like a victory to have read anything at all when the volume of panic, anxiety, and uncertainty in the world threatens to drown everything else.

I did not read into the plague, as it were, although those first few weeks of isolation certainly prompted many to do so. Anything with a zombie or apocalypse theme was so popular in the CPL catalogue it took until Halloween for your hold to arrive. The closest thing to plague reading I came up with this year was Andrés Barba’s A Luminous Republic, where a gang of feral children leak from a jungle into an unsuspecting San Cristóbal and claim that city’s kids as their own— an Argentine Pied Piper crossed with a Greek Chorus and Lord of the Flies. A town closing ranks against intruders—children!—to ruthlessly protect their own interests would seem a little too cruel, were it not for 2020 being, well, 2020. I imagine those who withheld aid cheques while making sanctimonious calls for personal responsibility in the wake of COVID-19 gutting employment, income, and stability from the most vulnerable at their most desperate moment of need would joyfully lead the Rout of the Children in San Cristóbal.

There, now I’ve named the dread thing: COVID-19, in the air, on your gloves, and in your nightmares of imperfectly-disinfected vegetables from the grocery store. When we imagine disaster it looks like Akira: apocalyptic and earth-shattering, with survivors left to reconstruct society as roving bands of cultists shake them down for tribute to their telekinetic boy messiah. Lost in the promotion of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga epic is its population of feckless politicians and crew-cut military personnel just following orders in the hope that the disaster they’ve spent their careers preparing to thwart simply won’t happen on their watch. And if It does happen, surely everyone will behave better than those from the disaster before us. But here we are, nine months and two waves into a pandemic that so eerily follows the curves of pandemics past and we still can’t help ourselves from repeating history, one illicit house party at a time.

It’s fitting that a country with a long, intimate history of disaster turns out some of the most bracing and clarifying writing on the subject. Jay Rubin’s anthology of Japanese short stories for Penguin are organized by theme rather than era, allowing for the grouping of a series of stories under the heading “Disasters, Natural and Man-Made.” The Kobe earthquake sits next to Hiroshima and up the page from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The characters of Saeki Kazumi’s “Weather-Watching Hill” climb a peak to survey their post-tsunami landscape and find a marker commemorating another tsunami that swept the area 78 years earlier, almost to the day. Shigezaki, our narrator, takes in a view of a beach now stripped of a protective brace of trees, “The beach was now as bare as a comb missing most of its teeth. With a pang , it occurred to me—there are some things you don’t notice until they’re gone.” The story closes with the observation that everyone is now in “Some world in between,” a line that could be applied to the entire 2020 experience without irony.

This is not to say that all my reading in 2020 was didactic, or that I set off on a pilgrimage of the pages for hope and enlightenment in a desperately weird time. I will admit to seeking consolation, distraction, and transportation, and for that I found Flights. Olga Tokarczuk’s ode to the liminal features many pilgrims, some willing, some conscripted to their journeys under threat of unpaid emotional debts. It’s a book that flits between dozens of fragments. If have you have waited a very long time to find someone describe the specific pleasure of walking into an airport steeped in the scent of coffee and duty-free perfume and felt a surge of delight and anticipation about the coming journey, this book’s for you.

Also the subject of delight and fragmentation: All that is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo: 1963-2018. The sumptuously-designed volume claims to be the first to include work from all 41 canon members of Oulipo, and promises the reader will find within it’s pages:

Inside: sharks as poets and vice versa, the Brisbane pitch-drop experiment, novel classifications for real and imaginary libraries, the monumental sadness of difficult loves, the obsolescence of the novel, the symbolic significance of the cup-and-ball game, holiday closures across the Francophone world, what happens at Fahrenheit 452, Warren G. Harding’s dark night of the soul, Marcel Duchamp’s imperviousness to conventional space-time laws, bilingual palindromes, cartoon eodermdromes, oscillating poems, métro poems, metric poems, literary madness, straw cultivation.

The effect is like walking into an art gallery for a new exhibition and finding yourself dazzled at the unexpected juxtapositions, the unconventional use of materials, and suddenly tearful at the beauty of mathematics. I suspect at least one of you has also wandered into a gallery and stared at something for hours seated on one of those softly padded benches thoughtfully placed in front of a painting to support your contemplation. Not that I’m speaking from experience. Not that this book provoked the same sympathetic response in my nervous system.

There are some things you don’t notice until they’re gone.

A final observation: 27 of the 63 books were translated, originally published in Spanish, Italian, Polish, French, or Japanese. The swiftest, most effective way out of a book rut is to visit another part of the world and see what stories they tell. This year I found: the tragic consequences of a post-funeral tea ceremony (Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata); butterflies as omens of evil (Nijigahara Holograph, Inio Asano); the intense, combustible relationships of teenagers (The Imagined Land, Eduardo Berti); and quantum mechanics for the curious (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli). I have never appreciated paper trips more than this year.