2020 was a crooked year. Our physical and mental wellbeing, relationships and finances all took a hit; but while everything else slid downhill, literature surprised statistics. Book sales surged during the pandemic. I, for one, couldn’t have lasted the lockdown on Netflix and Twitter alone; there are cravings of the mind satisfied only by novels, magazines, journals and anthologies. By continuity of thought. By the touch of good old paper that doesn’t lunge at the reader with live updates. Given the slowing-down of our lives, we now have more opportunities to squeeze offline reading hours into our schedules. To spend a longer while with each writer, sometimes to zoom in closer and at other times to escape our present. To dig into ‘transformative literature’ – books that hold within their pages the force to change lives.
Drawing up this compilation reminds me of Alberto Manguel’s ‘A History of Reading’, which ends with a WWII photograph of a bombed, roof-less library in London. Everything in it is in shambles, but the books and the shelves that support them have largely survived. Three men stand studying them amidst this rubble. Three readers. “They are not turning their backs on the war,” Manguel writes, “or ignoring the destruction. They are attempting to find once again – among the ruins, in the astonished recognition that reading somehow grants – an understanding. Here then, are six reads – with no loyalty to any particular genre – that help us adapt to the chaos that surrounds us.
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