A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All tagged pandemic
Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (2023) is a slight novel (page count just over 300) that explores storytelling and story-receiving, innocence and experience, memory and truth. Set during the long, slow days of pandemic lockdown, Tom Lake follows a mother unwinding the tale of her youth to her now young adult daughters.
Since the publication of her 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (or for some even before then), readers have recognized the understated brilliance of American novelist Elizabeth Strout. Something in her sparse writing makes readers feel seen; their life experience, or the life experience of those they have loved looms large, mirrored through her written word. There is unquestionably a magic at work here. I recently read Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, which begin with My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and includes Oh William! (2021) and Lucy By The Sea (2022).
J. R. Thorp’s debut novel, Learwife (2021) is a lyrical, internal monologue of King Lear’s widow during some undefined point in British medieval history. The novel opens as news of Lear’s death, and that of his three daughters, reaches a convent in northern England. Here, amidst the stone walls and industrious lives of the nuns, resides the estranged wife of King Lear who slowly unravels her story while she grieves the family she had already lost. Thus, Thorp’s Learwife begins where Shakespeare’s tragic King Lear concludes and provides the missing queen’s perspective through her memories and her grief.
If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land and then keep reading.
One of José Saramago’s famous novels, Blindness (1995, English translation in 1997), explores the brutal fall-out of a world beset by a pandemic of blindness.
