REAL BOOKS

The Reading List That Got Me Through the Pandemic

Titles, links, my quick notes on each

One of the great joys of the last year — if “joy” is a word you don’t cringe at hearing as you think of “pandemic” — has been a return to reading. Real reading, of real books. I was solo inside an apartment in New York City for nearly 52 weeks, so I had a lot of time to get back to the printed-and-bound page. I made myself a commitment early on: one TV show at a time. (For me, it was RuPaul’s Drag Race, Bridgerton, then The Crown. I like queens.) I had a sneaking suspicion that if I watched too much Netflix during The Great Pause and all that followed, I would plummet off the depression cliff in mere days. I was an English major in college, and I was completely frustrated by 2020 at just how little actual reading I had been doing as I hit my 40s.

If you didn’t get a chance to do much reading during this last year, because — oh, I don’t know — you were working non-stop at your dining room table to “pivot” and save capitalism or you were home-schooling three kids who hated Zoom School or, worse, you were in head-to-toe PPE saving lives in a hospital, first I say “thank you,” and next I say “here are great reads if and when you can find the time.”