People of the Book
Why reading books is crucial for this pandemic spring.
I have spent much of the past year in search of recommendations. Recommendations about whether or not to stay home; whether to purchase a mask; whether or not to send the children to school once it reopened; whether it might be safe to attend a Black Lives Matter protest in the midst of a pandemic; whether it might be safe to canvass for candidates; whether children could see their grandparents; recommendations for what gadgets and trinkets to purchase that might temporarily assuage the howling grief and fear that was part and parcel of being an American in the year 2020, and now in 2021 as well. But more than anything, the recommendations I wanted most in our year of COVID were for books to read.
The days were simultaneously empty and full, crammed full of the minutiae of managing a household and a job and a life, with endless tasks to complete (would there ever, truly, be an end to the recycling, or the laundry?) and huge voids of time left to fill by all the pursuits, hobbies, and appointments — teaching a classroom of students, seeing family, dinner with friends, movies, concerts, theater — that had suddenly, irreversibly vanished. And so books, always the solution to all of life’s minor miseries and small indignities, were a salve once more.
