We are all slowly but surely coming around to our new reality.
During a recent conversation with my dad, we discussed the year thus far and how no matter how hard you try, we seem only capable of talking about the coronavirus, as if there weren’t once enjoyable things that existed — like books.
I was in the process of packing to return to my apartment in New York after quarantining with my family in New Jersey for several months and we spoke about how unprepared I was when I first came home in March, operating under the assumption that this would be over in a month — max. We’d work from home for a bit, get to sleep in, eat dinner at a decent hour, etc. Silver linings and all.
I compared it to a snow day when you were a kid, the prospect of staying home for a day was so exciting. Then you get hit with a monster blizzard and you’re home for a week and the house starts to feel too small — your younger brother gets on your nerves and all of a sudden school is the only place you want to be. Today’s August 6th. I’ve only been back in Manhattan for two weeks, but my apartment walls are already narrowing and I would happily trade a good amount of my earthly possessions to be working out of the TPM offices again.
Books remain a necessary means of escape. Our theme this month is a bit on the nose — dystopian novels, because that’s how life feels. Why not trade the dystopian form of our current existence, for a slightly easier-to-digest, fictitious story? The last dystopian novel I read was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in college and we spent our class discussion delving into how society screwed the environment in that version of reality — a created world that doesn’t feel too far off from today’s norm.
Be sure to check out the list below and comment with some of your favorite dystopian novels. If you like what you see here you can always purchase any of the books below by visiting our TPM Bookshop profile page. Be sure to check back again next month for some new staff recommendations, and if you’ve missed any, you can find all of our reading lists here. Happy reading!
“It’s incredible how canny this book — about a virus that starts in China cripples the U.S. and the rest of world — was in foreseeing our current circumstances. But “Severance” is about more than just our worst coronavirus nightmares coming true. It’s about the relationship millennials have with their work lives in this current era of Capitalism, the power of nostalgia and generational differences within immigrant families.”
“It’s been a few years since I last read this novel, but McCarthy’s prose tends to stick with you well beyond when you finish the book. The father-son dynamic is stirring and the ending leaves you gutted.”
TPM partners with Bookshop, a non-profit bookseller whose objective is to help independent bookstores survive. TPM and independent bookstores both earn a small percentage of revenue for each book sold. You can learn more about Bookshop here, and on this episode of the Josh Marshall podcast.