In the office at my new apartment there are built-in bookshelves (they’re not built into the wall in the fancy sense of being permanently embedded there – there are shelves that we didn’t put up ourselves, is what I mean) that hold all of my middle grade and YA fiction with room left over for assorted sheet music, electronics, and (on the top shelf of the five) anything we want out of sight that we don’t have storage space for elsewhere. The shelves span the width of the room and – stacked two rows deep – my books take up two of them (my adult fiction and nonfiction are on a different shelf in the living room). I have them arranged according to a system that states:

1. Series books (Babysitters Club, Sleepover Friends, The Gymnasts, Silver Blades, and dozens of lesser-knowns that ran for only 5-10 titles) form the back lines, not because we’re embarrassed by them (we have no shame) but because when books are numbered, they’re easier to find, even when they’re behind other books.
2. The rest of the books are organized loosely by topic but mostly by free association: here are books about performing arts prodigies! Here are escape stories! Funny yet poignant goes here, adjacent to all-funny-all-the-time. Witches and aliens to the right, realistic young ladies to the left.
3. Nothing is on the top shelf because I couldn’t reach it even standing on a cushioned piano bench that threatened to topple if I didn’t distribute my weight evenly enough.

For my first reread (in years, really – I know I reread Where the Red Fern Grows in the past five years, and I read The Mozart Season regularly, but other than that…) I went with a campus novel. Like The Wonder Years, it was written in the 80s but set in the early 60s. I still have to remind myself that the title isn’t actually Don’t Tell Me Lovers are Losers. I remembered the key plot points before I started, but what I was mostly after was the feeling it gave me when I originally read it. It’s a hazy thing, but when I reread a book from that long ago in my own history, I’m taken back in my mind’s eye to the same images my brain conjured when I first read the book. And as such, I’m taken back to where and when I was then. Not in the particulars – I wouldn’t claim to remember, for the vast majority of books, where I was sitting when I read it or what year it was (though there are a few like that) – but in the sense I have of the world. (Yes, it occurs to me that this may just be tremendously narcissistic). Reading was the backdrop to everything I did while growing up. After orthodontist appointments, I was allowed to buy six paperback books from the local bookstore (these averaged $2.50-$3.50 (new!)). My parents eventually banned books at the dinner table.

Back to Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers: the title is very curious to me. I think I may have avoided it when I was a pre-teen because it sounded like it would be salacious, and I was at the time essentially a Victorian figure prone to vapors who ran at the very thought. But it’s not about romantic love, per se – just attachment (and the men who appear are exclusively brothers and fathers – there aren’t even any male professors). The back copy is very melodramatic – “Hovering on the brink of womanhood” – but the writing skims over the top of cliches without succumbing (I mean – Cynthia Voight surely did not write the back copy). The three main characters are not tropes – if they were, the narrator (Ann), the proper, preppy one from a “traditional” background would likely also have perfect grades and be “the smart one.”

After finishing this I read Clare Beams’s The Illness Lesson. I think I’ll alternate between adult books and journeys into the past as we take shaky steps into fall, election season, and the remainder of quarantine. Next up: Gone Away Lake.

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Exhalation, by Ted Chiang: I started reading this thinking it was a novel (which sounds…uninformed, but when a book comes directly to your Kindle from the library it’s easy to forget the details beyond fiction vs. nonfiction). There are nine stories in the collection and they fit together beautifully. I don’t mind when story collections are disparate in subject matter but cohesive in style, or even if they aren’t cohesive, but it’s always satisfying when a group of stories is thematically related. These are almost like a season of Black Mirror (down to some of the technology involved – “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling is very reminiscent of Black Mirror’s “The Entire History of You,” which came out two years before the story’s first publication (which doesn’t necessarily mean Chiang saw it before writing the story, or that it’s a negative if he did–it’s not derivative; it just reads as if the memory-footage software is a thing that actually exists in the world and both pieces of media are writing about it)) when taken together. The title story was almost too brutal to read in that, for me, it mimicked depression even though that isn’t the subject, but it was one of my favorites. The exploration of possibility is really the thing in this book, more than the writing itself, but there are also places in which the writing is lovely.

The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry: I have read some about the 1918 flu (I haven’t read Pale Rider yet), but it’s a topic on which I could read more if it’s new or particularly well written. The writing in this is fine, but…possibly as an effect of how much I’ve read about disease and epidemiology, I found it almost unbearably boring at first. The beginning chapters are about the beginnings of modern medicine in America (and in particular modern medical training, medical schools, labs, and so on) and while that’s a worthy topic, there were so many names and details that I just thought, “Can’t we jump to 1918 already?” By the time we reached the actual crisis, reading it felt like a chore. Too many details about exactly what happened when, rather than the feel and shape of the crisis.

Self Care, by Leigh Stein: My friend Leigh has written a satire that is completely of the moment, and her one-liners are in a class of their own. I started this fairly late at night and read the first 175 pages before falling asleep, finally, at 3 am, and finished it the next day – which is how I typically read Leigh’s books, because they’re always compulsively readable, but perhaps this one more than most! The words that best describe it are all very biting: mordant wit, trenchant observations, slanted humor.

The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo: This is such a nice long book to settle into, and thoroughly enjoyable. As an only child I was especially interested in the marriage of two only children who then had four daughters – not to make it all about me! but the novel provided both the familiar and the foreign in that way. Something about it reminded me of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I tend to tire of family sagas when they start way, way back and only spend chapters with each set of characters before moving on to their descendants, and much prefer this type of family story, which leaps around in time but very deftly and not by sacrificing characterization – you stay with the same set of people for the entire 500 pages, but come to understand them by seeing them at different ages and relationships to one another.

Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker: A thoroughly fascinating look at one family and the history of schizophrenia research. The structure is really engaging, though the characters are hard to keep track of (not much to be done about that, since the family has twelve children…) – I had to keep going back to the introduction to remember who was who! A very minor complaint overall.

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Maid, by Stephanie Land: I started reading this right before attending my first Zoom event of quarantine, which was a memoir panel including Land. It’s a very compelling story, and I really enjoyed hearing her speak! The book itself to me felt like it was missing an editor – there were sentences that were so syntactically hard to parse that I had to read them multiple times to figure out the (usually straightforward) meaning, and many that drifted into cliche. I know that the author had an essay that went viral, and I wonder if the publishers rushed the book to press to capitalize on that?

The Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala: At one angle, I don’t know why I chose to read a memoir of someone losing her entire family – husband, two children, parents – to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and it’s true that this knocked me over and left me sitting quietly staring into the distance. But Deraniyagala’s writing is beautiful and affirming, and it was only a further delight to Google her later and discover that she is now married to the actress Fiona Shaw, who plays a CIA agent on Killing Eve. You can find images of them together, elated and buoyant, across the internet. After trying and failing to imagine what such a horrific loss would feel like, it was incredible to see her now.

Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe: When I was trying to Google this book so I could search for it at the library by author, I Googled “Don’t Say a Word” or “Tell No One” or something like that (+ book) and…this came up anyway. Smart algorithm. I have to confess that for some reason I cannot keep a hold on who’s who among the IRA, the various branches within the IRA, the loyalists, the republicans, the Catholics, the Protestants, to the point where I wrote down on an index card which went with each other (I have a similar blank spot in my brain for which of “complementary” and “supplementary” sum to 90 degrees and 180 degrees).

It’s really eerie, for lack of a better word, to be reading this right now – the Troubles in the 1970s in Ireland are not an analog for the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality happening now in America, but the pervasiveness of violence and the difficulty of determining what, exactly, is going on at times (ie are there “outside agitators” looking to profit or escalate, or is claiming that there are outside agitators dismissive of black pain and anger? Are there white supremacists infiltrating the protests or abetting the police?). In Say Nothing, there are double and triple agents among the British army, the IRA, and the loyalists, and the only certain thing seems to be violence.

Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson: What a fun read. I spent the first fifteen or so pages – until the all-girls school was mentioned, I guess – thinking the main character was male. I don’t know if that was unconsciously related to the author being male (probably), or if the protagonist was an avatar for the author and he hadn’t quite disguised it enough, or something else. It’s not important, but it added to the narrator’s initial cypher-like quality.

Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden: Edward Snowden has a very archetypal face; I can think of three guys I know who have the same essential appearance. I think that’s part of why I feel an affinity for him (the other part is that, whether based on reasonable evidence or not, I’ve always thought of him as the “good” version of exposer with Julian Assange being the evil counterpart). He’s also my age. I do remember being affronted – and I’m sure this was some kind of projection on my part, given that I knew nothing of the situation – that he left the country without telling his girlfriend, the ultimate ghosting, and thinking that couldn’t he have at least told her in a letter, rather than making her find out with the rest of us?

And…as soon as I typed that I realized how numb-skulled it was for me to still be wondering how that had played out, given that it happened seven years ago. I think at the time I heard “his girlfriend knew nothing about his discoveries, revelations or planned departure!” and then inexplicably remained incurious. Obviously he kept her in the dark for her own safety, and – not a spoiler, I don’t think, since he mentions it early on – they’re now married.

Anyway. I still have a favorable impression of Snowden after reading this, still think whistle-blowers should be protected rather than exiled, and also feel the book was engaging and interesting. I’m curious (and this time I won’t just sit around wondering…) whether he had a ghostwriter or just an editor. There were a few lines that stuck out as a potentially-not-Snowden-himself writer attempting to manufacture “voice,” but the curation of anecdotes from Snowden’s childhood and early adulthood was done well. Aha – in what took me seven fewer years to answer, I have learned that Snowden had a collaborator-ghostwriter hybrid, Joshua Cohen, who’s a novelist.

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Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng: I grew up in a suburb similar to the Shaker Heights setting of this (also in Ohio, though Cincinnati instead of Cleveland; ours was not a planned community like Shaker Heights, and I think it was slightly more conservative/less self-congratulatory about being progressive, but maybe I just didn’t clock that attitude as a kid…) just a couple of years after Ng, so the references all hit. The plotting is good, though a little predictable – I say that as someone in general awe of successful plots, since that’s the hardest element of writing for me. Now I’m watching the series on Hulu, which is…okay.

Recursion, by Blake Crouch: My initial thought about this was “It’s so fun!” but I grew a bit weary of the premise and the spinning off of that premise as the book went on. It was still fun in the end, though the writing was really uneven – sometimes decent, other times sounded like it had been written by subpar AI. I will NOT dare to wade into questions of “what makes a novel a genre book/what makes a novel literary fiction” (okay, I’ll dip in a toe…marketing, in large part), but – I’m going to transgress here – I think I was expecting it to be more literary (I see from looking at a few reviews that it really wasn’t marketed as such, so if we’re using different measurement devices for different genres, I was probably judging it by the wrong rubric). I did like the premise, but it’s hard to sustain something like that.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell: This blew me away to the point where I’m not sure I can even type about it without either sobbing or laughing one of those uncontrollable laughs that often crosses over into crying. It’s an amazing story, with an ending that hits perfectly, but the writing on a sentence level is even more phenomenal. All of Russell’s images are genius, but I was particularly taken by her skill with verbs. Incredibly deft and clever without ever feeling cheap. Swamplandia! is absolutely singular, but the prose and setting brought to mind both Geek Love (and in the acknowledgments Russell notes Katherine Dunn as an influence) and Barry Hannah. I haven’t read either of Russell’s short story collections, and having those in my future makes me as happy as anything has since quarantine started. I’m beside myself with feelings.

Dopesick, by Beth Macy: I read Dreamland (also about the opioid crisis, and very compelling and well done) two years ago and wondered initially if this would feel at all like a retread…but the first review I found for Dopesick noted that it was published in 2018, while Dreamland was from 2016 and pre-Trump. Okay, sold – but ultimately I’m not sure it made much of a difference. Dopesick is a more region-focused look at the epidemic, and doesn’t delve at all into the more removed origins of heroin (which Dreamland does in depth). Dreamland was definitely much more compelling to me, but there’s certainly room for more than one book and angle.

Freshwater, by Awaeke Emezi: I’m not sure if I saw this on a list of recommended books or if it was something I clicked on while scrolling through the “available now” Kindle offerings of the Brooklyn Public Library, but I started it late at night (early in the morning, technically) and stayed up later than was advisable reading the first 1/3 of it before falling asleep with the Kindle resting against my hand. I don’t want to say too much about it because I think the experience benefits, the way certain movies do, from not having too much information going in. The opening is elliptical but not hard to follow or piece together; the writing is sharp and poetic. Two points of fascination: on their website, Emezi describes this as an “autobiographical novel” and I wonder to what degree they mean; the name Awaeke is eerily close to “Awake.” Emezi has another novel coming out in August, so that’s something for me to look forward to.

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The Need, by Helen Phillips: This book is fucking amazing. It’s my last read of the ten books long-listed for the National Book Award in fiction, and I definitely would have made it a finalist…it’s so amazingly odd in its beats. It’s also hard to discuss without giving too much away. I think I’ve heard people describe it as being “a trick,” “about a child,” and “the story of a paleobotanist,” and when someone asked me about it I wavered for a while before saying it was about motherhood and dualities, some more literal than others. The structure is perfect, the language is fresh, and the ending – which was going to have a hard time living up to the rest of the book/tying things up without being pat – was executed expertly. It will likely be one of my favorite books of 2020.

In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz: This book has lived on the floor next to my bed for six months, as I renewed and renewed it from the library since it wasn’t on hold. It should be on hold. Everyone should read it. I don’t remember where I saw it recommended, but once I’d received it I read the description again and thought it might be a miss for me…historical fiction and set in the west (granted, Blood Meridian is one of my favorites, so maybe I should have been more immediately excited about this one). It’s beautiful and uncanny, completely mesmerizing. Without giving too much away, the main character’s journey and the endless open plains on which he makes it felt tonally perfect for the early days of voluntary quarantine.

The Human Stain, by Philip Roth: Reading this in quarantine was slightly jarring somehow. The writing is excellent and the story is totally compelling (this was actually my first Roth novel – I’d only read Goodbye Columbus) but there was something…cunning about it? As if he had carefully selected which characters would say which things in order to very neatly sidestep potential criticism for those sentiments.

10:04, by Ben Lerner: I wanted to say “I don’t think I like meta-fiction” but that revealed my shallow understanding of the meta-fiction canon – I do, in fact, like Slaughterhouse 5, Pale Fire, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Cloud Atlas…so I guess what I disliked here was either the execution or the more specific self-referentiality of the narrator, rather than that of the text. There were many things I did like – the return to various types of imagery, the ideas, the connective tissue among those ideas and motifs – but the meta elements didn’t do anything for me except frustrate me. An odd quibble: though I always appreciate a return to/new layering upon images that have already appeared, I was distracted by the repetition of several words throughout – namely craquelure, dissection, proprioception.

The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian: I went to college with the author, and I remember him posting about the book (and the contest that’s central to it, the Loebner prize) at the time, but somehow never read it until now. Because it’s from 2011 (and focuses on 2008-9), I wondered if it would be outdated, but although AI and technology are central to the premise, the specifics of current AI aren’t so important. Most fun for me are the inquiries into communication structure and linguistics. The situation is AI and the Turing test, but the story is “what are humans trying to create when we try to create AI that behaves in a human-like way?”

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Two really excellent decisions that took place with no pandemic in sight but now seem as if they were perfectly planned:

1. My boyfriend gave me an Aerogarden for my birthday last year, and now there are salad greens growing in my bedroom
2. Two Christmases ago I had all of my middle-grade and young adult fiction shipped to my Brooklyn apartment (it was…a large number of pounds of books, because as a kid I never wanted anything but books, and my parents felt bad that I had to have braces twice, so my reward for going to the orthodontist was a trip to the nearby bookstore), and now I’ve decided it’s time to reread all of them…and possibly narrate the process. Don’t worry, I’ll refrain from starting a podcast (people have already gotten there first, in any case, with their Babysitter’s Club and American Girl pods…but I don’t know if anyone has done non-series titles…anyway, I’ll stick to blog posts)

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I think I intended to title a post “28 Days Later” (original, I know) but time is so stretchy that 28 days came and went and I didn’t have this tab open, so I forgot.

Then I started it again on day 30.

Now it’s day…37?

30 days. That’s a whole unlimited metro card. My brain is not moving seamlessly anymore, but thinking only in discrete units of time. One month. How many more?

We are of course lucky. We’re not sick, we’re not driving each other nuts, we still have much of our previous employment. I miss the springtime, which feels far from here. I miss smelling things (I haven’t lost my sense of smell – there just isn’t anything of note to smell in here). I miss my parents. I wish we had the Olympics to look forward to. Of course these are petty complaints.

When we have to go out – to Rite Aide, when we can’t get groceries delivered – we go out at 1 am, wearing masks and sunglasses and looking like bug people. Our one-block journey takes us directly past a police station, where there are nearly always at least a dozen officers gathered, laughing and talking, so close to one another, no masks in sight. It’s like we’re inhabiting two different planets.

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Back in Manhattan, 250 square feet. We go to Rite Aide wearing masks and scarfs, goggles or sunglasses even though it’s 1:30 am (we’re trying to go when no one else is there). It turns out the Rite Aide cleans their floors at that time, which is generally good but specifically bad because it’s kicking up mist and we have a fear of aerosols (I know about the floor-cleaning Zamboni only secondhand, because my role was to wait outside of the store – not too close to the entrance – to help carry things home, so that only one of us would be around (hypothetical) people. So I have no mask on, just a winter hat with earflaps into which all of my hair is tucked, which would look incongruous for this early spring night if there were anyone to see it. We can only see the police officers at the nearby station and hear a group of people in the parking lot across from it. A group of people? Surely they’re not actually in a physical group – maybe they’re at their windows? I try to peer into the lot as we pass and think I see people gathered around a car, but I don’t pause to be sure.

I don’t remember if it was before we ventured out or after we came back empty-handed that the fireworks started. It sounded like they were coming from the backyard, but I didn’t see any light when I went to the window. Who is setting off fireworks? There are enough frightening loud noises as it is.

About the backyard: this is a small building, and most of the tenants seem to have left the city. The backyard used to be easily accessed, and now there’s a sign that forbids residents from entering or from touching the door that leads out there. This is not because of the virus. It is, actually, because of us. When the building smelled of gas one night, we called Con Edison, and when they arrived they determined that what we were smelling was spilled gasoline…but then they found an unrelated gas leak, called the superintendent to come unlock the door to the building’s basement, quickly grew annoyed by his stalling, and had the fire department come break down the door. The super and the landlord were not thrilled by this and told us as much, but we did not find their argument (“you should have called us and we would have told you it was just spilled gasoline”) compelling, given that there was an actual gas leak that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

That evening, back in January, COVID was known but not yet looming; a gas leak was far more frightening. The Con Ed workers stayed – in the backyard and basement – until after 1 am, jackhammering and doing who knows what else. Our private suspicion was that they found illegal construction and that the new “no tenants allowed” signs are to prevent something like that from happening again. As such, since it doesn’t seem like they want people to stay away because of danger but because of nosiness, we decided that the yard might be the safest outdoor space we can access for the next…period of our lives.

But the person who really deserves to have use of the yard is a woman who lives two floors up, who’s lived in the building for decades and generally takes care of it and makes sure things are okay even though she’s not affiliated with building management or ownership. This afternoon, when I looked out the window, I saw her gardening there. Humans in the natural world! It was the best sight of the day.

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We walked from the East Village over the Manhattan bridge back to my apartment in Brooklyn on Tuesday. It was heartening to see most people doing as we were – moving to the side of the road/sidewalk when other people were approaching, avoiding stopping to wait for traffic lights in the same spot as others, etc. We managed to frogger our way through downtown Brooklyn pretty easily, though there was one woman who walked directly at us while crossing the street and proclaiming into her phone, “I’m not going to get it! I’m a young, vigorous woman!” upon which we skittered away like bugs, less afraid of cars than human vectors.

I lost my sweatshirt jacket somewhere between Manhattan and Brooklyn, or more likely when we stopped to rest at a bench on the Brooklyn end of the bridge. I had been wearing it draped over my head to provide some modicum of sun protection – even in these times we still found ourselves thinking, “Oh no, I forgot to put on sunblock!” and “I didn’t bring earplugs to protect against the screeching of the subway,” these quaint, tiny measures to protect our health that we used to follow with such vigilance. So I was wearing my sweatshirt over my head and trying to stuff the fabric into my ears when the train passed. And now it’s…somewhere on the ground, c’est la vie.

Last night was the first time NYC applauded for health care providers and grocery store workers and sanitation departments and post officers, etc., (or it was the first time we heard it?), and even though I’ve seen tweets to the effect of “my doctor friend doesn’t care if you cheer for her, she cares if you elect responsible politicians” (which I agree is more important!), both things can happen simultaneously, and I admit to feeling a mix of “now I’m going to cry” crossed with the old, weird, classroom/choir anxiety of “is it too late to join in now? Have I missed it? Will people be able to hear (gasp, horror) my voice?” and a touch of the anticipation one gets before fireworks (granted, it also sounded like someone in the neighborhood was setting off firecrackers, which…is this really the time?)

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City-mandated social distancing is technically only three days old, although we’ve been doing it for more than a week now since we were fortunate enough to be able to work from home starting then.

To stay spirited, we’ve developed series of actions that functions both as a routine to “keep us sane” and a way to measure just how much that sanity has slipped. A coded system that doesn’t rely on colors or numbers. Roughly in order of plot-based to losing-the-plot:

• Reach out to friends
• Continue doing some form of physical activity. A gallon of water weighs more than 8 pounds! (This is…not useful to me personally)
• Dust bust!
• Bed karaoke
• Gather family and in-laws online at www.wordsplay.com (is it Word Splay or Words Play? Intrigue!) and then figure out how to play Drawful remotely.
• Procure a table so that the bed is not the only place from which to work or Skype
• Discover that tolerance level for wine has followed the same trajectory as the US stock market: that is, after half of a glass, my ears turn bright red and hot, just like they did the first time I had several inches of a wine cooler when I was 18.
• Fold all of the clothes and putting them in the closet, instead of allowing them to continue their typical migration pattern of washer/dryer –> floor between washer/dryer and refrigerator, sometimes draped across two table-less chairs –> drawers under the bed if they’re lucky –> thrown onto the single easy chair until its shape is completely obscured –> getting picked up and examined to see if dirty, and thrown into the empty laundry machine if yes.
• Armpit farts vs. back-of-the-knee farts: a battle royale
• A definitive and exhaustive examination into all of our possible misconceptions about the world. Is it really bad to microwave plastic even if it’s a frozen food item that TELLS you to microwave it? (We haven’t looked into this one yet but the answer is YES, YES IT IS BAD, never give me anything that has been sopping up plastic particles in a dinner food sauna for 90 seconds). Does the heel of the bread loaf REALLY contain more nutrients, or was that just a statement parents everywhere devised to get out of having to eat the end piece themselves?
• Are those stomach noises hunger, digestion, or did you eat something particularly weird while I wasn’t looking?
• Detailed descriptions of what the woman who lives in the apartment above ours is likely wearing, based on her footsteps
• Trying to plug your computer charger into your phone and not understanding why it won’t fit
• Holding a wedding for our pair of Line Friends stuffed animals, who are either dressed as each other/wearing each other’s skins, because “one of them is already wearing white and the other is wearing a (skin) suit” (we have a number of these stuffed creatures – these two from Line Friends and the others from BT21)
• How many times can we listen to/watch “My Stick” and “Seagulls (Stop It Now)” before tiring of them? (There’s a reason this item is last. The reason is: we are still listening to them.)

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