02: What to Read When Not Playing Animal Crossing
Several quick reads and two great books to keep your brain busy.
New here? Welcome! Consult my first post to see what amateur bibliotherapy means.
Hi friends. I’m back with some more things you might want to read.
Dispatches from Cozytown USA
As I cocoon myself in fluffy blankets, well-worn paperbacks, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I am:
Taking my instructions from author Robin Sloan about how to stay sane and on course during this time. I suggest you do as well. (~11 min)
Eating pounds of pasta, inspired by Jia Tolentino’s aptly-timed Bon Appetit piece about how she lived on edibles and spaghetti while holed up writing her recent zeitgeist-y (and very good) nonfiction essay collection, Trick Mirror. (~5 min)
Feeling very click-y these days, which has resulted in me spending hours on the work-related advice column/blog Ask A Manager. Alison Green’s long-standing site is both an excellent source of professional advice and a gold mine of weird human behavior. Hitting the “Surprise me!” button on AAM is just as likely to get you an article giving you cover letter advice as it is to give you a letter about someone who wants her coworkers to call her boyfriend “master” (or its subsequent update). (~7 min)
Opening new tabs in my browser and flitting frantically between them as if, by staying frenetic, my mind will stay occupied with Just These Tabs forever. At least 10 of those open tabs are from TV Tropes, the pop culture wiki that names and catalogs the common tropes used in storytelling (stuff like Slashers Prefer Blondes, the Defrosting Ice Queen, and Executive Suite Fight are fun examples). Not only is the Random Media button a great way to get introduced to new entertainment, but the Random Trope button lets you endlessly read through the many humorous and wild ways folks parse and discuss media. (~infinite min)
Cackling my way through the archives of Caity Weaver’s gone-too-soon New York Times newsletter, “Wait—,” which investigated burning questions in news and culture like “how many presidential injuries do I not know about?” (~6 min)
Two Books: Light & Dark
And now, onto the books. If you’d like to buy a copy, check in with your preferred local bookseller to see how you can purchase. Alternatively, check your library’s website for digital resources.
The Light
If you’re looking for a book brimming with good-naturedness that pairs best with a too-big slice of almost-cloying lemon pound cake, read the geek fiction classic MR. PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE by (the aforementioned) Robin Sloan. The premise is simple: a young techie gets a job moonlighting at a mysterious bookstore, and the young techie tries to figure out the secrets behind its genial owner and his peculiar customers. If you’re in need of an optimistic and pleasantly corny adventure, this book will do the trick.
What to know going in: PENUMBRA is a tribute to puzzles and codes and very convenient circumstances that make things seem like they’ll just… work out, somehow. In 2012, Roxane Gay in the New York Times described this as “an excess of convenience — for every problem, [the book has] a clever solution.” But for this emotional climate, I find it uplifting to see problems enterprisingly solved; it feels overwhelmingly good and warm to just see things get fixed with a little creative thinking and elbow grease. Treasure hunts and tiny delights are Sloan’s strengths; when I saw him on a book tour for his recent book Sourdough, he brought a special customizable stamp that imprinted the longitude and latitude of the bookstore where he hosted each book talk. It’s this kind of enchanting level of detail that makes PENUMBRA worth reading.
The Dark
If you’re unable to lean into escapism and are instead feeling a gravitational pull towards texts with psychological weight that is eerily similar to our current moment, read THE MEMORY POLICE by Yoko Ogawa. Reading it now may well feel like you’re biting down hard when you already have a toothache, but it also beautifully and phantasmagorically illustrates the feeling that things are being taken from our lives faster than we can properly mourn them.
What to know going in: This tender little book, which was first published in 1994 and was only recently translated from Japanese to English, is not a happy read under any circumstance. Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker explains the plot best as “a dreamlike story of dystopia, set on an unnamed island that’s being engulfed by an epidemic of forgetting… [and] the psychological toll of this forgetting is rendered in physical reality: when objects disappear from memory, they disappear from real life.” Joshua Keating at Slate recently listed this book as “what to read as things keep disappearing” from our daily lives; I’d argue that it also provides a beautiful outlook on the ways we can take care of each other even when it feels like we’re perpetually losing something.
If neither of these are scratching your itch, have no fear. You can ask the Harvard Book Store’s booksellers for personalized recommendations that will be promptly emailed to you; CrimeReads published a list of thrillers and mysteries that will keep you so engrossed you’ll forget to check the news; and BookRiot has a quiz that will use your reading preferences to determine what book series you should read while social distancing.
I’ll be back Sunday with some more books and another list of my favorite long reads. Until then, stay inside, wash your hands, and pay back Tom Nook in a timely manner.