What to Read While Playing Animal Crossing (for 1,000+ hours)
Playing Animal Crossing this week shot me right back to early 2020. So did reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown before the year’s end.
Good afternoon. When was the last time you reveled in the perfection of a Biscoff cookie? Martin recently procured a bag (at Rite Aid of all places), so I’ve been munching on them while playing the latest Animal Crossing update. Yes, the title of this edition is accurate: I have played more than 1,000 hours of this silly game.
Action Items 4 u
The n+1 Bookmatch Donation Fund is back. I sent in some bucks to take their deranged and delightful book recommendation quiz, which yielded fascinating results.
Long Island’s biggest independent bookstore closed its doors in September. One of its former managers has launched a Kickstarter in order to open a new bookstore in the area, with a $250,000 goal to meet by December 16.
My very first employer, the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, is raising funds in support of a memorial to honor the lives of 146 workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Their $100,000 goal will assist with much-needed construction plans.
The books
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This week I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a book that everyone else read last year because it is about life after a flu kills most of the world. While Station Eleven came out in 2014, St. John Mandel was all over the place in March/April 2020 promoting her latest book, The Glass Hotel, which I just ordered. Every interview goes something like this:
Emily St. John Mandel: Yeah, it’s been fine. Groceries come once a week. It’s okay. How are you doing?
Maris Kreizman: I’m doing okay! I think that actually having these little video chats is keeping me on an even keel.
Emily: Yeah, that makes sense. It gets you outside your apartment. Like, I’m looking at your apartment, which is refreshing, because mine’s a mess.
Maris: Yeah, and out of your own mental space.
Emily: Exactly.
Maris: You have talked about this enough, so I’m just going to have to do it real quick.
Emily: We can talk about Station Eleven, it’s okay.
Maris: No! Do people think, though, that you are an expert on all of this because you wrote Station Eleven?
First of all, what I would give to never have another one of “these little video chats.” Second of all, I read this book while sick for the first time in 20 months and I cannot tell you how simultaneously terrifying and gratifying it felt to do so. The book starts with a calamitous performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear, an evening of theater that turns out to be one of the last before a mysterious and deadly flu takes over. The narrative follows those with a connection to that night. By darting between various perspectives and eras to illustrate a larger portrait of civilization responding to the worst, the omniscient narration and multiperspectivity coalesced into a reading experience that reminded me of those early-pandemic days of comparing COVID notes with just about everyone I knew: asking people if they stayed in apartments or fled big cities, what kind of masks/PPE they were buying or making, where they were finding stockpiles of hand sanitizer, what they were doing to pass the time, how they were adjusting to the “new normal…” and the list goes on.
Though it’s a futile exercise to grade a book based on its ability to accurately predict the future, I started Station Eleven with my default mindset of snark, waiting to poke holes in St. John Mandel’s depiction of disaster. I couldn’t help myself: all during last year’s press cycle, I learned less about The Glass Hotel and more about the ~prescience~ of Station Eleven. At first, I felt ready to take a pen to my copy and issue corrections about the myriad and specific ways the world had *actually* reacted to a pandemic. But as I became immersed in Station Eleven’s fast-paced and multifaceted world, I suspended my pettiness for a few hours and felt such tenderness for every character who thought their flu would just blow over. As a result, it sends me reeling to read reviews that reduce Station Eleven to a ~prescient pre-COVID pandemic novel~ (particularly when Severance by Ling Ma, one of my favorite books, is sitting *right there* and I will foist it upon you until you READ IT). Though it certainly was both brutal and cathartic to read through the lens of our own pandemic, at least the book ends with a hope for civilization to rebuild. As a result, reading Station Eleven felt a little bit like playing with one of those metal pin toys that hurt in a good way.
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I also read Poison For Breakfast by Lemony Snicket bit by bit before bed last week, which was meditative and meandering in a delightful sort of way. I was extremely *not* a child invested in the universe of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but reading this little book did instill a childlike sense of exploration and curiosity about something as seemingly mundane as breakfast of:
Tea
with honey,
a piece of toast
with cheese,
one sliced pear,
and an egg perfectly prepared.
Particularly since, you know, there was apparently a poisoning at breakfast.
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I’m also making my way through two books focused on futility in the working world, including The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris and There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. I’m enjoying both, but find that I can really only read them during the work week lest they hit too close to home over the weekend. I haven’t quite settled on my weekend reading picks, however.
That’s all from me this week, as I’m busy watching ancient Seinfeld episodes with a mix of amusement and disgust. If you find yourself in need of a podcast episode while you do some early holiday shopping, might I suggest this episode of 99% Invisible about the history of romance novel covers?