Pandemic Reading

When we left school for spring break on Thursday, March 19th, I told my students I’d see them in a week. I made them all wipe down their phones with disinfectant. I spent most of the last week making unit calendars and lesson plans for our return, because I wanted to spend my spring break reading, writing, and playing my guitar. Like everyone else, I had no idea things would change so quickly. Three days later, Griffin faculty and administration were busy making alternate plans for remote teaching, and my fellow teachers and I were scrambling to figure out the best way to make our classes less stressful, more flexible, and somehow still meaningful. We just finished our first short week of this new concept of school, and it’s fine. I’m grateful for a job that keeps going, even during a pandemic, and I’m grateful for some semblance of normalcy and routine right now.

Before the break, I’d ordered Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel, and Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson.

In terms of work, I have been looking to explore more novellas and short memoirs for my classes. They seem to work well in terms of time and interest. I adored Fever Dream, though I still have very little understanding of what the whole thing was actually about. I’m okay with that, because the reading experience was intense and beautiful and I appreciated the ambivalence of dealing with the brutal aftermath when you’re responsible for everything that happens to your kid. The original Spanish title is Rescue Distance, and frankly, I think it was probably a mistake to change it. Fever Dream is what’s happening. Rescue Distance is what’s missing. The most horrific aspects of the book are, I guess, psychological, but there’s some real gritty visceral stuff in there, too. The first time I saw it I wanted to read it just because there was a horse on the cover.

Nothing to See Here is one I’d recommend to just about anyone. I just finished it, and it seems again that the themes of family responsibility and limits of sacrifice have found me. I feel a little called out by the books I’m reading, but that’s only evidence some kind of god I don’t quite believe in. It’s a funny book, and though I don’t usually love funny books, this one is so specifically funny that I couldn’t help but be charmed and ultimately, cheered. It’s about 10 year old twins who burst into flames when distressed, and the caretaker who becomes their defacto parent. It’s a tender book, if not a happy one. I kept waiting for disaster, but all the disasters have already happened in these lives. This is again about the aftermath: about living with trauma and finding a way to honestly integrate it into your world so it doesn’t destroy everything you love.

Before my friend left to run a bookstore, she emptied her shelves of ARCs and extras and offered them to the Griffin library. I took home the ones I wanted to read, and one of those was Meg Howley’s The Wanderers. It is kind of like Space Camp for adults, and it’s so thorny and gorgeous that I really took my time reading it. It too is an exceptionally hopeful book, though chapter to chapter the hope always seems to be hidden around a corner. I appreciated the gentle empathy for every character, the slow drive toward a nuanced understanding.

I’m not sure what’s next - maybe The Body Where I Was Born.

Here’s the best song I’ve heard in the last week.