During the first few months of Covid, I was working in a hospital and became anxious enough about the situation that it became hard for me to read narratives in which anything bad happened. I didn’t read any books from March through August, when we rented a cabin in Gatlinburg for my birthday celebration and I felt relaxed enough again to restart. I started tracking my reading, but I’m now finding tracking slightly onerous. So I decided to try instead having a list of recommended reading. This is only a small portion of what I am reading, and I will periodically come in and trim away some older or better-known books and add new ones, so this won’t be a static list either.
- Emily Austin, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead
- Muriel Barbery, trans. Alison Anderson, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
- Kalynn Bayron, Cinderella is Dead
- Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night, Machine, and The Folded Sky
- Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
- Ann Braden, The Benefits of Being an Octopus
- Allie Brosh, Solutions and Other Problems
- Eleanor Catton, Birnham Wood
- Kashana Cauley, The Survivalists
- Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
- Christelle Dabos, trans. Hildegarde Serle, A Winter’s Promise, The Missing of Clairdelune, The Memory of Babel, and The Storm of Echoes (Mirror Visitor Quartet)
- Cherie Dimaline, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls
- Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves
- Dawn Dumont, The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour
- Sarah Emsley, The Austens
- Percival Everett, Telephone
- Percival Everett & James Kincaid, A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond
- Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
- Alexis Hall, Confounding Oaths and Mortal Follies
- Meredith Hambrock, She’s a Lamb!
- Kate Heartfield, The Embroidered Book
- Kate Heartfield, The Tapestry of Time
- Micaiah Johnson, Those Beyond the Wall
- Naomi Kanakia, The Default World
- Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
- Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!!
- Kelly Link, The Book of Love
- Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You
- Nick Mamatas, Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest
- Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
- Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds, We Speak Through the Mountain, and The First Thousand Trees
- Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In The Dark
- Claire North, The Sudden Appearance of Hope
- Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow
- Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow and Moon of the Turning Leaves
- Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife
- Tade Thompson, Rosewater, The Rosewater Insurrection, and The Rosewater Redemption
- Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles
- Helene Tursten, trans. Marlaine Delargy, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good
- Weike Wang, Joan is Okay
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