A Few Books Recommended by Beijing Bookworms
With recent reports of many communities no longer allowing waimai and deliveries to enter (you've gotta treck to the gate to get anything), it looks like we are still set for Beijing’s semi-lockdown to continue, at least for the near future. However, a great way to escape lockdown, at least in your mind, is to journey off to another world through the pages of a great book.
But with so many books out there, where does one begin? Well, we decided to reach out to a few of Beijing’s resident bookworms and members of Spittoon Book Club to find some recommendations.
by Oliver Sacks
This book by neurologist Oliver Sacks
consists of seven medical case histories of individuals with rather
unusual neurological conditions such as an artist who loses all sense
of color in a car accident.
Book Club regular Bill told me, “I’m
reading An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks right now, though I
don’t really have a good lockdown-based reason to be reading it; just
that I found it in a bookstore and had read it way back and was blown
away by it. I’m particularly drawn to the vivid way that he describes
his patients and how he intertwines this with fascinating explanations
of how the human brain functions. I also love how he writes. Even
though this is technically ‘science writing’, his prose is so sharp and
clean that I feel he could have been an excellent novelist had he chosen
that path.”
by Otsuichi
In this
rather dark tale, a nine-year-old girl gives an account of her life
after death, in what can be thought to be as a unique version of The
Lovely Bones.
This recommendation came from Gaudi, who has been
in lockdown for ten days. She told me that the theme of Summer,
Fireworks, and My Corpse is “imperceptible evil from unexpected people in
normal life.” She said that she connected with this book because
“locking down forced me to interact with strangers dwelling in the same
building and people in white uniforms. The unkindness of some people
shocked me.”
She also recommended:
Death and the Maiden (Der Tod und das Mädchen) by Elfriede Jelinek because "the life indoors of 10 days against my will drives me a little crazy and sensitive to all the wrong things on us during the time; Death and the Maiden has a very similar aura."
Emancipation Through Knowledge by Karl Popper (a chapter from his book In Search of a Better World) “Everything about the virus in reality is too crazy for me to understand...I need Popper to help me remember what science is.”
by Louisa May Alcott
This classic novel tells the story of the March sisters and their struggle to survive in New England during the Civil War.
Taz told me he decided to read this book “because a friend was discussing
it and I had no clue what she was saying. After 100 pages into the book,
it has suddenly become more interesting, and I see myself getting
arrested soon.”
His other recommendations are:
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter because it “was recommended for a Book Club reading. I couldn't finish it by deadline, but maybe I will keep visiting it.”
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie – “I wanted to read Rushdie again. I took some time deciding which one and then zeroed in on this book that I was reading in 2004, but left it midway and then never found time to revisit [until now].”
by Albert Camus
This book, published in 1947, narrates the story of a plague that is sweeping across the French Algerian city of Oran.
Recommended
by future Spittoon Book Club leader Carol Richman, she simply states
that “if anyone hasn’t read it, now is the right time.” Camus used a
cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran's population in
1849 as his source material. Given the world we are currently living in,
this is certainly a book relevant for our time.
by Emily St. John Mandel
Another pandemic-based novel, Station
Eleven begins with an actor having a heart attack and dying while
performing King Lear on stage, the same evening a deadly virus first
begins spreading in North America.
Spittoon regular and comedian
Louis Dowling simply states that Station Eleven is “a great lockdown
book”. The novel moves back and forth in time from exploring the actor’s
youth to twenty years into the future in a post-apocalyptic world.
by Ruth Ozeki
This novel tells the story of Nao, a 16-year-old Japanese girl living in Tokyo who keeps a diary, and Ruth, a
Japanese-American writer who finds the diary inside a Hello Kitty
lunchbox that washes up near her home on an island off the coast of
British Columbia.
Lastly, I wanted to give my own personal
recommendation for a book that I read recently. A Tale for the Time
Being, as you might guess from the name, deals with the concept of time,
how time passes and what “time being” means. As we are currently stuck
in semi-lockdown for the “time being”, it feels like quite an appropriate
book to read. The novel is funny, heartwarming and tragic all at the
same time and definitely well worth a read.
3 Movies Recommended by 3 Beijing Residents
Images: Amazon, Katie Coy
advertisement