Anywhere But Here

It comes as no surprise that three months into a global pandemic I needed a bit of escapist reading. With the Black Lives Matter protests raging through most of the month I, like many other, turned to curated anti-racists reading lists and spent a bundle at Indigo. But those books were still being shipped. And in the interim more people were dying, more stories of police violence were coming out, the world seemed capable of igniting fires and extinguishing none.

For the first couple months of quarantine my brain fell out my ear. I couldn’t read, and turned instead to the comfort of movies and television. Except on my lunch breaks at work. Because of Covid, I’ve stopped using the staff room and instead have two half hour chunks of time to spend in my Mazda. Which is what more than anything forced me back to my bookshelves. That and knowing that the library would eventually reopen and the books I’d had late-fee free would need to go back.

Joan Didion came first. I devoured her in an evening. I’m not sure why but I had always felt her writing was for the Ivy league types. Girls that I always wished to be but knew were just beyond my reach. Ones who would never be caught dead reading popular fiction. But when I saw the documentary The Center Will Not Hold, it became clear that while celebrated her work was not exclusionary. I couldn’t have known that South and West would have come to me at the exact moment I needed to read it.

NYT Review: The South (and the West) Through Joan Didion’s Eyes
by Laila Lalami - April 14, 2017

Meanwhile in the parking lot I was taken down the Ivy path once more, but in a version of New Haven twisted by magic. Not the kind where kids go off to a boarding school and get pet owls, mind you. The kind where secret societies perform rituals that involve disemboweling townies. With drugs and sexual assault. Where the living is just as dangerous as the dead. Maybe more.

If Hogwarts and Trainspotting merged together and joined the Skulls. That is what awaits you in The Ninth House.

Goodreads lists it as “Alex Stern #1” but gives no indication when a second might be coming. Last October is was optioned by Amazon Studios with author Leigh Bardugo producing. But with a global pandemic, can any of us really say what will come next?

Bustle: Leigh Bargugo’s Book About Yale’s Secret Societies
Will “F*ck You Up a Little”
by Zan Romanoff - October 9, 2019

For a true escape I always turn to France. And in this case it was the first of the late Peter Mayle’s works, A Year in Provence.

Like an idiot I had seen the Russell Crowe film A Good Year, and fell absolutely in love with it, never once thinking it could be true. Until I found out that it was based on a book by a British man who have moved to Provence himself. Turns out that he was more famous for his non-fiction accounts of relocating to France than for his novels.

I was only 7 when A Year in Provence came out, so I guess I can be forgiven for not knowing the best seller for non-fiction travel memoir lists while learning to ride a bike. But what is unforgivable is how I’ve owned the book for years without finishing it.

His writing instantly transports me to a place I very much wish I were. Every meal description haunts me with memories of fresh bread. But as much as reading about France pains me it also gives me comfort like nothing else can.

the Guardian: A Year in Provence 20 Years On
by John Crace - January 11, 2010