Books for pandemic reading
Nine writers tell us about a book they’ve read recently that’s helped them reframe what it means to be a person of faith and a reader right now.
I generally avoid postapocalyptic fiction. I’m a skittish reader, prone to boundaryless encounters with dystopias, and books in this genre can spook me for weeks.
In May, my book group’s pick was Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler’s much-lauded work of Afrofuturism. Published in 1993, the book is so spectacularly prescient that my line of literary inquiry while reading went something like: “How did she know? Wait. How did she know?”
The novel is narrated by Lauren Olamina, a Black teenager living in the early 2020s after all givens have been decimated by climate change, extreme inequality, epidemics, shootings, and fires. State lines have become like national borders, and voters love their autocratic president, who they hope will “get us back to normal.” Adults hold on to nostalgia and denial until they no longer can.
