Five books for today
Here are five books that are well suited for today (now please excuse me while I go cry in a corner)…
- Blindness by Jose Saramago
Described as “A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century.”
2. The Chaos Walking Trilogy by Ness
3. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
4. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
5. On the Beach by Shute (because you know… fingers on the nuclear weapons codes).
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Book Worm
jenp27
Nicole Del Sesto
The Reader's Room 
😦 Grr!! I was reminded of the Bradbury story “The Sound of Thunder”, where the guy goes back in time, steps on a butterfly, and the fascist candidate wins an election. All of these are very appropriate, too! And I’m crying today, but tomorrow I’m going to volunteer to tutor so that the next generation knows how to fact check and make informed decisions.
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I like that. I have yet been able to bring myself around to a more positive way of thinking. Today is going to be a tough day
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One of the How People Voted maps that was reported over here in the UK showed that millennials predominantly voted Clinton. There is hope in your future. The same as there is hope in the UK. We just have to hope that the orange clown’s 4 year term is managed so that it doesn’t descend into outright fascism and destructive toxicity. Do what you can to resist him!
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Thank you for this list, Jen. Weirdly, it helps me to get some emotional distance. And that’s an excellent suggestion, Tracey. I’m going to take my retired teacher skills to my low income, Hispanic neighbors. I truly see this election as a failure of education in this country.
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I’m happy to hear any positive movement that may come out of what I think is a horrible day. It makes it a little easier to tolerate!
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I am with you both. Unbelievable.
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I was thinking about making such a list this morning…
Station Eleven was one of my choices too.
Also:
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Maddadam trilogy, Margaret Atwood
Dune, Frank Herbert
Crime and Punishment, Dostoievsky
And some aspects of Games of Thrones (and following volumes) come to mind.
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Funny—my reaction was to avoid anything heavy or difficult and go for the purely comforting ones. I considered breaking out Georgia Nicolson to take to work for my lunch break, but I’m not ready to laugh yet; I ended up with the Gloria Vanderbilt/Anderson Cooper memoir, which I’ve been finding so soothing for some reason. And then I didn’t even read it, because I watched her concession speech and just sat there feeling depressed.
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I’m wallowing in my own anger and sadness. Hopefully I will be able to snap out of it soon and move on to other things
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I’ve had to shelve it as much as I can to go to work, so I’m in a bit of a zombie state. But I get off in half an hour and then, I have no idea. It probably won’t be good.
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I’ve never been an end of the world prepped type my “plan” has always been more along the lines of go out in one huge party. I believe that many Black Plague victims took this approach, seem to recall a scene in Anya Seton’s Katherine …
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Oddly I bought monsters of men last week. On the plus side I haven’t seen any cities in the prowl looking for sustenance yet – maybe they haven’t heard the election result yet. I’m hoping to read something a little darker then my current book Litle Women but am not ready for dystopia do it migh have to be a cosy crime
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No, no! Tana French for a book that grips you and that you can’t put down. Louise Penny so you can just have a respite in the Three Pines community. I saw the adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can Happen Here at Berkeley Repertory Theatre last week. I didn’t think that it could happen here. I need a moment to recover.
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Atwood is always a good choice no matter what the occasion. Think the whole world was shocked by this outcome.
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This past week I read Leaving the Sea, Jen. I know you disliked it, but I found it strikingly relevant to what is happening politically across the world and it pulled a trick for me of thinking analytically rather than emotionally. Although fear of what that man is capable of is hard to not react to emotionally.
I actually wasn’t shocked. He played into the fears of a large swathe of people who are by no means disenfranchised but who feel themselves to be that way, and who feel that their privileged way of life is under threat. As soon as the UK voted to leave the EU, I started to think Trump would win in the US. The same tensions and bigotry exist in both our societies. Then I started to think about how the Republican Party has blocked or delayed all manner of legislation during Obama’s terms of office, including to the point of constitutional crisis, and their selection of someone outside of the political mainstream to run against Clinton made a weird kind of sense.
Not shocked, then, but extremely depressed.
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