Dark, difficult and epic: A summer reading list for the age of quarantine and COVID-19

Summer reading has long been synonymous with simple pleasures. The beach read, the airport paperback, the vacation thriller, the holiday romance — a respite from drudgery, a bit of sun-soaked escapism ideal for tropical climes. 

But this summer is different. There will be no international jet-setting, no much-needed getaways to the all-inclusive resort. Thanks to coronavirus, our customary holidaymaking has been put on hold, to be replaced with the considerably less appealing “staycation” and yet more time at home. 

And one thing many of us do have a lot of lately, is spare time — all the time we would otherwise be spending at bars and restaurants, at swimming pools or baseball games. With that in mind, we have decided to present a different kind of summer reading list: arduous epics and bleak masterpieces, intellectual classics and revolutionary texts. The books you’ve been meaning to get around, but have never found the time or the will. This is your opportunity. Here are 10 lockdown summer reads.

1. William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic

“There’s much more stupidity than there is malice in the world,” someone observes midway through Carpenter’s Gothic, the garrulous anti-epic by American post-war master William Gaddis. In Carpenter’s Gothic there’s an abundance of both: the book’s three warring voices, an irate husband, his lonesome and depressed wife, and the intermittent stranger who owns their house, spend the duration of the novel whining, fighting, complaining, and otherwise airing their hatred and their pain. Like Gaddis’s previous novel, the 1,000-page satire J.R., Carpenter’s Gothic is entirely dialogue, and the cacophony of mundane chatter quickly feels oppressive. Stick with it, though, and you begin to find the rhythm and discover the pleasure of one of the most mesmerizing American novels of the century.

2. Joseph Heller, Something Happened

More than a decade after the release of his universally revered and hugely successful debut novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller returned with a long-anticipated second novel — that almost nobody at the time seemed to like. In fairness, this is a stubbornly unlikeable book, pitch-black in tone and unremittingly bleak in content. But this chronicle of ordinary American Bob Slocum’s joyless middle-class existence is so intense, so grim and utterly uncompromising in its depiction of anxiety and depression that it’s capable of shocking you into a candid reassessment of your life. Deeply unpleasant, it’s also resoundingly, breathtakingly true.

3. George Eliot, Middlemarch

It bears the subtitle A Study of Provincial Life, but Middlemarch, George Eliot’s 19th-century masterpiece, and maybe the finest achievement in the history of English literature outside of Shakespeare, sometimes reads like a study of everything — a comprehensive portrait of the world and everything and everyone in it. To the modern reader, Middlemarch can seem to have the thrilling sweep of a season of television, as the overlapping dramas of a cast of compelling characters are lavished with attention on an epic scale. It covers star-crossed romance and blackmail intrigue, municipal politics and scientific controversies. If it matters to life, it happens in Middlemarch.

4. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

When it was released in the early 1960s, everyone had an opinion about The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing’s frank, intellectual classic of feminism, socialism and women’s liberation was so provocative to readers and critics at the time that people seriously wondered whether it wouldn’t instigate a full-blown war of the sexes. Lessing’s honest portrayal of sexism and the clumsy buffoonery of even well-meaning men isn’t exactly shocking circa 2020, but her exquisite prose and sincere expressions of challenging emotions make The Golden Notebook as profound and engrossing today as the day it was published.

5. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

Life under lockdown has a tendency to make the everyday seem somewhat insane. As it happens, everything in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction feels more or less the same way: normal, but off somehow. Wise Blood concerns the travails of one Hazel Motes, a veteran in the late 1940s whose experiences in combat have jaded him for life. But Motes has gone a little bit crazy, and his outlook on the world, coloured by a rejection of the church and his religious background, leans toward semi-deranged extremes. Richly populated with characters so strange they can only seem real, and written with exuberant verve, it feels weirdly relevant to what PR flacks have dubbed “these uncertain times.”

6. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People

Famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is best-remembered for his debut novel Things Fall Apart, but his later novel A Man of the People advances his mastery of English-language African literature even further. A scathing, brutally hilarious satire about neocolonialism and the corruption inherent in international politics more broadly, A Man of the People tells the story of the Minister of Culture of an unnamed African nation, Chief Nanga, whose rank incompetence and unscrupulousness are seen through the eyes of narrator, Odili, a school teacher and intellectual brought into Nanga’s party. Achebe is meant to indict his homeland, but half a century later, it reads just as clearly as an account of U.S. President Donald Trump.

7. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Historian, scholar and political activist Angela Y. Davis has advocated for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex (a term she coined) for decades — even if her ideas about dismantling the justice system have entered the mainstream only recently. In this seminal book from turn of the millennium, Davis explores the problematic history and evolution of the American prison system, confronting biases inherent in law enforcement, the scourge of exploitative for-profit prisons and the way that incarceration developed in the wake of slavery as a means to continue subjugating black and brown bodies and reinforce the white status quo. Her simple solution? Don’t merely reform prisons. Abolish them.

8. J.G. Ballard,High-Rise

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” So begins J.G. Ballard’s dark, delirious literary thriller High-Rise, quite unforgettably — and it only gets more disturbing from there. A darkly comic account of the descent into violent madness of the residents of a modern high-rise apartment complex in 1970s London, High-Rise is arguably too on-the-nose to resonate during a global pandemic that’s keeping us in our homes 24/7. But as our own grip on reality loosens, it might be helpful to see how that turns out.

9. Philip Roth, American Pastoral

The parallels between our current historical moment and the civil unrest of the late 1960s has been well-established, so it’s hardly surprising that the most urgent and incisive novel about what’s happening right now across North America should expressly concern the political turmoil in the United States in 1968. The great Philip Roth’s masterpiece, American Pastoral is an imagined account of the life and times of Seymour “Swede” Levov, an esteemed Jewish businessman in New Jersey whose daughter becomes a militant radical during the Vietnam War. Shrewdly exposing the hypocrisies of middle-class American life that this period laid bare, American Pastoral articulates clearly the ways in which the country isn’t working.

10. James Joyce, Ulysses

June 16th is Bloomsday, the annual holiday commemorating the legendary, ordinary day in 1904, during which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus went about their errands in Dublin. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of Ulysses, which transforms the ultra-mundane into the poetic, even mythological, by a singular process of literary alchemy. It’s easy to be daunted by Ulysses, with its vast bulk of stream-of-consciousness prose and dense thickets of historical allusion and philosophical musing. But if there were ever a time to make the effort to conquer it — and, it should be said, to savour the joy and delight of reading this wonderful book — this would be it.