I’ve been reading too much; I haven’t been reading enough. We’ve been in a pandemic for a year now and I have whiplash from having to pivot so hard so often. At first it feels like all I read is the news and policy directives. My attention span is gone too, reading is harder than it was. When I cast my mind back to write this, all sense of chronology is gone—time is a circle, and the circle is a zero.

First, I read Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, and wonder if there is any hope for us at all. The book is bleak, and in the early days of a global health crisis this is something I’d call ‘four stars startlingly relevant’ in the sense that we so often seem unwilling to learn the lessons history tries to teach us. Chernobyl Prayer is a masterpiece. I read the first couple of chapters and put it down for six months, unprepared for how affected I was. I can see why she won the Nobel in 2015. I wonder if I’ve ever read any other Nobel winners and remember how much I enjoyed Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead when we chose it for book club a couple of years ago.