For your disaster prep reading list
If the terrors of contagion, environmental catastrophe, and the general apocalypse have been weighing on you lately and you’re game for a little exposure therapy, try:
This Is How We Live Now: An NY Mag feature from January where writer Emily Raboteau chronicles a year of diary entries wherein she challenges herself to bring climate change up in conversation every day. On their own, each entry reads like a well-observed but pedestrian incident; added up together, it’s a slow-mo unfolding of the ominous “before” part of a dystopian fantasy.
The Water Cure: A novel by Sophie Mackintosh from 2018 that Margaret Atwood called a “sinister fable;” I read this over the weekend and couldn’t help but obsess over toxins and power dynamics along with the protagonist. The whole story is a bit more fantastical and shadowy, so if you’re looking for something a step removed from, you know, all this, read this one.
Severance: A novel by Ling Ma, also from 2018. Oh boy. It’s impossible to not draw parallels between the book’s fictional “Shen fever” and the coronavirus outbreak/panic, but even the first chapter, which talks about how the characters relied on YouTube to survive in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, is something I think about all the time. I wrote a blurb about why this was one of the best books of the decade, but you should know that anyone especially working in media in New York City might find it a little too close to home.
Anyway, those are my recs for disaster preparedness reads; what are yours??
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