Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that he could not live without books.
The same could be said of Pittsburgh, a city that supports independent bookstores, small press publishers, a series of talks by well-known authors and City of Asylum, which houses writers in exile. So we asked local writers to suggest books to read in these strange, unsettling times.
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Clare Beams, author of a new novel, “The Illness Lesson,” is reading Angela Carter’s “Wise Children,” which she calls “delectable escapism.”
“I’m just reading this for the first time now ... it’s a dark but joyous romp, full of vaudeville and sets of twins and Shakespearean theater and illegitimate children and mystery. It feels stuffed to the brim in a way that makes a welcome antidote to our strange sequestered lives right now,” Ms. Beams wrote.
Her other suggestion is “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” a classic by C.S. Lewis.
“This seems like a good moment for anyone, adult or child, to remember that other worlds can open up at any time,” she wrote.
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Stewart O’Nan is the author of “Emily Alone” and “Henry, Himself.” He loves “Pittsburgh” by Frank Santoro, calling it “a gorgeous moving graphic memoir of growing up in Swissvale.” He also likes “Shopping Mall” by Matthew Newton, describing it as “a more analytical book-length personal essay exploring the shopping mall as a shared American experience, focusing on the author’s personal relationship with our own Monroeville Mall. Both make present worlds we as Pittsburghers know that have since vanished.”
If you can’t obtain those titles, Mr. O’ Nan wrote, “I’d recommend reading the big book on your shelf that you’ve tried to read several times but just couldn’t get through. ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘Invisible Man,’ ‘A Little Life.’ Now’s the time, now that you have time. Don’t let that book beat you!”
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Deesha Philyaw, author of the forthcoming story collection “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” recommends “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons” by Imani Perry.
“The author’s love letter to her children is feminist and scholarly, and it balances the fear that comes with raising black children in America with a hopeful imagining of their futures,” Ms. Philyaw wrote.
Ms. Philyaw also likes a story collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. “Whether it’s a battle of words between the mothers of the only two black girls at an elite private school or the subversive actions of a black man married to a white woman fruitarian who is angling to be America’s next top reality TV star, the stories in this timely collection present issues of race and identity with poignancy and dark humor,” she wrote.
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Damon Young, author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker,” highly recommends Michael Arceneaux’s “I Don’t Want to Die Poor” because it “vividly, transparently and hilariously illuminates the state of perpetual negotiation that economic insecurity forces on you. Comedian Samantha Irby’s latest, ‘Wow, No Thank You,’ proves that she is America’s greatest living humorist,” Mr. Young wrote.
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Siobhan Vivian, whose new book, “We Are the Wildcats,” is out this month, recommends “The Penderwicks” by Jeanne Birdsall.
“Should you find yourself in need of a cozy literary family to shelter in place with over the next few weeks, then you really must meet the Penderwicks. This National Book Award-winning series spans five deliciously readable novels, each a snapshot of the tender and ever-evolving relationships between four adolescent sisters as they grow up together,” Ms. Vivian wrote.
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Kathleen George, author of “The Blues Walked In,” turns to spy fiction.
“Anything by Charles McCarry is superb,” including “The Secret Lovers” and “The Shanghai Factor.”
“But to do the job of keeping us positive,” Ms. George wrote, “it’s hard not to mention Amor Towles’ ‘A Gentleman in Moscow,’ the ultimate upbeat survival-in-captivity narrative. Less well-known and captivating is ‘Washington Black,’ a layered and complex treatment of slavery by Esi Edugyan.”
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Like legions of baseball fans, Abby Mendelson is missing the season. He’s reading “Baseball: A Literary Anthology,” a story collection edited by Nicholas Dawidoff with such gems as John Updike’s story about Ted Williams and Gay Talese’s look at Joe DiMaggio in retirement.
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Bob Hoover, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s retired book editor, suggests “The Mirror and the Light” by Hilary Mantel.
“The final book in the fascinating historical fiction trilogy gives us the chance to bid goodbye to Thomas Cromwell, in Mantel’s words, a complex character who served England’s King Henry VIII all too well,” Mr. Hoover wrote.
“These Truths,” by Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, “interprets the course of the United States through its treatment of women and minorities,” Mr. Hoover wrote. “Her liberal take on our history can make readers feel uncomfortable at times, but it forces us to rethink conventional accounts.”
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Sharon Dilworth, author of “Two Sides, Three Rivers,” recommends Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s novel “The Mercies.” Set in an Arctic Norwegian village in 1617, the tale opens with a raging storm that kills 40 fishermen; the remaining women pull together to survive.
“The details about clothing and food and what they do to endure in this small isolated village are so compelling, I felt transported to a different time and place all together,” Ms. Dilworth wrote.
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Joshua David Bellin likes “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” “A modern ‘Walden’ but harder-edged than Thoreau’s classic, this book by Pittsburgh native Annie Dillard shows us both the marvelous and the troubling aspects of the physical world we live in, so it’s perfect for these uncertain times,” he wrote.
Mr. Bellin also suggests “Rescued” by Eliot Schrefer, a novel in a four-part series about young people’s relationship to nonhuman primates. “This book is about finding solace and safety, for ourselves and for other living things, in an often frightening world”.
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If you miss French food, take a tip from Stephen Heyman, author of “The Planter of Modern Life,” a biography of Louis Bromfield, America’s most famous 20th-century farmer, published this week.
In a confessional email, Mr. Heyman wrote, “I’ve lately been sneaking off to the bathtub with a vermouth and soda and a copy of A.J. Liebling’s ‘Between Meals.’ For a cooped-up Francophile like me, it’s way better than ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul.’”
Marylynne Pitz: mpitz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1648 or on Twitter: @mpitzpg.
First Published: April 16, 2020, 12:47 p.m.
