I used to catch up on reading during my travels, finishing a book (if it was short) on a flight to the way to my destinations. During the pandemic, reading inspired my artworks, allowing my brain to shift into the slow, focused process of imagining a narrative.
Heroes undergoing struggles and artists / revolutionaries addressing their life’s work were a solace as I labored in my creative processes.
Here are five books that I’ve read (or almost finished) that offered creative inspiration through the pandemic:
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
The Grace of Kings (Dandelion Dynasty), Ken Liu
The Next American Revolution, Grace Lee Boggs
Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
An American Sunrise
Harjo’s writing is exceptional, eloquent and elegiac. Her poem, “By The Way: For Adrienne Rich” resonated deeply with me as I labored to create during the pandemic. It was a reminder of the power of art to transcend the suffering of our times, portrayed aptly in her lines: “Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess. / The music, a sack that carries the bones of those left alongside /The trail of tears when we were forced / To leave everything we knew by the way—.”
The Grace of Kings
I became familiar with Ken Liu’s work through his masterful translations of science-fiction writers like Cixin Liu and Hao Jingfang. He elevated the content in ways that demonstrated his writerly prowess (for example, the Joel Martinson translations of Cixin Liu’s works just cannot compare). After reading The Paper Menagerie, I was excited to dig into his long, epic fantasy series: Dandelion Dynasty. If you are a geek for fantasy, you’ll be enthralled by the mythology, swashbuckling fight scenes, and ethical dilemmas and political quagmires.
The Next American Revolution
I’ve been having many conversations with activists - particularly women activists - about our role as artists and cultural producers in our current climate of social and ecological injustices. I often refer to models - mentors whose works I greatly admire. These include the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, and bell hooks, the Black feminist scholar (and also Buddhist). Grace Lee Boggs spent seven decades as an activist. Despite completing and receiving her PhD, she was denied professorship. Her philosophy about living and working in the service of “growing our souls” in order to expand humanity, was a compelling read. The notion of “living simply” so others can “simply live” shed light on American capitalism - as an ideology that has commodified labor, bodies and natural resources in the service of a middle-class standard of living that, as evidenced by climate change, is simply not sustainable.
Future Home of the Living God
I had heard that Erdrich’s writing was “dark,” but this speculative / science-fiction text of hers blows The Handmaid’s Tale out of the water. I was enraptured by her depictions of a post-apocalyptical world in which biological reproduction has gone awry, mainly through the struggles of various women. The fundamental question of autonomy, in a world constricting even rights to live and die, shed light on the genocidal treatment of people of the First Nations.
A World of Wonders
Aimee’s work is both prose and autobiography, painting the lives of animals and plants in richly contextualized stories per chapter. I think about her chirping conversations with songbirds and how I wish I had that kind of relationship with nature (why don’t I have that relationship with nature?). I am spellbound by Aimee’s words, which weave scientific observations into her experiences. I am also wistful about how soon these experiences may disappear from our lifetimes. Bonus: Lucky Fish was another favorite book of poetry that you can check out.
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What books would you recommend for summer reading?