In these uncertain and trying times, reading can offer moments of much-needed comfort and escapism. Whether returning to a well-thumbed favourite, exploring a new genre, or tackling a challenging text, it’s good to keep a book by your side. In this new blog, Publishing Director Tom Walker browses his bookshelves and selects his recommended quarantine reads.
Doctor Zhivago
What better time to re-engage with
this great Russian epic? The recent translation by Boris Pasternak’s nephew returns the lyricism and colour to this beautiful novel of love, war and the Russian soul.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Being stuck at home and only allowed out to go to the shops seems a good time to read about feminism, and this is arguably the first feminist novel. Wildly surprising in its modern sensibility,
Brontë rages against a society that held women shackled to men and the home.
The Little Prince
I can’t help thinking of how
the Little Prince would respond to our world right now. An enigmatic, compassionate but sad creature of the stars, I sometimes imagine the weight of his judgement on us all for the job we’re doing of keeping our little planet safe.
The World Turned Upside Down
The English Civil War of the 1640s shook the nation to its core, and in the process out scattered a legion of
radical ideas and philosophies which have formed the national identity ever since. One wonders how our current upheaval will reshape us.
Moby-Dick
What an opportunity, if you never have, to read this
bulking leviathan of a novel. From the first pages in Nantucket, where Ishmael befriends trusty Queequeg, Melville loops his crazed tale of ambition and revenge, culminating in scenes of terror on the high seas.
His Dark Materials
Pullman might be the purest storyteller of our times, and
His Dark Materials is his masterpiece: a truly addictive adventure story which leads us into other worlds.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Turning to
Margaret Atwood in times of trouble is always a good decision. Prophetic or not she is wise and compassionate, and laces those qualities with a killer wit.
Maigret
If all else fails,
pick up a Maigret. With plots as light as a feather and a stripped-down style, Simenon’s thrillers are beautifully evocative of the underground tensions of a mid-century Paris.
Persuasion
It’s always a good time to re-read Austen, to get lost in that luscious prose and arch wit.
Persuasion is her last-completed, and perhaps her most mature novel, and a joy to revisit.
I am Legend
In the current circumstances this is not a book for the faint-hearted:
Matheson’s vision of a post-pandemic future doesn’t contain many people, and even fewer who are not zombie-vampires, but there is a glimmer of hope at its end...
The Shining
A family isolated for months away from civilisation … could there be a more pertinent premise for our current situation? With its violent and supernatural undertones this puts a terrifying spin on lockdown but
it’s King at his finest and you’ll be hooked from the outset.
The Mirror & The Light
My final choice is not yet available as a Folio Society edition, but I do hope that it will be one day. This is my current quarantine reading. A nine-hundred-page masterwork of astonishing delicacy and intelligence which draws one back through the eyes of Cromwell to a Tudor London infested with plague and political instability.
It’s not always easy to focus on reading with the world turned upside-down but choose to lose yourself in any of these titles and I think you’ll be richly rewarded.