How many times have you ever dreamed of spending a nice relaxing day at home, without having to go out, and just curling up in your favorite chair with a book?
For some, many.
There’s an advantage in sheltering-in-place. Since we’re not endlessly going from one destination to the next, we have this unparalleled opportunity to breathe and take it slow. We have more time to read, to reflect and connect with ourselves.
Even if we don’t have piles of books at home, there are several other ways to enjoy a good story. With a little research you can find: publishing houses that offer free e-books or discounts on paperback books, writers who read their work on social media, and even podcasts of various literature. Also, rereading some classics that have been collecting dust on your shelf for years is certainly not a bad idea.
Here are some of our favorite books that we at MSA recommend to expand your reading list.
Ps. Let's go back to buying books as soon as possible to support our local bookstores!
Trout Fishing in America
by Richard Brautigan.
The book it’s an unusual collection of thoughts and observations taking place in the context of late 50’s early 60’s San Francisco North Beach and West Coast with a lot of analogies and references to trout fishing. The novel is organized in a manner different from Brautigan’s other novels and from more conventional examples of the genre. For one thing, it has no easily recognizable plot structure. Rather, it weaves together (with apparent randomness) about forty episodes in the unnamed narrator’s life and juxtaposes these with a few miscellaneous sections that illuminate the chapters in their vicinity. One thread of the story deals with the experiences of the narrator’s boyhood. From these the reader gains a sense of his unusual personality—especially his separateness, vivid imagination, and highly individual way of viewing life.
BLINDNESS
By Jose’ Saramago
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lone Survivor
by Marcus Luttrell
This is a story of great sacrifice and incredible strength of the human spirit to survive.
This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, SEAL team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His squad mates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors.
CROWDED
by Christopher Sebela (writer), Ro Stein (artist)
Ten minutes in the future, the world runs on an economy of job shares and apps—like Reaper, a platform for legal assassination. When the apparently average Charlie Ellison wakes up one day to find out she is the target of a million-dollar Reapr campaign, she hires Vita, the lowest rated bodyguard on the Dfend app. Now, with all of Los Angeles hunting Charlie, she and Vita will have to figure out who wants her dead, and why, before the campaign’s 30 days—or their lives—are over.
Sapiens
A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Naoh Harari
Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights. Starting from this provocative idea, Sapiens goes on to retell the history of our species from a completely fresh perspective. It explains that money is the most pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised; that capitalism is the most successful religion ever invented; that the treatment of animals in modern agriculture is probably the worst crime in history; and that even though we are far more powerful than our ancient ancestors, we aren’t much happier.
Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts
Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who escapes maximum security prison in Australia and ends up in the streets of Bombay.
As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals.
The novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.
