Dear readers, About once a year, when the state of the world is getting me down or the relentlessly gray skies have me feeling blue, a little alert in my brain says, “It’s time to watch ‘Lovesick.’” The British sitcom, with its three perfect seasons, is my comfort watch. It’s ostensibly about the misadventures of modern dating, but the real love story is the friendship among its three main characters: the hapless Dylan, the sarcastic yet tenderhearted Evie and the lovable playboy Luke. It’s a show about the confounding experience of being human, and about the people we choose to muddle through it with. (And OK, yes, this being a rom-com, two of those friends eventually become lovers.) I would happily tell you to stop reading this newsletter right now and watch it for yourself. But the series, tragically, was removed from Netflix in January, and is currently unavailable to stream in its entirety in the United States. I’ve found it hard not to take this personally. That was my show! But while I pray to the corporate media gods to find it another home, I’ve turned to another source of succor, one that could never disappear or desert me: books. It might seem an odd leap from contemporary romance to a postapocalyptic tale and a family drama, neither of which is particularly comforting or short on emotional turmoil. But no matter how many times I reread them, these books still crack my heart wide open. Like “Lovesick,” they remind me of what it means to be human — in all the loveliest, messiest, most maddening and exquisite ways. —Jennifer “Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John MandelFiction, 2014
“Station Eleven” opens with a tragedy: An actor, 51 years old, drops dead in the middle of a production of “King Lear.” But this death turns out to be just the first tremor of the cataclysm to come. While the actor’s heart stutters and a paramedic trainee who happened to be in the audience tries to save his life, a devastating flu is working its way around the globe. In a matter of weeks, most of the human race is wiped out. Twenty years later, civilization as we know it has come to an end. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below,” Mandel writes. “No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights.” An incomplete list. What remains are the essentials: a hunger for connection, for answers and, despite the devastation, for art. Among the few cultural artifacts that survived the plague are the works of Shakespeare, which a troupe called the Travelling Symphony performs for a circuit of communities around Lake Michigan. Kirsten, a child actor in that long-ago production of “King Lear,” is in the cast, and hers is one of several stories that Mandel weaves together, jumping between the Before Times and this strange new present. Mandel places each of her narrative puzzle pieces so precisely that you don’t realize until the end that this whole time they’ve actually been magnets, slowly working their way toward each other. The finale left me breathless. (And, speaking of perfect TV shows, the HBO adaptation is an absolute stunner and, as of this writing, still available.) Read if you like: “Severance,” by Ling Ma; “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” by Gabrielle Zevin; “The Great Believers,” by Rebecca Makkai; “The Last of Us” (especially Season 1, Episode 3 of the TV show). “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” by Karen Joy FowlerFiction, 2013
Fowler’s novel takes the question of what makes us human more literally. At first glance, Rosemary’s childhood seems straight out of an all-American sitcom. She grew up in Indiana, the child of two college professors. She had an older brother, Lowell, and a sister, Fern, from whom she was inseparable. They lived in a farmhouse; their yard had an apple tree. Then, something happened. Seventeen years later, Rosemary is a quiet, lonely college student at the University of California, Davis — estranged from her family, muddling her way through the mid-1990s and trying to process who she is in that pivotal event’s wake. To say any more would spoil the joy of reading this book — a concern the writer of its jacket copy does not seem to have shared. Here is my plea to you: Do not peek, do not pass Go, ignore all summaries and reviews and go into this novel as blind as possible. If it’s too late for you to enter unspoiled, hope is not lost; it was for me, too, and I can promise you’re still in for an unputdownable read. Fowler is a riveting storyteller with a psychologist’s eye for the mixed-up modus operandi of human behavior, and she can delight and/or devastate you in the span of one sentence. But if you can, please, do as I say and not as I did. You’ll thank me later. Read if you like: “Commonwealth,” by Ann Patchett; “The Family Fang,” by Kevin Wilson; that scene in “Mean Girls” where the students in the cafeteria go feral. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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