The best immersive books to get lost in – part two
In part two of our round up of reads to get lost in, Jake Elliott shares his selection of the best immersive books, from a timely look at neighbourly relations to an amble through the Japanese countryside. Check out part one here.
Float by Anne Carson
If you don’t know Anne Carson, then you’re in for a joyous discovery. Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of classics and literature. ‘Float’ is a poetry collection that comes in a clear plastic box. Inside, numerous small chapbooks float, holding jottings, lists, reflections and excerpts of thoughts that can be shuffled, rearranged, put down or considered however the reader might chose. The New York Times profiled Carson in 2013, the piece is a great intro to her work.
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss
If you feel, given current events, that you’d like to stay broadly ‘on topic’, this fascinating study, written in 2014 by Eula Biss, examines society’s fear of the medical establishment and the debate around vaccination. Biss reflects on her own experience as a new mother and conversations with other mothers to build arguments and ideas about immunisation and vulnerability. ‘On Immunity’ is a moving account of health on a large scale and an exploration of what it feels like to be “threatened by the invisible.” It weaves compelling evidence into arguments that are generous and life-affirming. This book could be read as a companion to Susan Sontag’s ‘Illness as Metaphor’, if you wish.
Letters to My Neighbour by Marcel Proust (translated by Lydia Davis)
One of the upsides to life in lockdown is the new bonds that we’re beginning to form with our neighbours. Or perhaps you’ve just become more aware of the strange hours they keep and the intricacies of their ‘exercise’ schedule? Over 100 years ago, Marcel Proust was politely asking his neighbours on the Boulevard Haussmann to ‘keep it down’ in elegant, elliptical prose. Collected here are some of those letters, providing a beautiful insight into Parisian life at the fin de siècle. Draw inspiration for your next passive aggressive note… This, of course, is an indirect recommendation for the Modernist masterworks: In Search of Lost Time. Read all of them. Now is your moment. Dip the madeleine. You won’t regret it.
RENDANG by Will Harris
Will Harris is one of the brightest stars of young contemporary poetry in the UK. He is the acclaimed author of the essay, Mixed-Race Superman (a sublime study of resilience and self-creation featuring Barack Obama and Keanu Reeves) and the poetry pamphlet All This Is Implied. In RENDANG, Harris draws on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage to show us new ways of thinking about identity and cultural memory. This collection came out at the beginning of March and is a beautiful way to encounter the best of contemporary poetry. If you’d like a taster of Harris’s work, you can read his poem SAY, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, on the Poetry Society’s website, here.
The Fox and Dr Shimamura by Christine Wunnicke
This is one of the strangest novels I have ever read. If you’re starting to go stir-crazy at home, you should open this book and prepare to enter the mind of neurologist Dr Shimamura. The year is 1891 and Dr Shimamura, suffering from consumption, ambles through the countryside of Japan’s Shimane Prefecture. He is tasked with examining women who have reportedly become possessed by fox spirits. I read this very quickly, in two sittings and dreamt about it feverishly for at least a week. It is dangerously under-celebrated. Wunnicke is a prize-winning novelist, biographer and translator. We should all know more about her.
Houdini’s Box by Adam Phillips
A meditation on the art of escape might be considered dangerous reading in the time of lockdown. Nonetheless, I would strongly recommend diving into the life of Harry Houdini through the psychoanalytical lens of Adam Phillips. This is a beautiful book concerned with what escapism may really be about. If you ever got into the case histories of Oliver Sacks, you’ll love this book; half Phillips’s take on Houdini’s life, the second half recounts Phillips’s time in analysis with a man who finds himself in a permanent state of flight (“If we privilege what we are escaping from as realer… than we what we are escaping to, we are preferring what we fear, to what we seem to desire.”) Warning: if you like this, Phillips has written lots of books.
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