2021 was the year when the world found itself at its lowest. If we had to sum up this year in an abstract feeling, it would be of loss and longing. With the second wave of the Covid 19 pandemic shattering our lives in ways more than one, 2022 looks grim yet hopeful at the same time.
As the year comes to an end and another starts with a small ray of hope, here are a few books that document loss, love, longing and hope through words. Pick up any of these five books to start the year and let us know your thoughts!
1. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Didion who passed away recently wrote extensively on grief and loss. In ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ which was written after her husband’s death, Joan takes her readers through her personal experience with grief and loss. Her writing on grief extends beyond the book in the form of essays. This book is extremely personal and documents her journey with loss and how grief changed her as a person. Surely one of the best ones to kickstart the year with.
2. The High Priestess Never Marries: Stories of Love and Consequence by Sharanya Manivannan
Sharanya’s prose in ‘The High Priestess Never Marries: Stories of Love and Consequence’ is lucid and magical. The collection of short stories is perfect for people who are hopeless romantics, the ones who live for unrealistic, literature-sque romance and the ones going through heartbreak. The author pens down tales that are set in Chennai but occasionally cris cross amongst various cities. She weaves her narrative like a dream. Sharanya holds her reader's hand and takes them into her magical world effortlessly.
3. The Unabridged Journals by Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath is known for her raw, confessional poetry that hits her readers at all the right places. Apart from her poems, Plath maintained extensive journals where one gets a deep insight into her personal life throughout her career. Her journals are as blunt as her poetry and narrate her life in her own words. Plath’s journals, together with her poetry collections, paint the tragic life of one of the extraordinary poets of the modernist era who ended up killing herself at the young age of 30. Her journals are confessions in their way, giving a little bit of understanding of who Sylvia was and what sort of life she lived.
4. In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, Maria goes deep into her family history and brings out a book that explores personal and cultural memories. After the death of her aunt, the author finds herself in her aunt’s flat filled with photographs, letters, postcards, and other souvenirs. In an attempt to explore her family life under Hitler's reign through these tangible objects, she seamlessly connects them, with memory and pieces her book like a family scrapbook in the hope of recovering personal history.
5. Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
Originally published in Portuguese in 1998, Paulo Coelho’s novel touches the boundaries of mental health, self-discovery and madness. In ‘Veronika Decides to Die’, the loss is not communal but personal- there is a loss of self. As the title suggests, Veronika, a 24-year-old healthy, young woman survives an overdose of pills and ends up in a mental hospital. She comes to know about her weak heart and hardly a week of life left. As the plot unfolds, readers with Veronika, are on a journey of self-discovery.
From all of us at the book club, we wish you a happy, safe and healthy new year.
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