5 books to enjoy this winter
A few recommendations in literature to bide the time as winter makes way for spring
Art by Chelsea Lai.
If there is anything a late winter cold front can teach us, it is the importance of good quality indoor recreation.
The most classic way to entertain oneself when the weather outside gets frightful (and what your parents probably tell you to do a lot) is picking up a book!
From education to entertainment, fiction to non-fiction, a good book can take your mind off the biting winds and snow, transporting you into another reality or enhancing your understanding of this one. Here are a few humble book recommendations in no particular order.
- Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal absurdist novel is about Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist who becomes “unstuck in time” and plunges himself — and the reader — into a non-linear journey of mortality and free will.
Light on pages yet heavy on plot, the story travels from Second World War Germany to the zoos of the planet Tralfamadore. It deals with a cold, uncaring universe that is fated to end ingloriously, drenched in deaths that are bound to happen regardless of fairness, all of which is confronted with the nonchalant mantra, “So it goes.” It is a perfect blend of dry humour, semi-stoic irreverence, and human tragedy.
- Midnight’s Children
While it is not the novel that would leave author Salman Rushdie in serious controversy, that does not subtract from the profound nature of this long, mystical, and engaging story.
Protagonist Saleem Sinai recounts his life — from birth to adulthood — inexplicably imbued with supernatural abilities due to being one of the hundreds of children born within the first hour of Indian independence on Aug. 15, 1947. Having been born at the very stroke of midnight, his life and that of India’s are inextricably bound, becoming a fantastical metaphor for the turbulence of the country’s post-colonial history.
- The Jakarta Method
Journalist Vincent Bevins’s debut book focuses generally on the rise and fall of the, still extant, Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War at the hands of the CIA.
This book untangles the intricate webs of international intrigue, interference, ideology, and realpolitik that surround the U.S.’s history of violent anti-communism and how that crusade directly led to material support for far-right coups d’état in Indonesia, Chile, and Brazil, among others.
The combination of declassified documents, contemporary accounts, and interviews with those who have lived experiences unveils the true, bloody extent of the U.S.’s Cold War program.
- Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
This book is Christopher Moore’s hilariously off-the-wall and intentionally anachronistic crack at filling in the missing years of Jesus Christ through the perspective of his childhood chum and “forgotten apostle” Levi Bar Alphaeus, aka Biff.
He travels to seek out the Three Wise Men so that Jesus can get a grasp on what it means to be the Messiah. The lessons learned inform Jesus’s teachings ultimately culminate in his crucifixion. Mostly silly with a dash of sentimental moments, it is a more than amusing novel that will leave readers grinning at those two Levantines’ antics.
- Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
This less-than-100-page manifesto by the late philosopher Mark “K-punk” Fisher explores the popular, pervasive western perception that the duo of capitalism and neo-liberalism are the only viable options since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The book acts merely as an introduction to a wider school of thought in regard to what comes next for humanity as, 14 years after publication, everything we thought to be normal seems to be crashing down all around us.
