A Year in Reading: Brandon Taylor

I started the year thinking about plagues and calamities. Like many people, I felt particularly disturbed by the growing gap between what I felt was my lived reality and what was being reported in the news or in print. I read by , and I was so disturbed and invigorated by it that I read it both slowly and too quickly. That is, is a novel about an actual plague that befalls a small, seaside town. But it is also a novel about the plague of misinformation that can attach itself to a city or a state, how we often delude ourselves into thinking that catastrophe always lurks elsewhere. It’s a long, slow year of horrifying realizations, all of which have come to me refracted through the chilling, prescient lens of Camus’s gaze.