The Millions

A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay

How can I summarize 20201 beyond unhinging my mouth open and loosing a terrified, mournful, righteously angry, existentially-fried scream that will Edvard Munch within the birdhouse of my soul for as long as I live? So, yeah, I’ll get right to the part about my reading then.

That said, you and I will have to muscle through one quarantine anecdote. The start of Massachusetts’s stay at home orders in March coincided with my two-week Spring Break from school. Having already written a novel about a virus outbreak in Massachusetts in which there was a shortage of PPE, poor federal response, and right-wing, racist virus conspiracies, I was NOT the least bit mentally prepared to handle the coronavirus reality. I spent those two weeks in a metaphorical fetal position. I couldn’t concentrate on the books I was supposed to be reading for possible blurbs and instead watched Animal Planet and reruns of . I was trying to escape but couldn’t. What brought me back was rereading by one of my favorite writers, . Hardly a feel-good novel, the third in his Blue Rose cycle of novels, writer Tim Underhill returns to The book was not an escape. I did not lose myself in its pages. Instead, with the help of Peter’s sublime talents, I found myself.

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