Books I’ve Read During the Pandemic
In the last few months, I’ve read several books that I highly recommend.
The first is Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by African American author Zora Neil Hurston. I heard about it on a PBS series The Great American Read when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Research at Harvard University and an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, recommended it. I like and respect Gates from years of watching Finding Your Roots, a PBS series on which, as host and producer, he traces the genealogy and genetics of well-known people in various fields with fascinating results. Given my respect for Gates, I immediately ordered a copy of Hurston’s book.
As a reader, I don’t like knowing much about a novel before I read it, I’m annoyed when reviews contain spoilers that give away plot points or lessen the pleasure of gaining insight into a character as I read. So, I’m going to follow the edict of Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who famously said, “Less is more.” All I’ll tell you about Their Eyes Were Watching God is that it takes place in Florida in the first decade of the twentieth century, it’s about the life of African American Janie Crawford, and it’s one of the most emotionally involving, revelatory, and surprising novels I’ve ever read. I hope that’s enough of a recommendation that you’ll take a chance to read it.
Another book I hope you’ll read is The First Man by Albert Camus. Many years ago, I read his novel The Stranger and his long essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Unlike these books, The First Man is not a work of existential philosophy; it is Camus’s autobiographical novel about his early life growing up in poverty in French Algeria. All I’ll tell you beyond that is that the book is engrossing and inspiring, and that Camus never got to complete it. The draft he was working on was found in the trunk of his car after he was killed in a traffic accident in 1960. Thirty-five years later, his daughter decided to publish it along with his notes. I learned from the notes that Camus had planned to continue refining it, but as a reader I found every page so involving that, as with Their Eyes Were Watching God, I felt privileged to read it.
