“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, the Fault in Our Stars
The year 2020 is like a book with crushed pages. The cursed year has made us closer to the parallel world. In our free time we have a tendency to find escapism, which we used to find in films, books or something else that we like. This year has given us a lot of free time to explore these platforms. When we talk about books Oscar Wilde once quoted; “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” Here are the books of 2020:
The lying Life of adults (By Elena Ferrante)
To endure presence, we untruth, and we lie most importantly to ourselves,” Elena Ferrante saw in a 2002 meeting. “Deceptions ensure us, alleviate enduring, permit us to dodge the unnerving snapshot of genuine reflection, they weaken the revulsions within recent memory, they even spare us from ourselves.” For Ferrante, the misrepresentations that individuals reveal to each other and themselves in regular day to day existence—I am cheerful; I love my better half; I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was doing—are “stunning stories,” or “insignificant lies.” At minutes when blame and disgrace compromise our soul, when they shake our most profound convictions about what our identity is, unimportant falsehoods prevent us from looking too carefully at ourselves. Lies that you can’t resist reading.
The Glass Hotel (By Emily St John)
A book telling us the haunted visions of a global crisis. A modest bunch of discreetly positioned signs recommend that The Glass Hotel exists in a similar universe as Station Eleven, in a period before the flare-up. The “Georgia Flu” is sneaking, yet we will never learn in the event that it is days, months, or a year away. Mandel has not written a ticking-clock prequel; rather, her new novel is a representation of regular neglectfulness, the apparatus of late neoliberalism juddering alongside trademark disparity. This is a story of Ponzi plans, not a plague.
Death in her hands (By Ottessa Moshfegh
Book, The 39-year-old American writer has manufactured a faction readership with stringent anecdotes about estranged female untouchables written in a level, antagonized voice. Extraordinary isolation can bring clearness however more regularly prompts a grim, delusionary presence. Her heroes are exhausted, irreverent and look for blankness; they typically have unusual, fierce considerations. In her 2017 short-story assortment, Homesick for Another World, the most thoughtful storyteller is a desperate kid: “Earth is some unacceptable spot for me generally was and will be until I bite the dust,” she says.
My Dark Vanessa (By Kate Elizabeth)
The story of an abusive relationship between a teacher and his pupil is intelligent, brave and painful to read. In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s ground-breaking debut novel, Vanessa Wyes is 15 when she gets associated with an educator at her Maine all-inclusive school. At 42, Jacob Strane is neither youthful nor appealing, yet Vanessa is quite ready to be manoeuvred into what she accepts is first love. Russell astutely draws us inside the maze of the high school mind – hot with hormonal strife, pushing limits, desiring deference, defying norms and fixating on sex. Vanessa has never kissed a kid, however, she invites the advances of her English instructor. The story unfolds more strange and painful events ahead.
Manasvi Srivastava
Manasvi is keen to watch things with her inquisitive lenses; she tends to find answers to all her curiosities. She is currently pursuing her graduation in journalism from Kalindi College, University of Delhi.
