#ShadyLadiesList: Pandemic Edition
Call me dark, but in this time of Covid-19, I’m going full dystopian and post-apocalyptic reading list.
I’ve been trying to reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Stations Eleven since it came out in 2014. I’d get a few pages in and then drift off to something else.
Pandemic hits? I can’t get enough of this book. I’m so excited for her new one, The Glass Hotel, which comes out this week.
I’m pairing it with a Last Word cocktail to stay on theme. The Last Word — which features gin, chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime — was actually invented at the Detroit Athletic Club!
Without further ado, here’s my Pandemic Reading List featuring women writers.
But don't worry! I'm not deep geek on this genre. These are books I think many of you will like even if post-apocalyptic fiction isn't normally your bag.
Stations Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Review: “Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, Station Eleven, begins with a spectacular end. One night in a Toronto theater, onstage performing the role of King Lear, 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack. There is barely time for people to absorb this shock when tragedy on a considerably vaster scale arrives in the form of a flu pandemic so lethal that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.” — New York Times
All The Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva
Review: “Delightfully unexpected … The strange and wonderful stories that make up Sachdeva’s debut begin on this side of reality and slip to the other—often so gracefully, and with such a precise rendering of the fantastical, that we become inadvertent believers. The World by Night’ plunges us into a cave beneath a prairie, where Sadie, an abandoned albino bride, finds herself seduced by a dark and glittering world populated by elusive creatures like herself.” — New York Times
Read an except here.
The Rending and the Nest by Kaethe Schwehn
Review: "Kaethe Schwehn vividly portrays a hostile world in which survival depends on stories shared, accepted and believed... a post-apocalyptic tale of personal acceptance and reinvention that is as compelling as it is unnerving." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Oh, and I should mention that in this post-apoclyptic world, the women can only give birth to inanimate objects. Like toasters. It’s weird and compelling and utterly satisfying.
The Followers by Megan Angelo
Review: “In her spectacular debut, Angelo masterfully explores the dark side of social media. In 2015, aspiring author and Manhattanite Orla Cadden is working as a reporter at celeb blog Lady-ish when she becomes roommates with Floss Natuzzi, who is desperate to become a star. Using her platform at Lady-ish, Orla succeeds in making Floss ultrafamous. Fast forward 35 years, and a dystopian view of social media is revealed: there are now state-appointed celebrities who are on TV 24/7. Their lives are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, and their marriages, pregnancies (including designer babies), and relationships are merely story lines for a voracious public.” — Publisher’s Weekly
Read and excerpt here.
South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby
Review: “If you like literature that transports you to exotic locales beyond the reach of commercial airlines and enables you to view hot topics from cool new angles, South Pole Station is just the ticket....Shelby's writing is pithy and funny...[and] in this unusual, entertaining first novel, [she] combines science with literature to make a clever case for scientists' and artists' shared conviction that 'the world could become known if only you looked hard enough.'" ― NPR
In this case, it’s climate change — not a pandemic — that we’re facing. But it’s also a comedy for those of you who need something a little lighter :-)
What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Review: “Strange and wonderful… a witty, oblique and mischievous storyteller, Arimah can compress a family history into a few pages and invent utopian parables, magical tales and nightmare scenarios while moving deftly between comic distancing and insightful psychological realism…her science fiction parables, with their ecological and feminist concerns, recall those of Margaret Atwood. But it would be wrong not to hail Arimah’s exhilarating originality: She is conducting adventures in narrative on her own terms, keeping her streak of light, that bright ember, burning fiercely, undimmed.” –New York Times Book Review
Read and excerpt here.
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Review: “The Old Drift” is an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia, the landlocked country in southern Africa. It closely tracks the fortunes of three families (black, white, brown) across four generations. The plot pivots gracefully from accounts of the region’s early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis. It pushes into the near future, proposing a world in which flocking bug-size microdrones are a) fantastically cool and b) put to chilling totalitarian purposes.” — New York Times
Read an excerpt here.
The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby
Review: “Few Americans realize that yellow fever was not always a disease of the faraway tropics. In 1878, an outbreak of yellow fever — the virus carried to the United States in mosquitoes from Africa — killed 20,000 people in the Mississippi Valley. Crosby, a journalist, profiles the outbreak as it rips through Memphis, the city hardest hit. She vividly evokes the Faulkner-meets-“Dawn of the Dead” horrors of that summer. Crosby makes the point that before World War II and the discovery of penicillin, vastly more soldiers died of infectious diseases than of combat wounds. “A soldier’s duty is to defense,” she writes, “and many men felt that the greatest threat to the American people lay not in enemy warships or troops, but in disease.” — New York Times
Want More of a Smart Thriller? Try These
The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Review: “Leigh Bardugo made her mark writing bestselling young adult fantasy, but now she’s doing something a little different with Ninth House, her first adult novel. Bardugo uses Yale’s secret societies—their hidden rituals and the power of membership—to create the perfect setting for a story where elitism and the occult are intertwined.” — Amazon Best Book
Read and excerpt here.
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
Review: An expertly written spy thriller . . . that tackles issues of politics, race and gender . . . Like the best of John le Carré, it’s extremely tough to put down. It marks the debut of an immensely talented writer who’s refreshingly unafraid to take risks, and has the skills to make those risks pay off.”—NPR
Read and excerpt here.
The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs by Katherine Howe
Review: “Katherine Howe is back and in fine, bewitching form. I relished criss-crossing centuries as Connie Goodwin―equal parts scholar, sleuth, and sorceress―tackles the mystery of a curse on the women of her notorious lineage, racing to break the spell before it breaks her." ―Julia Glass, National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes and A House Among the Trees
The Truants by Kate Weinberg
Review: “A gripping debut about friends who fall under the spell of their maverick teacher....A well-crafted page-turner full of love triangles and vicious circles, secrets and suspense. Escapist fiction of the highest order.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune