The most recommended books about isolation

Jennifer Haupt has collected a diverse, fascinating, and powerful group of writers who dig deep into the challenges we faced at the height of COVID.

The anthology, a fundraiser for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, features poems, essays, interviews, and more. I found the wide range of experiences and emotions both comforting and inspiring.

I’m fascinated by novels that treat famous real events from an insider perspective.

In this case, it’s the events following the Symbionese Liberation Army’s kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974. Fugitive SLA members, including a character based on Hearst, are sheltered by a former radical, Jenny Shimada (based on Wendy Yoshimura), who is also wanted by the FBI in connection with the bombing of draft offices.

Jenny is a sort of house mother to the volatile fugitives, who hope to write a book while in hiding to raise money for their cause, but inevitably she is drawn into their latest dangerous scheme. Filled with brilliant character studies, the novel astutely shows connections between the tortured personalities of individuals and the public acts they commit which end up shaping our culture. 

Shapeshifting lizard people. Oh. You want me to say something else?

How about... a world like no other, peopled by all manner of beings (but no humans, which is honestly a delight). The setting is so fantastic, but also so meticulously designed—every settlement and civilization feels organic, fully realized, and unlike anything else. But what about the story—?

Moon doesn't know where he's from, but he knows he's the only shapeshifter he's ever met, and the only person with wings...and worse, he thinks he's part of the terrible Fell, a species that seems to be invasive and hostile and looks a lot like him.

Then he meets another Raksura, and learns how wrong he's been about everything, including himself. 

When I first moved overseas, I hadn’t thought about leaving my friends behind, or what role they played in my life. We had largely spent our lives apart, ever-connected if remote, and that seemed to fit us just fine. Then something akin to culture shock took hold and I needed them more than ever. They were there, in their Zoom boxes, and on telephone calls. I was reminded to check in with them often—to keep the good thing we had going.

Written by Nobel Prize winning, libertarian communist (don’t worry about it, it’s a thing) author Jose Saramago, All the Names is a weird and joyful exploration of the grind of bureaucracy and the power of information to control lives. Unlike Bear, this is not an easy read. Saramago’s signature style features long, convoluted sentences, which confuse and disorient – much like plunging into complex archival research. The story focuses on Senhor José, a poorly socialised records clerk, trudging through his days in a faceless, nonsensical records centre. One day he connects with a particular file and the realisation that the pieces of paper he manages represent whole beautiful lives sends him on a journey that requires breathtaking bravery and the formation of new, if eccentric, friendships. A life-affirming read.

Much ink has been spilled about the “loneliness epidemic” spreading widely in the modern world, and this book does a good job of illuminating several facets of that epidemic, addressing the distinction between our private and public selves, and questioning the means through which we attempt, with mixed results, to close our social gaps.

This novel has everything I love – a narrator who’s definitely not telling us everything, newly arrived in a remote house by a lake in Norway that is so clearly drawn I can see and feel it in my bones.

Trond has secrets and this is where he’s going to live now. There’s a man down the track whose window he can see when it falls dark. A river flows fast beyond the trees. Petterson’s beautiful, spare writing creates a filmic atmosphere in which past mysteries unfold as Trond begins to learn to live alone with his past.

Stunning story-telling, wonderful place-setting, and a character utterly unlike me that I loved reading in his solitude.

This poignant story captured me: Henry Preston Standish, a single traveler on a cruise ship between Honolulu and Panama, unnoticed by anybody, slips on wet planks and falls into the Pacific Ocean. As his steamboat is further and further gliding away, Standish works on staying afloat. He is convinced he will be missed and the boat will return to rescue him. 

The author moves back and forth between Standish's thoughts about his life and his impending rescue and the people on board who notice his absence without suspecting any emergency. I was very moved following how Standish's hopes fade and how he comes to grips with remaining and dying alone in the middle of the ocean, as its author did many years later in the middle of Manhattan.

There is no book that better captures the unique human culture present at modern Antarctic research stations than the late Nicholas Johnson’s Big Dead Place, a frank, funny as hell, and at times savage chronicle of a year working support at McMurdo Station. Like my sister, who winter-overed at South Pole Station, Johnson worked in the galley, but it was the bureaucratic nonsense, present even at the farthest reaches of human civilization, that caught his incomparable eye for absurdity.

As I wrote South Pole Station, Johnson’s wry, searingly intelligent voice was always in my mind. To me, he is the epitome of the non-scientist drawn to the world’s most unforgiving workplace: a wry, brilliant journeyman whose humor had a razor-sharp edge but who cared deeply for the work he did and the people with whom he did it. This is my favorite book about Antarctica.

Eleanor is completely relatable to me on my worst days. She’s neurotic and judgmental and favors predictability.

Reading this made me feel a little less bad about myself when all I do is lie on the couch and read and eat cookies for dinner. It also helped me to see that sometimes all you need is one person to love you for everything to change.