After all, during shutdowns it felt like many of us were stuck in time loops, repeating the same day over and over. In addition, "It felt like during the pandemic the timeline split, like we're in an alternate timeline we're not supposed to be in," says writer and avid time travel fan Rebecca Johns-Trissler. "It's like something is off. Something feels deeply messed up. If we could have seen what was coming at the end of 2019, what would we change?"
“Like the dope fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm, I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter,” W Somerset Maugham wrote in his 1932 short story “The Book Bag”. I entirely agree: if you want to feel at home in a new city, simply bring a book as you saunter the streets.
In buying books, I’m feeding the delusion that I will get to them all. Because, from my cockeyed perspective, it’s the noble thing to do. And perhaps it takes me back to better times. Yes, book sales are down. But I’m once again doing my part to right the ship.
At night we’re just animals, I was reminded. The clients, yes, seeking release they couldn’t admit during daylight hours, but also the workers who manned the various portions of the strip mall after dark. The way we cared for each other, sometimes more in silent gestures than anything else, felt connected to our deepest instincts as pack animals. No matter how much I wanted to go home, there was some comfort in the simplicity of that connection.
On the rapidly expanding shelf of dystopian novels, “My Name Is Iris” offers a sharp vision of how racism gets imbibed by its victims like a sweet poison. In Skyhorse’s telling, America’s melting-pot myth is a narcotic that promises inclusion but induces self-harm.
When the association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meets to decide how the states of Southeast Asia will navigate the tricky passage between China and the United States, they do it in English. Other languages fall victim to practicality (Bahasa or Tagalog aren’t widely learned outside their homelands) or politics (Japanese runs the risk of recalling wartime hegemony, and Chinese might suggest acquiescence to a contemporary one). There is irony in the fact that the world’s most economically dynamic region, and potentially its most turbulent one, operates in a language whose spread is a product of imperial history.
It’s this irony that lies at the heart of Nile Green’s fascinating and engaging book, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (2022). There is no doubt, as Green shows, that the geographical concept of Asia has become distinct and meaningful. But there was nothing natural about it. Of course, in a certain sense, all geographical terms are constructs. But rhetoric in recent years about an “Asian century,” or the importance of Asian markets or Asian values, belies the reality that the commonality in the region is often patchy and frequently a product of its experience being mediated through its encounters with Europe. The development of the European Union, flawed and partial an account of the continent though it is, has given shape to some sense of common purpose, although not a common language. Like ASEAN, the EU uses English more than any other language, Brexit or not. Asian collective identity does not have quite as obvious a political coalition, but a more amorphous one does exist and can be analyzed.