This blog has been dormant for the last years. There was a lot going on and there were to many words in my head and I just did not get them organized. I don’t really want to explain right now and just start over (nothing bad, just busy life).
One thing I want to do more this year is read. I started out posting the books I read on my Instagram account but thought it would be nice to write up a short summary here. Just to be clear: no New Year’s resolution but just trying. No pressure please. Especially not right now, right?
One book I just finished is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It was one of the books I turned over at the book store a couple of times and then got it as a Christmas present from a friend. I am glad I did!
At the beginning the actor Arthur Leander suffers a heart attack onstage and dies. From there it moves quickly into the beginning of a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the population and ends civilization as we know it. This sounds way more dramatic than it really is in the book. 20 years later Kirsten Raymonde, who played in Leander’s last production as a little girl, travels with a group of actors and musicians from settlements to settlement and performs Shakespeare and music to its inhabitants. The book jumps back and forth in time between the after and the life of Arthur Leander and the people in it. Throughout the story it becomes clear that the characters are interconnected, sometimes in surprising ways. Reading about the end of the life as we know it in normal times can be a little disturbing and it made me uneasy in stretches because of our own ongoing pandemic. In the end though the pandemic in the book is not the main storyline but just the backdrop to some of the people we come across in. Yes, it talks about how life changed through the pandemic but also about how people cope (or not) and it felt oddly “normal” if that makes any sense. I really enjoyed it. Maybe you will, too? If you already read it, what did you think?
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