A Year in Reading: Mark Slouka

When times get hard—and the news, I think it’s fair to say, has sucked of late—my reading, like everyone else’s, gets reactive.  Which makes sense.  When it’s a damp, drizzly November in your soul, when the Gomerts and Gosars are in the ascendant and two-star generals travel the land informing cheering crowds that the government is putting vaccines in their salad dressing, when cowardice and imbecility vie for the crown and cruelty is the judge, it’s only natural, like Ishmael, to want to either confront the world or escape it.    

I’ve been doing my fair share of both this past year, and on the chance that there are a few others out there who lately find they need enough wine to float a whaling ship in order to face the headlines, or who’ve been wondering what delights the new variant might have in store for us, I offer the following as both club and balm. Knowledge and narcotic.  

Two quick caveats: First, I’ve limited myself to titles readily available in English.  Second, my daughter points out that a good number of the writers I mention are white, male, possibly grumpy, and occasionally dead.  True, enough.  Inquiries will be made.   

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Maybe a year ago, when the world was still young and I harbored the illusion that the contagion had been brought under control, I picked’s in the hope of gaining a better understanding of the largely Moscow-fed river of disinformation sweeping us into the post-fact world.  I chose the right book.  Pomerantsev, a Kjev-born, British journalist, knows whereof he speaks, and he writes with a fearless, clear-eyed gusto that offers—to me, anyway—a kind of existential hope.  People this smart (and uncompromising, and relatively young) are a weapon in the fight, and knowing they’re out there holding the line can make a difference when the current begins to seem overwhelming.