9 books that may offer inspiration or comfort after a tumultuous year

The United States has survived a pandemic, civil uprisings and a divisive political election within the last 12 months.

With sales of coffee, meditation apps and art supplies soaring, it’s clear Americans could use a little lift to pull through to the spring, when a COVID-19 vaccine may start to return life to some semblance of normality.

Faculty members in the English department at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences share the books they’ve read recently that have offered them comfort or inspiration, from an Armenian children’s tale to a book that lends perspective to human tragedy by setting it against the immensity of the universe.

Andrew Chater, adjunct professor of the practice of English. Chater is an award-winning BBC TV historian and presenter who has made over 50 films. His “bookpacking” classes at USC Dornsife use novels as portals through which to explore U.S. regional history and culture.

My Name is Aram (Harcourt Brace, 1940) by William Saroyan

“Saroyan’s alter ego, Aram Garoghlanian, is a child growing up in the Armenian community around Fresno in the early part of the 20th century, and we view the adult world through his eyes. He’s a kind of Huck Finn — funny, wicked, disingenuous and charming. Saroyan is a deeply humane writer, describing with quiet irony the struggles of an immigrant community celebrating life in the face of hardship and adversity. Evergreen and universal, this is a delight from start to finish.”

Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, assistant professor of English. Daniels-Rauterkus’ work focuses on the politics of racial representation in American and African American literature. Her first book, Afro-Realisms & the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press) was published in April.

Heavy (Scribner, 2019) by Kiese Laymon

“[Laymon] invites the reader into his private, emotional world and takes us on a moving and painful journey through his precarious childhood in Mississippi, physical and sexual abuse, struggles with food and weight and the loneliness of writing and navigating academia while Black. In these times, as America reckons with the weight of slavery and the persistence of anti-Blackness, Heavy is a book that inspires us to confront our past head on so that we might eventually put down some of that baggage.”

Mark Irwin, associate professor of English. Irwin is the author of nine collections of poetry and is a four-time Pushcart Prize winner. Irwin teaches undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops at USC Dornsife.

The Crossing (Alfred A Knopf, 1994) by Cormac McCarthy

“In The Crossing, Billy Parham rescues a pregnant wolf from a trap and takes her from New Mexico to Mexico in order to release her into the wild. There are numerous crossings and re-crossings, all of which attempt to survive a continually heightening sense of loss. This novel of survival has provided me with a great sense of compassion and courage during the pandemic.”

Emily Anderson, professor of English, interim college dean of undergraduate education. Anderson specializes in 18th-century British literature and culture. She teaches courses on topics including the rise of the novel, Jane Austen and 18th-century women writers, and Shakespearean forgeries and adaptation.

For the Time Being (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) by Annie Dillard

“I’ve found it comforting for the ways it views the large-scale evolutions of human life. She couches the individual experience — tragic or joyous — within macro-level phenomena from an impossibly distant perspective. She gives us language for how to understand the loss of thousands of individuals in a flood, or (in our case) the loss of hundreds of thousands in a pandemic and to recognize that tragedies of any magnitude have their beginnings and ends.”

Piranesi (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) by Susanna Clarke

“Piranesi’s protagonist is imprisoned in a mysterious, labyrinthine house — except he doesn’t perceive the house as a prison, but a sentient place that shelters him, provides him with food and comfort, and has rhythms and feelings of its own. My house is small by comparison but his gratitude toward a place that others perceive as a prison has definite resonance in this time of quarantine.”

Enrique Martínez Celaya, Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts. Martínez Celaya is an artist, poet and philosopher whose paintings have been exhibited and collected in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Master and Margarita (YMCA, 1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov

“The novel has many unusual — often absurd — characters, including the devil, Pontius Pilate and a giant talking cat. It is a profoundly moving love story as well as a piercing satire of Stalin’s Moscow, its repressive regime and the negotiations Russians did to survive. For me, The Master and Margarita is a magnificent novel that shows how desperation, belief, futility, sadness and resilience can coexist in individuals and nations.”

The Leopard (Feltrinelli, 1958) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

“Ostensibly, The Leopard is a novel about the decline of a family of Sicilian aristocrats, but it reads like a poem about human frailty, the illusory nature of power, irredeemable loss and the unstoppable passage of time.”

Hilary Schor, professor of English, comparative literature and law. Schor studies contemporary fiction, feminist theory and Victorian literature, from serial fiction, narrative poetry and art criticism to proto-sociology and urban history.

The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press, 2008) by Suzanne Collins

“I reread it compulsively, night after night, finishing and then starting again. I’m a sucker for novels about plucky young women at the best of times. Katniss Everdene’s inventiveness, her resiliency and her quest to survive without losing her sense of herself, answered something deep within me.”

Station Eleven (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014) by Emily St. John Mandel

“The book opens with a production of King Lear on a snowy night in Toronto, as rumors of a new epidemic reach the city and emergency rooms overflow; it stops and opens again twenty years later, with a group of traveling actors in the post-pandemic ruins of our world.The beauty of Mandel’s language, the persistence of Shakespeare, who lived and wrote in a time of plague, and the courage and grace of the heroine  all this, in a time of darkness — gave my life the reflected glow of literature that endures.”