Books That Helped Me Beat the Lockdown Blues (Part 1)
These books helped me survive the pandemic
Trapped by the four walls of my tiny studio apartment, I craved for an escape. A toxic relationship followed by an ugly break-up just two months into the pandemic and then travelling halfway across the world to a new country for my PhD, I had it all.
The pandemic had hit me hard, harder than any breakup could. With no friends in the new city of Berlin, I rekindled my childhood passion for reading.
Reading kept me sane. In those days when the sun used to set at 3 P.M, I tucked myself on my sofa near the heater (or die Heizung as the Germans would like to call it) and read my heart away. I bought a waterproof Kindle with my first PhD salary, and boy, it was the best buy of my life.
The best part of a waterproof kindle that no advertisement talks about is that you can read it while soaking your body in the lukewarm waters of your bathtub. This marked the beginning of long baths and water-soaked wrinkled fingers.
Without giving you any more vivid imageries of my kindle-in-the-bathtub shenanigans, I will dive into the top 5 books that helped me survive this lockdown.
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
Convenience Store Woman is an unconventional book; you will either absolutely love it or hate it. My debut as a reader of Japanese writing has been through the pages of a Haruki Murakami book, and I have been glued to East Asian literature ever since.
I serendipitously found this book online, and its quirky cover wooed me enough to add it to my shopping cart in a minute.
This book is written from the point of view of the author Sayaka Murata in the body of a thirty-six-year-old convenience store worker named Keiko Furukura. Unlike most female protagonists, Keiko is an oddball puzzled by the complexities of human behaviour and struggles hard to fit in the boxes constructed by society.
She finds solace and purpose in working at the convenience store, the “Smile Mart”. Here she mechanically picks up simple human behaviours like interacting with others, smiling and even flirting by mimicking the other employees. For the first time in her life, she finds herself “fitting in”. She lets the mundane routine life of the mart, its uniform and manual make her a functional cog of the society.
To the futility of her effort to fit in, society still tries to “fix” her. Childless middle-aged women are considered as appendages of society, and they are either eliminated by evolution or are shipped off to a therapist’s office. Keiko starts living with a detestable man, Shiraha, to prove to her family and friends that she is “sexually active” and hence “normal”.
Final Thoughts
There is a bit of Keiko in all of us. Being an ambivert, an overthinker (and a self-diagnosed bipolar person), I too have often struggled to fit into society, moulding my behaviour based on people’s judgement and likeliness.
This book made me realise that I am not alone. With the pandemic curbing our primitive desire to form social bonds, this unconventional, odd book assures us that it is okay to be different.
To be continued. Part 2 coming soon.
