I find prompts for productivity during this quarantine conflicting. Don’t tell me what to do with my free time as if I don’t have to work from home while also isolating, lifestyle blog. But I have to admit, being at home in the last I’ve-lost-count-of-how-far-along-we-are-in-this-quarantine-TBH days, it is a luxury to have these little pockets of time to do whatever the hell I want: play Animal Crossing while waiting for my editor to finish going through my draft, catch up on everyone’s Instagram Stories after a quick lunch. I am most satisfied, however, with the fact that I don’t have to spend hours after signing off work in traffic. Instead, I now use that time to cook an early dinner and laze in bed with a book/an ebook in hand.
So far, I’ve finished five books over the course of quarantine. That’s almost half of the amount of reading I’ve accomplished in 2019! So as much as I hate to admit it (and the privilege that comes with me saying this), this quarantine may actually lead me to finally finish my bedside book stash.
With the help of our editorial team, I’ve put together a few titles for “optional reading” if you finally have the time for a big book—meaning reads with so many pages, it might literally take you the whole quarantine period and beyond to finish. But that’s alright because it’s not like anyone’s keeping count except maybe your iBooks tracker or Goodreads account.
“The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt
First, a side note about the author: I love that she’s only published three books in three decades—exactly one book for each decade. Donna Tartt takes her time. And so should you when you read her novels, which aren’t exactly sprawling epics or postmodern masterpieces but are smart, intricate old fashioned novels that have the readability of any other bestseller.
“The Goldfinch” runs for about 950+ pages (another edition runs for 700+) and tells the life story of a boy following his mother’s death at an art museum where a painting by one of Rembrandt’s pupils becomes a lifelong reminder of that tragic day. It’s not Tartt’s best (it’s “The Secret History”), and the length isn’t justifiable (it almost never is) but if you want to read something that took more than a decade to write—a rarity these days—this isn’t a terrible option. Just skip the film adaptation.
—Catherine Orda, copy editor
“A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara
I will not be (and was never) the first to complain about the grueling length of and amount of suffering in Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life.” I mean, that gradual build-up that reads like a typical coming-of-age New York story only for the reader to end up more miserable than they were a page ago.
I will, however, say this is required reading for masochistic bibliophiles out there, especially if you have the stamina. I recall reading this 800-page tome for the first three months, abruptly pausing and then finishing it in a week once I’ve gotten over that cutesy slump. If this is not your genre though, consuming Yanagihara’s equally compelling, equally verbose New York Times articles is also a must.
—Christian San Jose, associate editor
“Killing Commendatore” by Haruki Murakami
I bought this at last year’s MIBF and only managed to pick it up this past Holy Week. It took me a while because I’ve been a bit intimidated by its length (it runs over 700 pages), and I only have the hardbound edition so that made it hard to carry around to read on my spare time. But because of the quarantine, I no longer had to lug the book around in my bag. Took me a week to finish (I dedicated two to three hours after work every day to reading it!)
As you’d expect from a 700-pager, there’s a lot going on in the plot. What I like about it though (despite it having the same old Murakami elements), is that the strange, mystical happenings are more tightly interwoven into the lives of the characters. So strange as they are, it kept me very invested in the story.
—Pauline Miranda, associate managing editor
“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt
This is one of the first books by Tartt that I read. I was around second year college and I started on it thinking I’d get bored of it right away, but it was really 560 pages of pure dramatic gold. It took me around two weeks to finish, just because I was so entertained by how pretentious and outlandish the characters were. During the part where they started having a ritual of sorts with plans to kill each other, I was flipping [out]—those high-class students with degrees in classical studies really went full-on medieval. That’s how great a writer Tartt is though. However menacing the story is, it’s still so poetic, compelling, profound and believable.
—Thets Torres, junior content creator
“Illuminae” by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
One of the longer books I’ve read during the quarantine is Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s “Illuminae,” an epistolary science fiction novel that tells the story of a planet’s invasion and a breakout of a plague (which is kinda timely) through interview transcripts, diary entries and medical reports.
I’m personally not the biggest fan of sci-fi novels, but I do love how the book tells the story of the people who are affected by companies who prioritize profit over human lives. The worldbuilding throughout the novel is amazing, too.
—Gela Suacillo, junior content creator
“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo
As a 2010s book and musical nerd, I was basically forced to experience Victor Hugo’s brick—er, opus—as the intersection of my teenage obsessions. It has tragedy, social inequality (give Jean Valjean his bread!), kind of, sort of, but not really feminism (or whatever those chapters on the history of the nunnery were supposed to be) and sad boys (Marius my boy who tries) (Enjolras my patriotic son) (Graintaire my sad gay alcoholic child), all set within the ramblings of a man who loves Paris maybe a bit too much. If I remember right, I read around five chapters, set the book down in disgust over Félix Tholomyès for like two years, and finally picked the book up again and finished the rest of it in three days.
P.S. This is the longest book on this list at a whopping 1,462 pages!
—Zofiya Acosta, associate editor
Header photo “L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux” (1888–89) by Vincent van Gogh
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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A list of books to get us through the quarantine
Writer: CHRISTIAN SAN JOSE
