For Your Reading List

Credit: Drawn & Quarterly, Rumi Hara

One thing I'm hearing a lot of in the books community and among friends is how frustrating it is to want to read during quarantine — having so much time to read — but not being able to focus. My go-to suggestions: short stories and graphic novels. Of the latter, Rumi Hara's graphic short story collection Nori is one of the best I've read recently.

Nori (short for Noriko) is the four-year-old at the center of these stories, and she's a fearless, sprightly girl whose curiosity leads her from one adventure to the next in 1980s suburban Osaka. Working tirelessly to catch up is her grandmother — her main caregiver and closest companion. Nori's world is dreamy and intoxicating, and Hara's illustrations are the perfect media for translating a child's perspective and imagination. Nori races through her neighborhood — chasing rabbits, befriending bats, tussling with classmates, keeping the grown-ups on their toes — and the scenery is vibrant and immersive, so detailed it's easy to get lost in them yourself. In a time when exploration might be next to impossible, living vicariously through someone else's is the next best thing — and Nori is the perfect vehicle. Get your copy now. —Arianna Rebolini

Read Me: A Book Advice Column

It's probably no surprise to hear we're big fans of book recommendation lists, but sometimes you're looking for a book to get you through a situation so incredibly specific that no reading lists have been built around it. Yet.

We want to help!

Respond to this newsletter or email hellobooks@buzzfeed.com with what you're going through and what kind of literary help you're looking for, and we'll put our brains together to come up with some perfect titles.

What helps Tracy O'Neill write?

Credit: Soho Press; Tracy O'Neill

Tracy O'Neill's new novel Quotients — about a man and a woman trying to make a relationship work in a world of secrecy and surveillance — is one of our must-reads this summer. Here's what helped her write it.

I have a high capacity for obsession. Five years ago, I obsessed enough about a story that I thought it was time to write a second novel. Quotients would be a narrative of fear and intimacy about a former spy handler who falls in love with an elusive American, but struggles to leave behind the paranoia cultivated in his work in intelligence. They’d both want to feel safe in their home and family life, and would believe that they could so long as they act rationally. Like all of us, though, they would face the dangers of the internet, mass surveillance, their own deceptions, crumbling media, and the difficulties of locating truth in a world that often confuses endless streams of content and data for knowledge.

While writing Quotients, it always seemed that time for the book was scarce. For much of that time I was working five jobs at once, so I was always scrounging for minutes. I was ever on the lookout to move more quickly. When a migraine set in, I slipped on polarized sunglasses to dampen the glare of the headache enough to keep working. I didn’t want to lose any moment I could turn my attention to this story.

In this way, obsession is a decent engine for the long haul of a novel. But what obsession giveth it can also screweth up. The job of the writer is to sit one’s ass in a chair and think until a thought defies the grammar of everyday speech, then do it again and again until there’s a book. Simple enough. Still, it’s easy to confuse thinking deeply with fixating on a problem of writing past the point it’s useful.

What helps me most in these moments is my dog, Cowboy O’Neill.

Where I am apt to sit wringing my hands, Cowboy opts for walking. This is wise. I know that walking unclenches my mind, but I never seem to learn the Pavlovian lesson and need to be reminded that not-writing is half of how I write. As Cowboy and I loop around blocks, the pattern of one foot in front of other replaces that of a knotted-up thought. Something in the back of the head finally loosens, and my mind can follow the optimism of the body, which insists it is not stuck at all.

Most of writing is thinking, but writing is also something you do with your body, and I need both to feel a little free. When it’s too cold to walk at length, I’ll jump on a miniature trampoline for a few minutes, or if it’s late, drink whiskey and start over the next day. I contend that these instances of not-writing are central to a book’s composition too.

—Tracy O'Neill