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In August 2022, I came down with COVID-19, whose acute symptoms cleared up within a week. However, I live with a chronic illness, and over the course of many months, it became clear I had not recovered properly. For eight months, I could barely walk more than 10 minutes without needing to rest. I slept much of the day. I have been forgetful, unable to focus, and what I call “cognitively impaired” (brain fog doesn’t quite get it). So, this is life with the dreaded Long Covid. I know people with Long Covid who cannot read at all; in this regard I felt lucky to have books by my side (and in my bed). This, then, is a Long Covid reading list, the books that I like to believe took care of me through difficult times.

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Transit, by Rachel Cusk

I have always loved Canadian-born author Rachel Cusk, her brutal honesty and searing sentences. She is one of the masters of the autobiographical novel. It is through her brutally honest observations, terse sentences, and unusual imagery that we fall under her spell. Cusk is cutting, wickedly funny and never avoids the difficult subjects—divorce, parenthood, the challenges of being a female writer, and home renovations.

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Lives Other Than My Own, by Emmanuele Carrere

I got hooked on French writer Carrere between September and October. During this time, I read all of his works. I love how he plays with the autobiographical form; each book varies from one to the next. His latest, Yoga, is a metaphysical and political stunner (and constantly surprising). My Life as a Russian Novel is both erotic and provocative, with one of the most memorable sex scenes I’ve read in some time. But it was Lives Other Than My Own that broke my heart. The first section describes his failing marriage that was temporarily saved by a tsunami he and his wife lived through in Indonesia. The second section is about his now ex-wife’s sister dying of cancer and those left behind. I enjoyed the fact he didn’t explain the relationship between the two sections; we are left to interpret his connections and meditations on love, altruism and compassion. Tender, mortal and deeply moving.

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Stray Dogs, by Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage is, for me, one of the most exciting writers in Canada today. He writes so well about race, displacement and the immigrant (refugee) experience with grit, humour and poetry (his formalistic forays into Arabic intonations and rhythms I particularly enjoy). Stray Dogs is a fine collection of short stories; the form lets him travel internationally, from Berlin to Beirut to Montreal. I appreciate his political boldness and the fact he isn’t afraid of taking on Heidegger. Living in Berlin, I particularly related to his story about Berlin neighbours who are attracted to the narrator’s foreignness—a kind of fetishization of the Other that Hage always writes so well about (in this case, the narrator’s Middle Eastern background). I adapted his novel Cockroach for the stage, so I’m very familiar with his work. It’s always a pleasure to see it evolve and speak to the politics of (post) colonialism today.

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A History of My Brief Body, by Billy-Ray Belcourt 

With beautiful language, intellectual honesty, and sexual bravery, Billy-Ray Belcourt has written a genre-bending memoir. A poetic and queer meditation on Canada’s colonialist history through the narrator’s experience of body-in-the-world, I particularly love the hybridity of form, the academic-made-poetry, and the sensual dance with politics, gender, ancestry and history. A way forward, in looking back and in.

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The Baudelaire Fractal, Lisa Robertson

I love Lisa Robertson’s poetry—she is, for me, one of the best poets writing in English today—so I was excited to finally have the time to read her first novel. It’s challenging—as all her writing is—as well as playful and a beautiful portrait of the emergence of an artist. Her deep dive into Baudelaire, fashion, identity, being a poor writer in Paris in the 80s, sensuality and sexuality, took me in and utterly seduced me. A stunning read.

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Poetry Is Queer, by Kirby

Diving into Kirby’s manifesto on queerness and art was both a pleasure and a balm. In an increasingly divided world (and a horribly angry one at that), Kirby’s honest and loving journey through beauty, pleasure, liberation and grief is essential reading for our times. It is Kirby’s belief in literature as a kind of bass line, a heart to return to, that speaks to me most of all.

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Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

I have lived between Berlin and Italy these last few years, so I felt compelled to read Italian literature other than Elena Ferrante (whom I adore). Recently reissued by NYRB in 2017, Family Lexicon is an autobiographical masterpiece originally published in Italy in 1963. Ginzburg’s book captures, with humour and grace, the eccentricities of her highly educated, socialist family amidst the rise of fascism. She has perfect sentences and terse language; she captures the anti-fascist energy of her world amidst the darkness of her times. I was often reminded of Chekhov with her attention to detail, the idiosyncracies of characters (the parents in particular), and their longing for transformation.

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Inferno, by Dante

What better way to spend a winter of Long Covid than by plunging into the depths of Dante’s Inferno? As I felt the circles of hell in my own body (and the virus that stubbornly has refused to leave me to this day), I decided to immerse myself in the masterpiece of 14^th century literature that singlehandedly modernized the Italian language. It was, I admit, challenging. Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation is excellent. However, I did notice (thanks to the bilingual edition) that they didn’t follow Dante’s rhyming scheme—at all! Perhaps, in reading aloud the English beside the Italian, one realizes how hard it is to rhyme well in English… The translators included copious notes between sections, so that the world Dante is writing from—a world I knew little about—comes to life in fascinating ways. It felt like there was a professor in the room coddling you with details of lexicon and 14th century Italian social movements, which was oddly comforting. I also appreciated the fact the notes were between chapters, so you could tread lightly or dive deeply, depending on one’s mood.

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Learn more about In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark:

In his wildly ambitious and darkly funny debut novel, Jonathan Garfinkel probes the fractured nature of identity, the necessity of lies, and the bloody legacy of the Soviet Empire.

Spanning generations, continents, and cultures, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark is an electric tale about a nation trying to emerge from the shadow of the Soviet Union to embrace Western democracy. Driven by a complexly plotted mystery that leads from Moscow to Toronto to Tbilisi, punctuated by wild car chases and drunken jazz reveries, and featuring an eccentric cast of characters including Georgian performance artists, Chechen warlords, and KGB spies, Garfinkel delivers a story that questions the price of freedom and laughs at the answer.

With exhilarating prose reminiscent of Rachel Kushner and more twists than a John le Carré thriller, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark is a daring, nuanced, and spectacularly entertaining novel by an exceptional talent.