Browsing Buku tentang Pandemi untuk Dibaca Saat Puasa

Hai hai lagi!

Jika kamu udah pernah nonton video April TBR di  instagram reel aku, tentunya bakal ada 4 buku yang bakal aku baca bulan ini. Keempat buku itu buat readathon yang berlangsung mulai bulan April ini. Sementara itu, aku juga ingin baca buku yang vibesnya cocok dengan saat ini yaitu puasa dan pandemi. Sehingga aku mengandalkan kekuatan search engine untuk mencari rekomendasi buku tentang pandemi. Karena listnya pasti banyak banget, akhirnya aku memutuskan untuk membatasi daftar yang aku temukan itu agar lebih ringkas.

Rencananya aku bakal baca salah satu atau salah dua atau salah semuanya dari buku-buku ini saat puasa. Ada banyak banget website dan blog yang merekomendasikan buku-buku untuk pandemi dan pilihannya beragam. Aku gak ambil list dari goodreads, tapi dari website kayak Penguin, NY Times dan macem-macem blog orang yang lewat di search engine. Dari semua daftar rekomendasi yang buanyak banget, aku menemukan beberapa buku yang terus direkomendasikan di beberapa tempat yang berbeda. Jadi aku memutuskan untuk mengambil 7 buku yang masuk daftar rekomendasi paling banyak dan nanti aku baru akan memilih buku mana yang ingin aku baca bulan ini.

1. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Keywords : Adult, Science Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Dystopia

Released : September 9th 2014

Length : 333 pages

“One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.” (Goodreads)

2. The Plague by Albert Camus

Keywords : Classics, African Culture, Philosophy

Released : First Published on 1947

Length : 308 pages

“In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.” (Goodreads)

3. Severance by Ling Ma

Keywords : Adult, Science Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Dystopia

Released : August 14, 2018

Length : 291 pages

“Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?” (Goodreads)

4. Wow, No Thank You: Essays by Samantha Irby

Keywords : Non Fiction, Essays, Humor, Memoir

Released : March 31, 2020

Length : 319 pages

“Irby is turning forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and is courted by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife and two step-children in a small white, Republican town in Michigan where she now hosts book clubs. This is the bourgeois life of dreams. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with "skinny, luminous peoples" while being a "cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person," "with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees," and hides Entenmann's cookies under her bed and unopened bills under her pillow.” (Goodreads)

5. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Keywords : Classics, Magical Realism, Romance, Spanish Literature

Released : First published on 1985

Length : 348 pages

“In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.” (Goodreads)

6. The Book of M by Peng Shepherd

Keywords : Adult, Science Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Dystopia

Released : June 5, 2018

Length : 485 pages

 “One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.” (Goodreads)

7. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Keywords : Adult, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Russia

Released : March 26, 2019

Length : 462 pages

“A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.” (Goodreads)

THE BOOKS I WANT TO READ

After reading the blurbs, I want to read either Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel or The Book of M by Peng Shepherd. Di bulan Maret aku baca satu bukunya Peng Shepherd yang baru dirilis tahun 2022 berjudul The Cartographers. Aku suka banget gaya penulisannya di buku ini meski eksekusi ceritanya ada yang tidak sesuai ekspektasi. Jadi aku pengen baca bukunya yang lain. Kalau Station Eleven, aku baca blurbnya sudah tertarik, kayaknya seru baca buku tentang orang-orang yang terhubung dengan unik karena dunia yang berakhir dan waktu yang maju mundur.

Itu tadi ketujuh buku yang paling banyak direkomendasikan di masa pandemi ini. Kira-kira sudah ada yang pernah baca salah satunya? Cerita dong di kolom komentar di bawah ini. Atau kalau kamu punya rekomendasi buku mengenai pandemi atau yang cocok dibaca saat ini, bisa banget kasih tau aku juga ya.