A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

’s prose tended toward the turgid more than the playfully gnomic, but when it comes to the aphorism that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” it must be admitted that he wrote an absolute banger. has a way of making anything sound more profound. However, the past few years goes a long way to substantiating Lenin’s claim. The pandemic, supply chain shortages, the war, the insurrection—four of the horsemen right there, and that’s just since 2020. Just preamble to saying that If it’s true that literature acts as a mirror to reality, then certainly in my own reading I’ve been drawn to the post-apocalyptic as of late (like so many of you). There used to be a sense in which works envisioning the end of the world were cautionary, but now they read like survival manuals. Novels of collapse weren’t the only things I read in the last year, but as a syllabus of my own preoccupations, the opening of the seals and the blast of the trumpets has been on my mind. I’ve found communion in many of novels; a sense of not being the only anxious person, and sometimes the