Battle Of The Books

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Code Switch team has been mired in a months-long debate that we're attempting to settle once and for all: What kind of books are best to read during this pandemic? Books that connect you to our current reality? Or ones that help you escape it?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey fam, we have a favorite ask. Do you identify as Latino, Latina, Latinex, Hispanic?
0:06.5	Are you about to turn 18? We want to talk to you about the upcoming election. Please send us an
0:12.1	email at codeswitch at npr.org with the subject line Latinex 18. That's Latinex 1-8. Thank you so
0:22.5	much now onto the show. You're listening to codeswitch from npr. I'm Shireen Madisal Miraji
0:30.0	and I'm Karen Guix-Veat sitting in Virginia this week. Karen, I wish I could say you were here for
0:35.8	a happy reason but the reality is you're here because our team needs to settle a score.
0:43.2	That's right. This is serious business because today on the show we're settling
0:48.2	once and for all a question that we've been debating for months and a question in fact that a lot
0:53.2	of people have been debating. What kind of books are best to read during this pandemic? Books that
0:58.5	connect you to current reality or books that help you escape it? I've heard a lot of people talking
1:07.7	about reading everything they can about plagues and pandemics, anything involving the end of the
1:13.9	world. We're talking histories of the Spanish flu, yellow fever, the bubonic plague, anything
1:20.3	with a dystopian future in it. And of course, you know, people are also scooping up books just as
1:26.4	fast as they can about racism and anti-racism and white fragility, etc., etc., really trying to
1:32.9	contextualize this moment as we've come to call it, this moment. But there are just as many people
1:41.1	who are staying as far from all of that as possible and sinking into the soothing comfort of books
1:47.2	that take place in happier times and places and have happier beginnings, happy middles, and most
1:52.8	importantly, happy endings. Those books exist with all that happy beginnings, happy middles, happy
1:58.7	endings, sign me. They do. They do. I wonder if people can guess where you stand on this debate.
2:06.1	Oh, it's no secret that although I am a hardened cynic, I am team escapism right now. Tell us
2:13.2	why. Why not? Have you looked at the news lately? We are so saturated with grim reality,
2:19.2	political, medical, economic, and most recently the loss of RBG, all of it. I needed an escape.
	...

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