10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing

10Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing.

This review presents 10 books to help deal with the boredom of social distancing.

While you practice social distancing and wait for things to get back to normal, here’s a list of 10 bookish recommendations to ease your boredom. (Don’t ever say I never did anything for you. Lol.)

It is no longer news that the world is currently battling a global pandemic-Covid19.

The Virus, which was first detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019, has steadily spread its tentacles into other countries.

As of this minute, according to statistics released by the World Health Organization, there are 1,850,220 confirmed cases with 430,455 recoveries and 114,215 deaths worldwide.

Sadly, there is no preventive vaccine or cure for the virus as of yet.

The populace is simply advised by health workers to take precautionary measures such as washing hands regularly under running water for at least 20 seconds.

Avoid close contact with people who are unwell and practise social distancing, while the world waits with bated breath for a cure to be found.

1. ‘You Belong To Me’ By Karen Rose

“Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo, Who’ll be next?
No One knows……. “

You Belong To Me is a dark romantic suspense story (with an emphasis on ‘suspense’) with intricate plot lines and layers upon layers of intrigue, lies, and deeply buried explosive secrets.

Just when you think you have the story all figured out, a new dynamic is thrown in that turns the storyline upside down.

Years ago, a young schoolgirl was beaten, raped and murdered on her prom night.

Several schoolboys witnessed the crime (including her prom date), but not one of them tried to stop the crime or came forward to report it.

Twenty-something years later those who were present that night are becoming victims themselves, dying in horrific ways.

As is her routine, Baltimore Medical Examiner Lucy Trask is out on her morning run when she finds a dead mutilated body.

It turns out it’s someone connected to her in the past.

And so is the second and third body. Each of these bodies has an alphabet branded on it, making it evident that they are not isolated incidents and the killer is not finished.

Homicide Detective J.D Fitzpatrick is assigned to the case alongside his partner Stevie.

He also catches a case of instant attraction to Lucy, and when it becomes obvious that she is a target, he becomes her self-appointed protector.

Karen Rose knows exactly how to add a bit of romance to the dark pages of a gritty suspenseful thriller.

And what’s more, the romance isn’t all up in your face. There’s just the right balance in the mix.

10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing

If you enjoy romantic suspense that keeps you guessing, then this is a great pick.

There is just enough romance to remind you that this is a romance novel, but it blends so seamlessly with the plot and danger.

2. ‘City Of Girls’ By Elizabeth Gilbert

“At some point in a woman’s life, she gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”

City of Girls spans several decades and follows the life of a ninety-five-year-old woman- Vivian Morris told in a letter to a younger woman, Angela.

It manages to be a fun, evenly paced read, while also dealing with messy topics like shame, and grief.

It also shows how we have to live with the consequences of our choices and mistakes.

Imagine that you write a letter to one of your father’s female friends, asking her how she knew your father and what the nature of their relationship was.

Imagine that you get a reply, in the form of a nearly 500-page letter, as the lady paints a picture of her colourful life, right from the summer of 1940, as she arrives in the city of New York, as a vain, bored, wealthy, nineteen-year-old girl, with a talent for sewing, taking you into the fast-paced, sexy world of show business, showgirls and classic theatre of New York in the 1940s.

The story shines in its rich descriptions of landscapes, costumes and characters.

10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing

3. My Sister The Serial Killer By Oyinkan Braithwaite.

“Ayoola summons me with THESE THREE WORDS-KOREDE, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again”.

My Sister The Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker- and more difficult to get out of the carpet than water.

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, My Sister The Serial Killer tells the story of two very different sisters – Korede and Ayoola.

Ayoola the free-spirited, beautiful younger daughter is a social media-savvy fashion designer with a penchant for killing her lovers, supposedly in self-defence.

Korede, our protagonist is the responsible and practical one, a hard-working and well-respected nurse.

when she isn’t cleaning up murder scenes and disposing of dead bodies for her sister.

She also has a crush on Tade, a handsome young doctor in the hospital where she works.

Things start falling apart when Ayoola visits her sister at work and starts going on dates with the Doctor of Korede’s dreams.

Korede isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back, but to save him would mean sacrificing her sister.

Despite its title, I don’t think that this novel falls into the genre of crime thriller

This is because for much of the story, the focus is on the relationship dynamics between the sisters than the actual murders.

Braithwaite keeps you wondering what the narrator and older sister, Korede, will do next, and just how far she will go to protect her younger sister.

The themes explored in My Sister The Serial Killer are Sibling relationships, familial loyalty, family values, childhood abuse and its resultant trauma and effect on the victims, patriarchy and what feminism in an oppressively patriarchal society can look like.

If you are in the mood for a quick and entertaining, yet satisfying read with short chapters and morbidly dark humour, then this should be a great pick.

10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing

4. ‘The Book of Night Women’ By Marlon James

“Every negro walks in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will. A circle like a sun, a circle like a moon, a circle like bad tidings that seem gone but always, always come back.”

“Woman work round the sun and sleep round the moon and sometimes work round both, especially if it be crop time. Other times women wait on the moon, especially if it is filled with blood and rises low over the blue mountain. That be the season of the Sasa, the Asaase Yaa or the Ogun and the other forgotten gods.”

Set on a Jamaican sugar plantation, the story follows Lilith, a mulatto girl with “skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody done ever seen”, born into slavery in the late 18th century.

This is a COMING-OF-AGE story unlike no other.

Watching Lilith grow and begin to understand the complexities of the wretched world she is born into, is such an intense ride from start to finish.

The story is so intricately woven, with well-developed characters and a bit of history set to fit perfectly into the narration.

And what’s more, the story is narrated in beautiful and colourful Jamaican Patois that rolls along smoothly.

If you’d like to read a slavery novel with an unusual setting and language, then you should read this.

5. Americanah By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’”

Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.”

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West.

Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time.

Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.

10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing

6. A Woman Is No Man By Etaf Rum

“Where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender, as normal as the bosoms on a woman’s chest, as necessary as the next generation growing inside her belly.”

In her debut novel, ‘A Woman Is No Man’, Etaf Rum follows three generations of Palestinian-American women as they navigate their lives in a man’s world.

Told in alternating timelines from different points of view, we get to hear from the three women- Isra, Deya and Fareeda as we follow their lives.

A Woman Is No Man’ is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, a culture where a man is allowed to do anything and a woman is just a possession.

Everything she has or does is at the “say so” of the men in her life.

7. Mr and Mrs Doctor By Julie Iromuanya

Julie Iromuanya’s debut novel, Mr and Mrs Doctor is a brilliant novel about the lies people tell and the other lies and antics they get up to, in order to cover their lies.

If I were to suggest another title for this book, it would be “The Doctor That Never Was.

Ifi and Job; A Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, begin their lives together in Nebraska with a single outrageous lie: that Job is a doctor, not a college dropout.

Unwittingly, Ifi becomes his co-conspirator that is until his first wife, Cheryl, whom he married for a green card years ago, re-enters the picture and upsets Job’s tenuous balancing act.

In this book, Julie Iromuanya aptly describes the struggles that African Migrants who live abroad (USA) go through trying to convince those back home that they are doing well abroad by putting up a facade.

10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing

8. ‘The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives’ By Lola Shoneyin.

“When Baba Segi woke with a belly ache for the sixth day in a row, he knew it was time to do something about his fourth wife’s childlessness”.

For a polygamist like Baba Segi, his collection of wives and a gaggle of children are a symbol of his virility, success, and prosperity.

It is also a validation of his manhood and status as a “big man” in society.

All is well in this polygamous home until wife number four arrives.

Bolanle, a soft-spoken graduate amongst illiterate wives is ostracized by her co-wives from the start.

Baba Segi’s unhidden excitement at bagging a graduate as his fourth wife doesn’t exactly matter.

Worse still, her failure to conceive threatens to unsettle the balance in the home and expose a fiercely kept dark family secret.

Lola Shoneyin does not sugarcoat things in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s wives.

She portrays the day-to-day life, the ugly politics/power tussle that happens in a polygamous family, and the lengths to which the wives are willing to go to secure their positions in their husbands’ homes.

The story is told mainly from Bolanle’s point of view. However, Baba Segi, his three wives, Segi and his driver also get to have their say.

There was a wide range of narrators, but despite the different voices, the novel maintained a smooth flow and a clear narrative.

9. Queenie By Candice Carty-Willams

“Financially guide who? Excuse me, Queenie, I cannot be with someone in that much debt. I have a lifestyle that needs sustaining. My Mr Right cannot have minus money.”

Read this, if you are in the mood for a light, quirky, inspirational read.

Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither.

She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers.

After a messy break-up with her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…

Wrong places, including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.

10. ‘Something Wonderful’ By Judith Mcnaught

“What is it you think is going to happen?”
Alexandra shivered deliciously.
“Something Wonderful.”

Something Wonderful tells the story of Alexandra Lawrence, an artless country girl, and her tempestuous marriage to Jordan Townsend, the rich and powerful Duke of Hawthorne.

Swept into the endlessly fascinating world of London society, free-spirited Alexandra becomes ensnared in a tangled web of jealousy and revenge, stormy pride and overwhelming passion.

But behind her husband’s cold mask, there lives a tender, vital, sensual man.

If you are a lover of historical romances spiced with sizzling chemistry, humour and very believable characters, then this should be a great pick.

10 Books To Help Deal With The Boredom Of The Social Distancing