Books

By Cheree Cleghorn, Editor

My husband has been in some part of the news business from the time he was 16 years old.

I have been in it, adjacent to it and fed by it, but not on the front lines in the way he has been.

I confessed to him last night that, spending much of my day online as I do, the beat of bad news made me to not want to look at the updates.

Not since 9/11 have I so dreaded reading the news.

“Don’t look,” he said. “We’ve been through worse than this.”

Don’t look? Not reading the news would be unimaginable in normal times with him. Don’t look?

Maybe it is even worse than I thought and he just isn’t telling me.

No, it wasn’t that.

He has perspective I lack, and that most of us lack, since he also is an amateur historian.

Ignoring his advice (I keep looking) and stuck in my frame of mind (it’s worse and getting worse still), I just read a book which, perhaps, everyone but me has read. If you haven’t, now is the time.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a fictional account of how an island of good people lived, endured the occupation of the German army in WWII and the resulting isolation from England, and went on after it was over. They are triumphs over adversity, each in his or her own way.

The plat has the islanders write letters to an interested author about the German occupation. Their own stories bring home in the most human, intimate ways what happened. They tell stunning anecdotes and then move back to that time (post-war), seamlessly, as if to say, one goes on.

Nothing we have seen and nothing we shall expect to see can equal their privations and their special kind of bravery.

Give it a try.

If you read it, then you will be able to look at the news again.

I think.

I could and that is saying something after these last few weeks.

Fiction is not meant to deal with one’s immediate concerns. Oddly, this does a fine job of that anyway.