Quest's Winter Reading Picks

The goal of reading is not always pleasure. Sometimes we need to be reminded of history, and what might yet come to be if we ignore those lessons. Yale Professor of History Timothy Snyder, author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, writes, "A final plurality has to do with time. The state endures to create a sense of durability. When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. The defence of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. Awareness of history permits recognition of ideological traps and generates scepticism about demands for immediate action because everything has suddenly changed. Confidence in the future can make the world seem like something more than, in Hitler’s words, “the surface area of a precisely measured space”. Time, the fourth dimension, can make the three dimensions of space seem less claustrophobic. Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy. A sense of the future has to be created in the present from what we know of the past, the fourth dimension built out from the three of daily life." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-away

Fiction Picks

1984 by George Orwell

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin

The Windup Girl (2009) by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

Alone in Berlin (1947) by Hans Fallada

Nonfiction Picks

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder

The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

The Rebel by Albert Camus

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel

The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev