Book clinic: which books can help me cope with the existential dread of our times?
Alex Preston recommends recent political books that make sense of the current madness, and luminously insightful novels
Q: Which books would you suggest to deal with the constant and creeping sense of existential dread in today’s social, political and economic times? Should I be reading to cope, or for escapism on my daily commute?
Foresight strategist, 36, north London
A: Alex Preston, novelist, critic and nonfiction author, writes:
A foresight strategist sounds like something out of a Don DeLillo novel, but I hear you as far as the existential dread goes. It’s hard to live today and not be assaulted by what David Foster Wallace called the “howling fantods”. Lying behind your question seems to be the suggestion that we read either to be informed or entertained; I’d say that great literature has a duty to do both.