Underrated but over-relevant, here are some timely reads you should get on your bedside table rotation immediately.

Maybe you’re livin’ la vida lockdown (again) and need a story to stir something inside of you, or perhaps you’re sunning yourself on a patch of sand with a soy latte somewhere between Bondi and Bronte.

Whatever the predicament, here are some 2020-proof page turners for the voracious reader of burgeoning bibliophile who wants to be whisked the fuck away. You’re welcome.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Otessa Moshfegh
This book is savage. It is the most darkly sardonic, acerbically brilliant, remarkably timely piece of writing to be devoured guiltily like a giant wheel of triple brie of chocolate fudge cake. You feel demonic and twisted for literally laughing out loud at an anti-protagonist's plight to self-medicate into a year of solipsism.

She’s the antithesis to the overachieving modern woman, deciding things would just be a whole lot easier if she entered a coma for 12 months and rejected all notions of success, love, socialising and work. A mood, no?

It’s aggressively satirical and will be swallowed whole by the deeply sarcastic and cynical amongst us. I would fling this book in the direction of anyone feeling dejected in 2020 and needing a rollicking, revelatory laugh that subverts the status quo of what it means to be a 20-something woman.

Phosphorescence, Julia Baird
This book quite literally shook me, showered me, redressed me and dragged me out of a deep depressive spell in lockdown 1.0. I would NEVER have picked this up of the crowded bookshop shelves on my own volition if I hadn’t seen a few clever friends of mine giving it some social media love with lots of imperative language like ‘YOU MUST READ THIS NOW ’.

I obliged, and thank fuck. It’s basically an intimate exploration into how we find awe in the natural world and our “hankering for green and blue” by a renowned Australian journalist, mother and survivor. It dovetails in and out of Julia’s quotidien pleasures like stupidly early morning beach swims to her darkest days living through cancer. It’s this delicious, moving, unrivalled vault anti-BS, sage advice on how to find meaning in the everyday. I doggy-eared about 89 pages and have a growing list of lovers to lend it to.

Call Me By Your Name, Andre Acimen
Okay, not exactly underrated but potentially on its way out of the zeitgeist. Maybe you were too young to indulge in its sun-doused, citrus-riddled, La Dolce Vita exuding pages in the 2017 prime.

This tale incisively, meticulously and excruciatingly articulates the inimitable feeling of having a crush. There’s so many knock-the-wind-out-of-you lines in here that it may offer some brief reprieve from the stale ‘how’s iso treating you?’ interrogation you’re receiving on Bumble.

An earth-shatteringly brilliant and at times sombre story of two lovers entangled by fate and fear, this badboy goes down like an icy limoncello on a hot Summer evening in Capri. (To tide you over until that is an actual reality again in 100 years). Oh, and then you can do the whole watch-the-movie-after-you-read-the-book thing which is always fun.

Recollections of my Non-Existence, Rebecca Solnit
This book has verve. It’s an essayistic beauty. It tackles big, untouchable and taboo ideas to the ground and rubs them in the mud until they’re all gritty and beaten up and ripped apart in a refreshing way. Rebecca chronicles her years in San Francisco as a writer from 1981, documenting gentrification and oppression.

She grapples with stories and sights of the ostracised and marginalised black and gay communities she coexists with through sensitivity and outrage. Her main preoccupation, however, is with the systemic and inescapable notion of misogyny and how women’s humanity is, has and continues to be rejected through gender biases. Rape, gas lighting and PTSD are all discussed in extensive detail, so this book comes with a hefty trigger warning. Solnit also touches on her trajectory as a writer, what it means to be impassioned by words and how we grow through adversity, all via truly beautiful prose.

This is something that can be picked up, put down and returned to in fleeting bursts between other more escapist reads, or studied in one deeply thought-provoking digest if you’re in the mood to flex your mental muscles.

A Few Underrated Reads Of 2020 (So Far)