Pandemic and depression

A comic high-rise memoir & a play about the brain's highs and lows

Dundurn recently published a charming book chockful of Toronto Content, a Seinfeldian pandemic diary These Days Are Numbered by Rebecca Rosenblum. This collection of missives, dialogues, lists, miniatures and the occasional very gentle diatribe was collected out of the author’s Facebook updates between March 2020 and March 2022. Who still wants to read about the pandemic, you may ask, and when was the last time that anybody posted anything worth reading on Facebook? I, too, started this book skeptical but its voice won me over quickly: deadpan, hapless, overly invested in the minutiae, curious and anxious about the well-being of other humans. It is, best of all, a funny book about the “pando” that made me titter all the way through, while the scene with the author traipsing about a pitch dark Beach in search of a prepaid fruit cake, encountering equally confused strangers in search of same, is a literal LOL.