It’s been quite an election season—perhaps the most contentious yet. To help us all unpack this political moment, writer Carlos Lozada (an AWP17 Featured Presenter) has offered a list of sixteen nonfiction books at The Washington Post, which includes titles as old as Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and more recent titles such as Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (2016).

But perhaps you’re looking for something a bit simpler, more bipartisan. In that case, Brightly has a list of seven illustrated children’s books about voting and elections—books that introduce children to the complexities of the electoral process. The list includes classics like Amelia Bedelia’s First Vote, by Herman Parish, and newer titles, too.

Still, some of us are feeling pretty hopeless, so if you’re looking for apocalyptic fiction to drown in instead, Emily Temple at Literary Hub has that covered with a diverse list of “ten literary apocalypses” from the last five years. It includes Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Olivia A. Cole’s Panther in the Hive, Laura van den Berg’s Find Me, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles, N.K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season, Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses.

Related reading: In July 2015, Carlos Lozada binge-read eight books on Donald Trump and shared what he learned.

Photo Credit: Elliot Stallion/Unsplash.