Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events. As the coronavirus has spread through the English-speaking world over the past months, pandemic-themed reading lists have appeared in all manner of outlets.
Here are a few reads for your consideration:
Fiction
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Blindness by José Saramago
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
Bring Out Your Dead by J.M. Powell
The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman
The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
The Companion by Katie M. Flynn
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz
Find Me by Laura van den Berg
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
Journal of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Room by Emma Donoghue
Severance by Ling Ma
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Stand by Stephen King
They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
The Training Commission by Ingrid Burrington and Brendan Byrne
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Nonfiction
The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Hot Zone The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston
Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City by A. Harris Ali and Roger Keil
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney
Pox: An American History by Michael Willrich
SOURCE: Open Culture