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