Plague, Pandemic, and Safety: What I’m Reading In Covid Lockdown

I suppose the normal reaction to our coronavirus quarantine life would be to read more escapism… but I’ve found myself reading a lot more about plague and plague times. I started with The Company of Liars, and just kept going.

College students begin to fall ill from a mysterious malady in Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers. The sickness leaves them seemingly healthy, but unable to wake up. As the strange sleeping sickness spreads through the town of Santa Lora, it reveals the secrets and the secret strengths of the residents.

The story is eerily prescient with characters needing to wear a mask, but also feeling kind of stupid wearing a mask, quarantine shortages, and an online hashtag hoax. The only part missing from The Dreamers was a bunch of people demanding to ignore the quarantine rules and get haircuts. The Dreamers is beautiful, and the story moves… but it also has basically no plot. Almost nothing from the pandemic gets resolved, the survivors just sort of try to go on living with what they’ve experienced.

The Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland, tells the story of a mismatched band of travelers, all trying to outrun the plague and their own secrets. Each traveler is guarding a secret, revealed slowly over the course of the book, and there’s something more deadly than the plague stalking them too.  The company hopes to escape the plague, and individually restart their lives in new places, but can anyone really outrun the past? And, can we really hope to escape the plague?

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, is a novel about the historical events in the mining village of Eyam in the black death. When the plague is discovered, the  the villagers seal themselves off (with one exception…) to prevent the wider spread of disease, and the story takes place in a quarantined town of sick, dying, and randomly spared.  There is a darkness as the plague exacerbates the existing difficulties of the religious threats from a fear of evil witches or of being named a witch, harsh and even violent penance for sins, and the  tension between Puritans, Quakers and other Christians.

In Wilder Girls, by Rory Power, a horrific tox causes a girl’s school on a remote island to voluntarily go into quarantine, but it’s becoming clear that no one is coming to help and there’s no cure in the works. The worldbuilding really works, and I absolutely loved the tension from the spreading disease, although I had trouble connecting with the characters.

In Plague, by Julie Anderson, ancient plague sites around London become the scenes of disturbing modern crimes. The story is much gorier than I usually like, but I was fascinated by the locations. New London on top of old London, with the ancient rivers and buildings still accessible if you know where to look.

Also, not at all a pandemic story, but I relate more and more to the hideout house in Red Sky Over Hawaii every week of quarantine.

What are you reading in quarantine?