Discussion: What did you read when COVID shut the world down?
The books that gave us comfort
This month marks five years since COVID shut down normal life as we knew it in most of the world. (In East Asia things were shut down a bit sooner.) Looking back on my reading log and even my newsletters from those initial weeks and months is a weird trip down memory lane. Given the forced social isolation, many people turned to books — especially big and intimidating books.
I remember finishing Ron Chernow’s Grant right as COVID was becoming headline news. A Gentleman in Moscow, picked at the start of 2020 as our March read, was wildly appropriate for our book club’s first video discussion. Robert Massie’s big Russian biographies were a nice distraction. Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map gave me some insight into historical epidemic responses.
Most memorably, though, I spent a couple of months with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I was not alone in picking that 1,300-page epic. I finished it and immediately knew I wanted to read it again, which led to the creation of The Big Read. I still think about Natasha and Pierre and Andrei, and would like to read it again someday. It’s a book about a particular time and place that speaks to universal themes — while also occupying a particular time and place in my own memory.
So, my question for you: What did you read when COVID shut it all down? Which books stick in your memory from those first disorienting weeks and months in 2020?
I think I finished Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” trilogy during those first few months. We started a book club in the family so at least one night per week we could have something to talk about at dinner that wasn’t related to the pandemic. We kept it going for almost a year and read “Little Women,” “The House in the Cerulean Sea,” “And Then There Were None,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” and one or two books in the “Keeper of the Lost Cities” series.
A friend started a Facebook Group called "The Readers Grim" and we read and discussed pandemic-themed books: Severance by Ming La, The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, Fever, 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson, The Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen, Wanderers by Chuck Wendig, and The Stand by Stephen King