Books to Read During a Pandemic

Severance by Ling Ma is becoming one of the hottest novels right now despite being published in 2018. The reason for its recent rise in sales is because the novel’s pandemic, Shen Fever, mirrors our own struggles with Covid-19. Ling Ma explores how it affects life around the world and specifically New York City. Not sure if reading about a pandemic while living through one will provide much solace, but it’s worth a shot.

Jane Hu at The Ringer discusses this and more in her essay. Also if you’re looking for another book about loss and epidemics, Joshua Keating has an article on Slate about how the Orwellian novel The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa mirrors how things we’ve taken for granted are disappearing in the age of Sheltering in Place and Social Distancing. Another dystopian tale that mirrors our current reality.

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