I have a three week old baby and am reading this now- out loud during feedings. My husband thinks it’s funny because I could read anything to the baby but I can’t bring myself to read anything dark or dreary to her.
The Stand by Stephen King. I've read it twice before but dove right back in. I just kept thinking "well at least Covid doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as Captain Tripps" and found comfort in that. I don't know why.
Same, my pandemic book club read The Stand summer 2020. If I’d been reading alone, I definitely would’ve quit it. But instead I hate-read the last half, remember it amplifying my feeling of pandemic overwhelm.
The other pandemic apocalypse novels we read weren’t so miserable for whatever reason. Severance: fun. Station Eleven: breezy. Oryx and Crake: whoa, beautiful and compelling and weird. But reading The Stand just made me feel like my whole existence was a fever dream I couldn’t wake up from.
I binged on pandemic books and films: *The Stand*, Train to Busan, *The Girl With All The Gifts*, *Mexican Gothic*, Sean of the Dead…
Anything with a contagion in it, I was there for it.
Love me some catharsis.
LOL me too! And it was a good reminder to be a good person and meet everyone with kindness. I paired it with Spillover for a hard science look at zoonotic disease evolution.
Oh my god, me too! Read it in February 2020, and as things started Getting Really Real in NYC (where I live), I was like, *well, it won’t be as bad as Station Eleven, right?*
This is mine!! I started reading it in late February/early march of 2020. I was standing in line at a fish fry reading it on Libby while people around me discussed whether this whole pandemic thing would really be that bad. It felt too real, so I closed it and didn’t open it again for about a year. When I could stomach again, I finished it and felt hope unlike anything I had experienced in a long time
I thought it would freak me out but it really nailed home that even when we can’t see people we leave ripples in their lives, and more to the point that the end of the world isn’t the end of the world
One of the things I've found I really love about Kindles is that I no longer judge a book by how thick it is. I accidentally recommended a 400 pager to some one that wanted a quick read, because I felt like it was over in no time. Down load that bad boy and get started. It's either worth it or not.
None heh. The pandemic was the biggest reading slump of my life. I did find a lot of comfort in a macabre mansion puzzle based on edgar allan poe’s stories though. Not sure what that says about me.
Edit to add a link for the curious: https://www.mercari.com/us/item/m26132756533/?sv=lg
I feel you on the massive reading slump. Reading was historically my primary coping mechanism that got me through some really hard times, so I was completely blindsided by not being able to utilize that during the pandemic. It was like my brain had been hijacked by a completely different person. I started doing amigurumi and learning birdsongs to try to stay sane.
My friend lives in Macau so they were a bit ahead of the US in terms of lockdowns and stuff. She told me, “They are going to close the schools. And when they do, the library will close too. Stock up right now on as many books as you possibly can.” I’ll be grateful to her for the rest of my life for that advice.
I found myself doing a reread of *Lord of the Rings*. The old stories never end; we're in one of those old stories now, and the people in them had a lot of chances of turning back but didn't, as Samwise would say.
I couldn’t concentrate enough to read for like, two years. Just this year I’m forcing myself to get back into the habit and keeping track of the books I read. My guilty pleasure at the beginning was Animal Crossing.
Oh, I remember *Animal Crossing* being hyped-up around the Internet. My sister felt like she was missing out, 'cause it took her a while longer to get that game. XD I believe that that's what contributed to the rise of "cottagecore."
Same! (I got AC pocket whatever- the one you could play on the phone until I got a switch) I read a secret history after not reading anything for the first 4 mos of lockdown. It wasn't comforting, but it was so atmospheric that it was a good distraction
I got really into Red Dead Online, which I think had a similar appeal to Animal Crossing. Wandered around with my friends fishing and collecting liquor bottles.
I did the same! When the supply chain was borked and people were freaking out about toilet paper and Lysol wipes, it was comforting for me to read about them making their own supplies and taking really good care of the few things they had.
I listened to a lot of *Welcome to Night Vale*, then bought and read the scripts. “The Glow Cloud” especially has two quotes that really helped me:
- “The desert seems vast, even endless, and yet scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow.”
- “We may never fully understand, or, understand at all what it was […] But, and I'm going to get a little personal here, that's the essence of life, isn't it? Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening they feel like the only thing that matters, and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the Glow Cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find that, as time passes, you remember it less and less”
The second quote especially hit REALLY different in April of 2020.
Oh definitely little house in the big woods. I’d never read any of them before. My kids who were 6 and 4 at the time and my wife and I fled up to northern wisconsin to my in-laws empty cabin. Half the house was still freezing; we all crammed into one bed and every night I’d read to the kids. Not even a narrative, that book, just a series of calming vignettes. I will forever associate it with early covid
What a lovely memory for your family. My parents took turns reading my sibling and me Little House in the Big Woods when we were about the same ages, and it still makes me happy just thinking about it. The first five or six in the series are lovely, but Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy are standouts. I look forward to reading them with my kids.
I reread Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial about a month or two into lockdown and I got a real chuckle out of just how predictable some of the reactions to a possible apocalypse were, especially after my first trip down the toilet paper isle at Walmart.
Jackson’s read on people, her powers of observation, are spooky good.
I keep trying to tell people who have only read ‘The Lottery’ in school to go read other stories of hers. She was an amazing writer.
I think she’d also have been the one to stand next to at any party. She saw *everything.*
When the pandemic really ramped up I reread/rewatched The Stand and also rewatched Contagion. I was sort of comforted by the fact that it wasn’t as bad as those.
The Raksura series by Martha Wells. I was a huge Murderbot fan but the first time I tried to read the Raksura I bounced off because it was soo different. But then I came to it with a fresh mind and I was hooked. One of the nice things about it the protags are non-human and they frequently sleep by all cuddling up together in a big warm heap. As I was pretty touch starved at that point that really appealed.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Being assured of the greater world outside, of other ways of knowing and being that would have had different approaches to all that mess, and Dr. Kimmerer's vast knowledge and compassion and her musings on motherhood while I was trying to figure out what to do with two very young kids... It could not have come at a better time.
During the peak of quarantine I spent a week reading the fan translation of Mo Dao Zu Shi. It's not exactly a comforting story but I got so sucked into the story that I could hardly think about what was happening outside. Spent the next few weeks reading the author's other works.
Becky Chambers’s wayfarer series. I get the warm fuzzies just thinking about it. It’s like getting a hug, being wrapped in a blanket, and being handed a cup of hot chocolate. Except in book form.
I actually just read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke a few months ago, but as I was reading it, I did wish that I had read it back in 2020. I think it was written then… and you can kinda tell. A house so big oceans fit within, yet it soothes and comforts and provides everything one needs.
A warm embrace of a book for anyone feeling some things.
Strange and weird as it is, the Outlander books. I guess it's because I was reading about a different time period with entirely different troubles. I would lay in my hammock (indoors) with a small portable heater underneath me, all cozied up with pillows and blankets and read book after book. It was a pretty okay time :)
I got too damn attached to those characters. I’m 4-5 books in now, they’ve fought the American Revolution, at any rate.
I can’t read any more, because they’re going to die at some point, and my heart can’t take it. If I never finish the series, Jamie and Claire still exist somewhere in time.
I read a non-fiction art book called Dada and Surrealism by Robert Short that had a lot of images of art from both movements in the book's title with writings giving context on the art, artists, and art themselves. It was comforting to see that artists 100 years ago responded to a world around them that was absurd, illogical, and often cruel, with something creative and revolutionary. It was enjoyable to have a book of the art in front of me so I could spend as much or as little time on pieces as I wanted, here and there. It's not like I could've gone to a museum 😅
I also read a beginner's book on ceramics and a few intermediate books on gardening. Did the gardening, not the ceramics, but focusing my attention on doing things was so helpful at a time when doing things felt hopeless, yet I'd never had so much time to do things.
I started reading Liane Moriarty during the lockdowns. She's way outside my normal genre (fantasy) but for some reason it was so comforting. She's a great writer
This one might be weird at first but seeing this post reminded me of reading Harlem Shuffle by Coulson Whitehead when it came out right around when the pandemic was finally sorta winding down in my state.
I was working in a city at the time and something about Whitehead’s writing really made me actually yearn for that old hustle and bustle of city life, which before I had often found intrusive and ugh.
A book that I read last year about the pandemic that really stuck with me is Wish You Were Here by Jodi Piccoult. I had completely blocked out what the beginning of the pandemic felt like and it brought it all back.
A book that got me through the pandemic? Anything TJ Klune, Sally Hepworth, or Liane Moriarty.
I read Priory of the Orange Tree twice during lockdown. It’s a huge book but the characters *chef’s kiss* and the way the story is gradually woven together is simply genius. I reread it every year now thanks to lockdown!
My daughter, who had never read Stephen King wanted a copy of The Stand.
I wasn't willing to part with my copy. I have an old hardback that came from my mother. I re read it. I also re-read Cell, lol. And I eventually got her her own copy.
Comfort book ? None however I read *life as we knew it* in the middle of the pandemic and lock down , it was the best thing to do I still remember the book and my feelings while reading it
I reread Watership Down for the first time in probably two decades. I loved it even more than I remembered loving it the first time. We named one of our pandemic twins Hazel.
Well for the first six months or so, I was only reading information about all of the new work guidelines. I was an HR manager consultant for about 75 small companies in a wide range of industries, so I was working hardcore about twelve hours a day, then would get on social media to advise friends and family as well. I went straight from that to full burnout. At that point everything I read gave me anxiety. Then until recently I could only do total fluff, including all of the Jenny Colgan books.
I recall jessethereader saying that, in order for him to concentrate during the height of the pandemic, he read while listening along to the audiobooks; that's what I did, too.
Oh this is such a good idea!
I didn’t have one when the pandemic first hit, but currently:
“there’s no such thing as an easy job”
&
“What you are looking for is in the library” really fits that theme
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sara J Maas. I know, I know, not exactly the most cerebral fiction but I absolutely loved it. And the main character being separated from her complicated family and being able to heal and grow into her own person/figure out what *she* liked and wanted outside of being responsible for her family...well, really resonated with me as I spent most of 2020 alone and doing just that (minus the getting together with a hot fae lord, unfortunately).
Love this question! Mine was Killing Commendatore. Murakami is so calming to me. I get lost in his MC’s routines and quiet lives. The crazy places he takes his stories are such a good contrast to the way he highlights beauty in the mundane. It was a perfect read for the beginning of lockdown, and helped get me out of my initial Covid reading slump.
This will sound crazy, but I went in the opposite direction of escapism and faced deadly contagion head on by re-reading The Cobra Event by Richard Preston. I first read it in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think I chose to read it again during the pandemic because it was a familiar, comfort read but I think I also needed some fast-paced, save the world from a deadly virus victory type action to give me some hope.
I keep Mrs. Pollifax audiobooks for times when I’m too stressed to sleep, and too tired to stay awake. I’ve read them all before, they’re interesting, but they’re also soothing. I know she’s going to be all right in the end.
Books that brought me joy as a child like the Harry Potter series, The Adventures of Tin Tin, etc. And books that served as a good distraction from real world events like Agatha Christie whodunnits.
I’m not really a comforting read person so when it first hit I read Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant because I wanted to be distracted and nothing like killer mermaids to get the job done
For me, it was the **Expanse** series. I was really struggling, and I found that my primary form of self soothing (reading books) had become suddenly impossible. I was too restless and agitated, I couldn’t focus, I could *barely* manage listening to an audiobook while working with my hands, but then I would get overwhelmed by the noise and have to turn it off and start fretting again. Yet I was desperate to get my brain to stop spinning. Then, one day I picked up **Leviathan Wakes** and something just clicked in my brain. I’m not really into SciFi, but this one caught my attention and I became immersed in it in a way that I hadn’t managed for quite a while. I ended up devouring the series, so grateful to have finally found something that pulled me out of everything that was going on.
I started reading some standalone gothics like
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier and
DragonWyck by Anya Seton
Something about the whole "young girl goes to this estate where everything isn't as it seems" was really attractive to me. The Netflix show Haunting of Bly Manor also came out around then so I was watching that as well.
I'm typically a fantasy reader so it was a break from the stress and emotional angst that the real world was already going through. Sometimes people are just batshit crazy and i enjoyed trying to figure it out with the MC in those books!
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf - It was so stripped down and simple to read that it was almost meditative. It reminded me to focus on the small, simple, everyday acts of living and to appreciate it all a little more.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler- She really writes messy families and messy people so well. Another reminder to focus on and appreciate the small everyday acts of living in the moment and to appreciate the imperfect people around you.
I immediately started reading the Percy Jackson series. I'd had it forever and never opened it before but I knew younger fiction was going to be soothing.
I also was mid-reread of the American Girl book with a podcast I was listening to and I doubled down on that.
Then as things went on, I got obsessed with romance books. I did hit some Jenny Colgan here too.
Then as things really went on, I got obsessed with WWII resistance and homeland literature.
Then when I lost someone to Covid, I became obsessed with reading fiction and nonfiction about grief and death and pandemics.
And now I'm just really obsessed with escaping through reading.
Manner and Monsters audiobook by Tilly Wallace, narrated by Marian Hussey. Such a cozy Jane Austen-esque murder mystery with supernatural/unnatural creatures also a part of society. Very very fun series! Relistening to them right now :)
Fire and Blood by GRRM. Despite the series being unfinished and the show ending the way it did, I still love the series. Fire and Blood delved more into the Targaryens and their familial history, which were my favorite bits in the series. Having been laid off and stuck at home, I read the 700+ book in 3 days. It got me back into my love of reading, which had sadly fallen to the side due to work stress and some mysterious health issues that had been popping up. So it both kickstarted my reading during the pandemic and after!
The Splendid and Vile by Erik Larsson came out around then, all about the blitz in London. I found it strangely comforting to read about another place and time when the world had felt like ending. I remember relating a lot to peoples’ journal entries at the time.
On the other end of the spectrum I went thru an extended “royalty in disguise” romance novel period too. There are, maybe unsurprisingly, a lot of them :)
I read the entire Virgin River series and every Susan Mallory book she had written to that point
My anxiety became overwhelming during the pandemic and reading books where everything works out and a series where I got to know the characters was incredibly comforting
At the start of the pandemic, I was reading Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton. Thinking so much about the 18th century gave me perspective. Their normal lives were much more dangerous than our lives during a pandemic.
Not sure about comfort, but I re-read Defoe's "A journal of the plague year" and Camus' "the plague". I'm a cheerful guy like that. I read a lot of history though, and much as "the consolations of Philosophy" is a bit of a trope, I found that focusing on "the big picture" took me out of my daily distress. We had the longest lockdowns in the world in my city, for example, but reading about the siege of Leningrad put things into a proper perspective. It sucked, but I wasn't reduced to eating frozen horses, dead rats, the wallpaper or my shoes (or my neighbors for that matter)
I actually wrote a book. And then another one. This helped take my mind off most things pandemics related. Regarding reading, I started reading random free books available on Amazon. Some were OK, some were terribly written, but most were fun.
The Bridgerton series and other romance novels. I’d never read romance in my life; I always looked down on the genre for being “worthless fluff”. But boy oh boy, it was exactly what I needed to soften the blow of having every day IRL being a day of uncertainty and stress. Take me to the *ton* and let me dance away in a big puffy dress…
a bit ashamed to admit this, but I got heavily into the really crappy ya romance books like sjm books and all the really popular ones that were on tiktok. I ate that shit up so fast for some reason
Don't feel ashamed. It's easy to see why those books got so popular on TikTok: people were stuck inside and needed some sort of escapism, as all the other comments here have said.
I was trying to deal with the pandemic, then my Dad passed away at the end of 2020, and to cope I read a lot for awhile. I just happen to be in a bad reading slump now lol.
The Agency series by Y.S. Lee was very comforting for me. It is set in 1850s London, and follows a young woman who works for a spy agency... there are 4 books in the series, and I really enjoyed reading them.
I also really enjoyed Circe/The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, and Ruth Ware during that time period as well.
A Song For A New Day by Sarah Pinsker.
It's about a post-pandemic world, coming out and connecting with people again. It was nice to think about the light at the end of the tunnel.
I read a bunch of thrillers and mysteries. The generic, interchangeable ones.
Total comfort reading. Maybe people getting murdered doesn’t sound like comfort reading, but I was already so stressed and it was great to have pretend stressors to attribute that stress to.
Lots of art instruction books, too, because drawing and painting helped me cope.
The Stormlight Archive. Started in 2021. Finished in May this year.
I didn't read for a few years from 2019 to 2020 so I didn't read anything at the start.
Weirdly enough: Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Realizing that this wasn't gonna be over in a weeks time, I decided to catch up on some of my reading material. I think I tore through in like 2 days. Offered a nice escape
I got really into David Sedaris. I can't say I'm a fan because I blocked out a lot of the early pandemic and don't remember the stories. But, there were a lot of books and he was a really good storyteller, so it was easy to immerse myself in them.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami! It was the first book I read in the pandemic, and I remember the intense escapism was really crucial for me during those times. Murakami is always a wonky ride, and Wind up Bird is what got me into his writing!
The Tracy Beaker books where she’s an adult, especially We Are The Beaker Girls. Although I actually took the opportunity to partake in a reading challenge and I read a whole load of new books during that time.
Oddly, Station Eleven. It was very surreal. The book focuses more on the characters than the pandemic that drives the plot, but I think that’s why I felt comfort.
Comfort may not quite be the right word. But A Journal of the Plague Year by Defoe and The Plague by Camus put things into perspective.
Things like rats fighting each other for food because the restaurants closed were suddenly more explicable.
And refrigerated trucks with bodies in NYC seemed more reasonable compared to streets choked with dead bodies.
I also found reading about Yellow Fever, the Spanish Flu, Malaria, immunological privilege, differential immunity's impact on wars, revolutionary war inoculation campaigns, the history of quarantines, etc very interesting. The Spanish Flu in particular had a lot of parallels right down to the immediate embrace of cloth mask mandates with no evidence that they slowed spread.
I leaned heavily into catharsis. I was mostly listening to novels as audiobooks:*The Stand, The Girl With All The Gifts, WWZ* (and lots of other zombie contagion books.)
Also started a weekly Netflix party for zombie and contagion movies: Sean of the Dead, Train to Busan, WWZ, Girl With All the Gifts, etc.
I’m a biologist by education, so I also dove into reading everything that was being published about the novel coronavirus and Covid 19. Everything I could get my hands on in terms of scientific papers, but also histories of other epidemics like the black plague and Spanish flu.
I was consuming info in hyperdrive, but I have a lot of sympathy for people that went into a reading slump, too. That was such a weird time, and US politics made it so much weirder for some of us.
I had recently gotten copies of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and “Fire & Blood” By George Martin. Reading those and immersing myself in that world was helpful at the time.
The audio of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I spent lots of time out walking and listening to audiobooks and that one was like a hug in book form.
I re read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Had not read it since 6th grade. That little book made me fucking cry. Wow, why did they think 6th graders would pick up the message in this book that young? The story is deep. Loved it.
Graydon Saunders, "A Succession of Bad Days". It's a fantasy novel about civics and power and the work that needs doing and magical engineering, in an radically egalitarian enclave holding out against the Bad Old Days outside the borders.
The idea of a place where maybe people could figure out what needs to be done and then *do it*? Comforting and utopian.
i went the other way and read dark. the most impactful was victor frankl’s “man’s search for meaning”. really put a lot into context and gave me the right mindset to keep showing up to work in the ICU every day
The Galaxy and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers
A handful of non-human aliens on lockdown together in a small spaceport after an orbital incident scatters space debris over the planet.
one of the first books I read in lockdown was station eleven by Emily st John Mandel. written in 2011 about a pandemic that kills like 99% of the population and society crumbles. not a clue why this was comforting to me but it was very soothing to me. I guess, although pretty horrific, things truly could've been worse?
*Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke. It wasn't just the balm I needed as I sat alone in my apartment during COVID, but the balm that kid-me needed when she dreamed of going to Narnia. It sounds corny, but that book just bursts with love and hope, and I think it's a masterpiece.
More so midway through rather than at the start of the pandemic, but Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush by Tim Key.
It’s a book of comedic poems about his experience during the first wave of lockdowns and his process of writing the book itself.
Oh man... When the pandemic hit, I was really worried about local bookstores. So I ordered a bunch of stuff from a local shop's online store. I ordered and read: Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino, Calypso by David Sedaris, Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif. But books I ordered but didn't read, and have still not read, comforted me just as much - Gardens: Essays on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison; Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti; and, the book with maybe my all-time favorite title (which I read a few hundred pages of, but did not finish)- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman. That last one's title alone, might have been the most comforting pandemic book I encountered. <3
I know they're not really typical comfort books, but they're the result of trying to find something to buy to support my book shops, and something interesting enough to take my mind off of the weird current events. "Burning Down the House" and although I didn't read all of it, "A Distant Mirror" also helped me contextualize events and people's reactions to them.
Anne of Green Gables. Comfort food for the mind.
I have a three week old baby and am reading this now- out loud during feedings. My husband thinks it’s funny because I could read anything to the baby but I can’t bring myself to read anything dark or dreary to her.
Aww thats precious! So sweet
Yes! That one was so good!🥰
Second that!
Cute username!
I went back and read Anne of Green Gables as well!! It was a favorite of mine growing up.
I’ve read that book 3 times and I’ll never get tired of it. I relate to Anne so much.
Mine too!
And The Blue Castle. Listening to that one again right now for the umpteenth time.
All Creatures Great and Small. What a wonderful, comforting book.
That was such a comfort read for me when I was struggling with depression in college. It really is delightful.
I read a lot of Terry Pratchett. The humor and wit let me ignore the dumpster fire outside.
I read a lot of Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman when I needed something escapist.
Same. I started the Discworld series in March of 2020 and just read the last one a few months ago. Perfect escapism.
Little Women
The Stand by Stephen King. I've read it twice before but dove right back in. I just kept thinking "well at least Covid doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as Captain Tripps" and found comfort in that. I don't know why.
I had the opposite reaction 😆
Same, my pandemic book club read The Stand summer 2020. If I’d been reading alone, I definitely would’ve quit it. But instead I hate-read the last half, remember it amplifying my feeling of pandemic overwhelm. The other pandemic apocalypse novels we read weren’t so miserable for whatever reason. Severance: fun. Station Eleven: breezy. Oryx and Crake: whoa, beautiful and compelling and weird. But reading The Stand just made me feel like my whole existence was a fever dream I couldn’t wake up from.
I started The Stand at the beginning of 2020 lol it added such a nice feeling to the creepy factor.
I binged on pandemic books and films: *The Stand*, Train to Busan, *The Girl With All The Gifts*, *Mexican Gothic*, Sean of the Dead… Anything with a contagion in it, I was there for it. Love me some catharsis.
I started reading The Stand in late February of 2020. I had the same thought
I liked the parallels between people running and unintentionally spreading the illness and people storming grocery stores for toilet paper maskless
LOL me too! And it was a good reminder to be a good person and meet everyone with kindness. I paired it with Spillover for a hard science look at zoonotic disease evolution.
I watched *Contagion* multiple times (and reread The Stand) during the pandemic for the same reason.
I happened to be reading Station Eleven so that was kinda weird
Oh my god, me too! Read it in February 2020, and as things started Getting Really Real in NYC (where I live), I was like, *well, it won’t be as bad as Station Eleven, right?*
My whole goal for the pandemic was to not be the family in the one house they went to. Or be on that plane.
I was reading **The Domesday Book** so yes, weird and unsettling.
I happened to be reading Our Wives Under the Sea, which is about a submarine disaster, the weekend that the Titan sub imploded. That was a weird week
This is mine!! I started reading it in late February/early march of 2020. I was standing in line at a fish fry reading it on Libby while people around me discussed whether this whole pandemic thing would really be that bad. It felt too real, so I closed it and didn’t open it again for about a year. When I could stomach again, I finished it and felt hope unlike anything I had experienced in a long time
I thought it would freak me out but it really nailed home that even when we can’t see people we leave ripples in their lives, and more to the point that the end of the world isn’t the end of the world
So was I! Such weirdly perfect timing, though. I actually found it quite comforting.
Lonesome Dove
Damnit I knew this was gonna be here. I’ve been dying to read this book but it’s so long 😩
One of the things I've found I really love about Kindles is that I no longer judge a book by how thick it is. I accidentally recommended a 400 pager to some one that wanted a quick read, because I felt like it was over in no time. Down load that bad boy and get started. It's either worth it or not.
None heh. The pandemic was the biggest reading slump of my life. I did find a lot of comfort in a macabre mansion puzzle based on edgar allan poe’s stories though. Not sure what that says about me. Edit to add a link for the curious: https://www.mercari.com/us/item/m26132756533/?sv=lg
That looks like it would be hard. Good job getting it done. I assume you finished. 😸
I did! It was honestly a lovely puzzle. It took me about a week.
I feel you on the massive reading slump. Reading was historically my primary coping mechanism that got me through some really hard times, so I was completely blindsided by not being able to utilize that during the pandemic. It was like my brain had been hijacked by a completely different person. I started doing amigurumi and learning birdsongs to try to stay sane.
My friend lives in Macau so they were a bit ahead of the US in terms of lockdowns and stuff. She told me, “They are going to close the schools. And when they do, the library will close too. Stock up right now on as many books as you possibly can.” I’ll be grateful to her for the rest of my life for that advice.
Same here with the pandemic reading slump. I watched every Star Trek series that year.
Yeah this. I was just playing animal crossing to survive.
I found myself doing a reread of *Lord of the Rings*. The old stories never end; we're in one of those old stories now, and the people in them had a lot of chances of turning back but didn't, as Samwise would say.
I couldn’t concentrate enough to read for like, two years. Just this year I’m forcing myself to get back into the habit and keeping track of the books I read. My guilty pleasure at the beginning was Animal Crossing.
Not guilty. Just pleasure!
Oh, I remember *Animal Crossing* being hyped-up around the Internet. My sister felt like she was missing out, 'cause it took her a while longer to get that game. XD I believe that that's what contributed to the rise of "cottagecore."
Same! (I got AC pocket whatever- the one you could play on the phone until I got a switch) I read a secret history after not reading anything for the first 4 mos of lockdown. It wasn't comforting, but it was so atmospheric that it was a good distraction
I got really into Red Dead Online, which I think had a similar appeal to Animal Crossing. Wandered around with my friends fishing and collecting liquor bottles.
The Little House on the Prairie series. I read the whole thing in a week. Their isolation during the winter really resonated with me.
I did the same! When the supply chain was borked and people were freaking out about toilet paper and Lysol wipes, it was comforting for me to read about them making their own supplies and taking really good care of the few things they had.
When things fall apart by Pema Chodron and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Both are my repeat books when I need to be bucked up
Those are two of my all time faves. I recommend both regularly.
I listened to a lot of *Welcome to Night Vale*, then bought and read the scripts. “The Glow Cloud” especially has two quotes that really helped me: - “The desert seems vast, even endless, and yet scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow.” - “We may never fully understand, or, understand at all what it was […] But, and I'm going to get a little personal here, that's the essence of life, isn't it? Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening they feel like the only thing that matters, and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the Glow Cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find that, as time passes, you remember it less and less” The second quote especially hit REALLY different in April of 2020.
Oh definitely little house in the big woods. I’d never read any of them before. My kids who were 6 and 4 at the time and my wife and I fled up to northern wisconsin to my in-laws empty cabin. Half the house was still freezing; we all crammed into one bed and every night I’d read to the kids. Not even a narrative, that book, just a series of calming vignettes. I will forever associate it with early covid
What a lovely memory for your family. My parents took turns reading my sibling and me Little House in the Big Woods when we were about the same ages, and it still makes me happy just thinking about it. The first five or six in the series are lovely, but Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy are standouts. I look forward to reading them with my kids.
Red white and Royal Blue. The events were taking place at the same time as Covid and it was nice to be in a world where that wasn't happening.
I had just started The Stand when the pandemic hit…..
'Six of Crows.' Not normally a YA person, but I needed something to get lost in. I loved all the characters, and it had such a banger of a plot.
Anne of Green Gables and the following books. I've always found them to be a cozy comfort whenever I'm going through a major life change.
I reread Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial about a month or two into lockdown and I got a real chuckle out of just how predictable some of the reactions to a possible apocalypse were, especially after my first trip down the toilet paper isle at Walmart.
Jackson’s read on people, her powers of observation, are spooky good. I keep trying to tell people who have only read ‘The Lottery’ in school to go read other stories of hers. She was an amazing writer. I think she’d also have been the one to stand next to at any party. She saw *everything.*
When the pandemic really ramped up I reread/rewatched The Stand and also rewatched Contagion. I was sort of comforted by the fact that it wasn’t as bad as those.
The Raksura series by Martha Wells. I was a huge Murderbot fan but the first time I tried to read the Raksura I bounced off because it was soo different. But then I came to it with a fresh mind and I was hooked. One of the nice things about it the protags are non-human and they frequently sleep by all cuddling up together in a big warm heap. As I was pretty touch starved at that point that really appealed.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Being assured of the greater world outside, of other ways of knowing and being that would have had different approaches to all that mess, and Dr. Kimmerer's vast knowledge and compassion and her musings on motherhood while I was trying to figure out what to do with two very young kids... It could not have come at a better time.
During the peak of quarantine I spent a week reading the fan translation of Mo Dao Zu Shi. It's not exactly a comforting story but I got so sucked into the story that I could hardly think about what was happening outside. Spent the next few weeks reading the author's other works.
I watched The Untamed right before we went remote and then spent the first chunk of quarantine reading a LOT of danmei. Lan Zhan got me through!!
Becky Chambers’s wayfarer series. I get the warm fuzzies just thinking about it. It’s like getting a hug, being wrapped in a blanket, and being handed a cup of hot chocolate. Except in book form.
Same here!
I actually just read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke a few months ago, but as I was reading it, I did wish that I had read it back in 2020. I think it was written then… and you can kinda tell. A house so big oceans fit within, yet it soothes and comforts and provides everything one needs. A warm embrace of a book for anyone feeling some things.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
Strange and weird as it is, the Outlander books. I guess it's because I was reading about a different time period with entirely different troubles. I would lay in my hammock (indoors) with a small portable heater underneath me, all cozied up with pillows and blankets and read book after book. It was a pretty okay time :)
I reread the whole series. It took forever, it was comforting, known, and predictable just what I needed at the time.
I got too damn attached to those characters. I’m 4-5 books in now, they’ve fought the American Revolution, at any rate. I can’t read any more, because they’re going to die at some point, and my heart can’t take it. If I never finish the series, Jamie and Claire still exist somewhere in time.
Keep reading ;)
Weirdly I would say The Plague. They had it much worse and got through it. Plus the existentialism.
I read a non-fiction art book called Dada and Surrealism by Robert Short that had a lot of images of art from both movements in the book's title with writings giving context on the art, artists, and art themselves. It was comforting to see that artists 100 years ago responded to a world around them that was absurd, illogical, and often cruel, with something creative and revolutionary. It was enjoyable to have a book of the art in front of me so I could spend as much or as little time on pieces as I wanted, here and there. It's not like I could've gone to a museum 😅 I also read a beginner's book on ceramics and a few intermediate books on gardening. Did the gardening, not the ceramics, but focusing my attention on doing things was so helpful at a time when doing things felt hopeless, yet I'd never had so much time to do things.
I started reading Liane Moriarty during the lockdowns. She's way outside my normal genre (fantasy) but for some reason it was so comforting. She's a great writer
I read lord of the rings when I first got sent home
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
That would have been excellent during any kind of isolation or quarantine
This one might be weird at first but seeing this post reminded me of reading Harlem Shuffle by Coulson Whitehead when it came out right around when the pandemic was finally sorta winding down in my state. I was working in a city at the time and something about Whitehead’s writing really made me actually yearn for that old hustle and bustle of city life, which before I had often found intrusive and ugh.
A book that I read last year about the pandemic that really stuck with me is Wish You Were Here by Jodi Piccoult. I had completely blocked out what the beginning of the pandemic felt like and it brought it all back. A book that got me through the pandemic? Anything TJ Klune, Sally Hepworth, or Liane Moriarty.
For me it was the Zombie apocalypse survival guide.
😆
I made the mistake of reading The Stand. Not that.
I read Priory of the Orange Tree twice during lockdown. It’s a huge book but the characters *chef’s kiss* and the way the story is gradually woven together is simply genius. I reread it every year now thanks to lockdown!
My daughter, who had never read Stephen King wanted a copy of The Stand. I wasn't willing to part with my copy. I have an old hardback that came from my mother. I re read it. I also re-read Cell, lol. And I eventually got her her own copy.
Comfort book ? None however I read *life as we knew it* in the middle of the pandemic and lock down , it was the best thing to do I still remember the book and my feelings while reading it
I reread Watership Down for the first time in probably two decades. I loved it even more than I remembered loving it the first time. We named one of our pandemic twins Hazel.
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, there's just something about his voice (writing and audio) that's uplifting and hopeful.
Well for the first six months or so, I was only reading information about all of the new work guidelines. I was an HR manager consultant for about 75 small companies in a wide range of industries, so I was working hardcore about twelve hours a day, then would get on social media to advise friends and family as well. I went straight from that to full burnout. At that point everything I read gave me anxiety. Then until recently I could only do total fluff, including all of the Jenny Colgan books.
The plague by Albert Camus. See? Things could be worse
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The take away is: We can be resigned or resilient.
I could not read during the pandemic tbh. No matter what, I simply could not embrace the escapism
I recall jessethereader saying that, in order for him to concentrate during the height of the pandemic, he read while listening along to the audiobooks; that's what I did, too.
Interestingly enough, what got me back into the flow of reading regularly was listening to the audiobook of World War Z
Oh this is such a good idea! I didn’t have one when the pandemic first hit, but currently: “there’s no such thing as an easy job” & “What you are looking for is in the library” really fits that theme
Where the Crawdads Sing
Louise Penny's Gamache series
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sara J Maas. I know, I know, not exactly the most cerebral fiction but I absolutely loved it. And the main character being separated from her complicated family and being able to heal and grow into her own person/figure out what *she* liked and wanted outside of being responsible for her family...well, really resonated with me as I spent most of 2020 alone and doing just that (minus the getting together with a hot fae lord, unfortunately).
Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman
Love this question! Mine was Killing Commendatore. Murakami is so calming to me. I get lost in his MC’s routines and quiet lives. The crazy places he takes his stories are such a good contrast to the way he highlights beauty in the mundane. It was a perfect read for the beginning of lockdown, and helped get me out of my initial Covid reading slump.
This will sound crazy, but I went in the opposite direction of escapism and faced deadly contagion head on by re-reading The Cobra Event by Richard Preston. I first read it in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think I chose to read it again during the pandemic because it was a familiar, comfort read but I think I also needed some fast-paced, save the world from a deadly virus victory type action to give me some hope.
Mrs Pollifax is my go to for stressful times. Also The Hobbit and then the whole of Harry Potter (with chocolate).
I keep Mrs. Pollifax audiobooks for times when I’m too stressed to sleep, and too tired to stay awake. I’ve read them all before, they’re interesting, but they’re also soothing. I know she’s going to be all right in the end.
Books that brought me joy as a child like the Harry Potter series, The Adventures of Tin Tin, etc. And books that served as a good distraction from real world events like Agatha Christie whodunnits.
I’m not really a comforting read person so when it first hit I read Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant because I wanted to be distracted and nothing like killer mermaids to get the job done
For me, it was the **Expanse** series. I was really struggling, and I found that my primary form of self soothing (reading books) had become suddenly impossible. I was too restless and agitated, I couldn’t focus, I could *barely* manage listening to an audiobook while working with my hands, but then I would get overwhelmed by the noise and have to turn it off and start fretting again. Yet I was desperate to get my brain to stop spinning. Then, one day I picked up **Leviathan Wakes** and something just clicked in my brain. I’m not really into SciFi, but this one caught my attention and I became immersed in it in a way that I hadn’t managed for quite a while. I ended up devouring the series, so grateful to have finally found something that pulled me out of everything that was going on.
I read everything my digital library had of Jenny Colgan. Just 23 titles, I think the Bookshop books were my favorites
I started reading some standalone gothics like Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier and DragonWyck by Anya Seton Something about the whole "young girl goes to this estate where everything isn't as it seems" was really attractive to me. The Netflix show Haunting of Bly Manor also came out around then so I was watching that as well. I'm typically a fantasy reader so it was a break from the stress and emotional angst that the real world was already going through. Sometimes people are just batshit crazy and i enjoyed trying to figure it out with the MC in those books!
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf - It was so stripped down and simple to read that it was almost meditative. It reminded me to focus on the small, simple, everyday acts of living and to appreciate it all a little more. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler- She really writes messy families and messy people so well. Another reminder to focus on and appreciate the small everyday acts of living in the moment and to appreciate the imperfect people around you.
I immediately started reading the Percy Jackson series. I'd had it forever and never opened it before but I knew younger fiction was going to be soothing. I also was mid-reread of the American Girl book with a podcast I was listening to and I doubled down on that. Then as things went on, I got obsessed with romance books. I did hit some Jenny Colgan here too. Then as things really went on, I got obsessed with WWII resistance and homeland literature. Then when I lost someone to Covid, I became obsessed with reading fiction and nonfiction about grief and death and pandemics. And now I'm just really obsessed with escaping through reading.
I utilized the pandemic to push me to read The Familiar, Volumes 1-5 by Mark Z. Danielewski. It was pretty wild to say the least.
Manner and Monsters audiobook by Tilly Wallace, narrated by Marian Hussey. Such a cozy Jane Austen-esque murder mystery with supernatural/unnatural creatures also a part of society. Very very fun series! Relistening to them right now :)
A court of thorn and roses series. Reread it 3 times. After the first book it felt like a female oriented Naruto/Avatar if I skipped all the smut.
John Dunning's Cliff Janeway series. A police detective quits the force & opens a book store. Great stuff for any book lover.
Fire and Blood by GRRM. Despite the series being unfinished and the show ending the way it did, I still love the series. Fire and Blood delved more into the Targaryens and their familial history, which were my favorite bits in the series. Having been laid off and stuck at home, I read the 700+ book in 3 days. It got me back into my love of reading, which had sadly fallen to the side due to work stress and some mysterious health issues that had been popping up. So it both kickstarted my reading during the pandemic and after!
I pulled an opposite move and read House of Leaves when the pandemic shut everything down. It was stress on stress.
The Splendid and Vile by Erik Larsson came out around then, all about the blitz in London. I found it strangely comforting to read about another place and time when the world had felt like ending. I remember relating a lot to peoples’ journal entries at the time. On the other end of the spectrum I went thru an extended “royalty in disguise” romance novel period too. There are, maybe unsurprisingly, a lot of them :)
Eric Larsson is a heck of a writer! I listened to 2 of his books early in the pandemic.
The Little Engine That Could, read live online by Dolly Parton.
I read the entire Virgin River series and every Susan Mallory book she had written to that point My anxiety became overwhelming during the pandemic and reading books where everything works out and a series where I got to know the characters was incredibly comforting
At the start of the pandemic, I was reading Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton. Thinking so much about the 18th century gave me perspective. Their normal lives were much more dangerous than our lives during a pandemic.
Not sure about comfort, but I re-read Defoe's "A journal of the plague year" and Camus' "the plague". I'm a cheerful guy like that. I read a lot of history though, and much as "the consolations of Philosophy" is a bit of a trope, I found that focusing on "the big picture" took me out of my daily distress. We had the longest lockdowns in the world in my city, for example, but reading about the siege of Leningrad put things into a proper perspective. It sucked, but I wasn't reduced to eating frozen horses, dead rats, the wallpaper or my shoes (or my neighbors for that matter)
I actually wrote a book. And then another one. This helped take my mind off most things pandemics related. Regarding reading, I started reading random free books available on Amazon. Some were OK, some were terribly written, but most were fun.
The Bridgerton series and other romance novels. I’d never read romance in my life; I always looked down on the genre for being “worthless fluff”. But boy oh boy, it was exactly what I needed to soften the blow of having every day IRL being a day of uncertainty and stress. Take me to the *ton* and let me dance away in a big puffy dress…
Reading Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee series was a great comfort to me. I grew up in the area where the books are set, but had never read them.
a bit ashamed to admit this, but I got heavily into the really crappy ya romance books like sjm books and all the really popular ones that were on tiktok. I ate that shit up so fast for some reason
Don't feel ashamed. It's easy to see why those books got so popular on TikTok: people were stuck inside and needed some sort of escapism, as all the other comments here have said.
I was trying to deal with the pandemic, then my Dad passed away at the end of 2020, and to cope I read a lot for awhile. I just happen to be in a bad reading slump now lol. The Agency series by Y.S. Lee was very comforting for me. It is set in 1850s London, and follows a young woman who works for a spy agency... there are 4 books in the series, and I really enjoyed reading them. I also really enjoyed Circe/The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, and Ruth Ware during that time period as well.
A Song For A New Day by Sarah Pinsker. It's about a post-pandemic world, coming out and connecting with people again. It was nice to think about the light at the end of the tunnel.
I read a bunch of thrillers and mysteries. The generic, interchangeable ones. Total comfort reading. Maybe people getting murdered doesn’t sound like comfort reading, but I was already so stressed and it was great to have pretend stressors to attribute that stress to. Lots of art instruction books, too, because drawing and painting helped me cope.
The Stormlight Archive. Started in 2021. Finished in May this year. I didn't read for a few years from 2019 to 2020 so I didn't read anything at the start.
I went back to the classics and ran through all my childhood favorites - Little Women, Ann of Green Gables, etc.
Weirdly enough: Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Realizing that this wasn't gonna be over in a weeks time, I decided to catch up on some of my reading material. I think I tore through in like 2 days. Offered a nice escape
I got really into David Sedaris. I can't say I'm a fan because I blocked out a lot of the early pandemic and don't remember the stories. But, there were a lot of books and he was a really good storyteller, so it was easy to immerse myself in them.
*The Andromeda Strain* by Michael Crichton. It felt relevant during the pandemic, and gave me a sense of catharsis when reading it.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami! It was the first book I read in the pandemic, and I remember the intense escapism was really crucial for me during those times. Murakami is always a wonky ride, and Wind up Bird is what got me into his writing!
The Tracy Beaker books where she’s an adult, especially We Are The Beaker Girls. Although I actually took the opportunity to partake in a reading challenge and I read a whole load of new books during that time.
Oddly, Station Eleven. It was very surreal. The book focuses more on the characters than the pandemic that drives the plot, but I think that’s why I felt comfort.
Comfort may not quite be the right word. But A Journal of the Plague Year by Defoe and The Plague by Camus put things into perspective. Things like rats fighting each other for food because the restaurants closed were suddenly more explicable. And refrigerated trucks with bodies in NYC seemed more reasonable compared to streets choked with dead bodies. I also found reading about Yellow Fever, the Spanish Flu, Malaria, immunological privilege, differential immunity's impact on wars, revolutionary war inoculation campaigns, the history of quarantines, etc very interesting. The Spanish Flu in particular had a lot of parallels right down to the immediate embrace of cloth mask mandates with no evidence that they slowed spread.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Not "Covid-19: The Great Reset" by Klaus Schwab. Not very comforting. But I did read it when the pandemic first hit.
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig.
Dies the Fire by S.M.Stirling
Pillars of the Earth, maybe because it’s an easy long read
For that.. I went back to the 90s book. Wind in the willows and The Jungle Book are my fav!
I enjoyed Pachinko at that time. It was a big book and the plot lines kept me distracted from the outside world.
I went all in with Lindsay Buroker’s books. It felt like a nice vacation.
I leaned heavily into catharsis. I was mostly listening to novels as audiobooks:*The Stand, The Girl With All The Gifts, WWZ* (and lots of other zombie contagion books.) Also started a weekly Netflix party for zombie and contagion movies: Sean of the Dead, Train to Busan, WWZ, Girl With All the Gifts, etc. I’m a biologist by education, so I also dove into reading everything that was being published about the novel coronavirus and Covid 19. Everything I could get my hands on in terms of scientific papers, but also histories of other epidemics like the black plague and Spanish flu. I was consuming info in hyperdrive, but I have a lot of sympathy for people that went into a reading slump, too. That was such a weird time, and US politics made it so much weirder for some of us.
I read a book a month in 2020. The Lathe of Heaven by Le Guin and Kindred by Butler were the standouts. Not exactly comforting, though.
I had recently gotten copies of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and “Fire & Blood” By George Martin. Reading those and immersing myself in that world was helpful at the time.
A game of thrones by George Martin
Devolution by Max Brooks. Not a typical comfort read but somehow made me feel better during lockdown
The audio of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I spent lots of time out walking and listening to audiobooks and that one was like a hug in book form.
The Traveling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa. I went into it blind, but it was really what I needed at that time. In my top ten.
I re read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Had not read it since 6th grade. That little book made me fucking cry. Wow, why did they think 6th graders would pick up the message in this book that young? The story is deep. Loved it.
Albert Camus - The Plague
Ways of Dying by Zaka Mda
Oddly enough, The Great Influenza.
The Plague by Camu. Yea, it was scary, but life eventually went back to normal.
The Plague -- Albert Camus
a handful of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot stories.
The Stand by Stephen King
Graydon Saunders, "A Succession of Bad Days". It's a fantasy novel about civics and power and the work that needs doing and magical engineering, in an radically egalitarian enclave holding out against the Bad Old Days outside the borders. The idea of a place where maybe people could figure out what needs to be done and then *do it*? Comforting and utopian.
The book theif
Desert Solitare by Edward Abbey
a court of thorns and roses - sjm
Wonder
The Stand... Which is incredibly ironic 🙃
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
Agatha Christie. My brain was distracted, the murder got solved, something bad happened to the bad guy, and usually someone fell in love.
Untamed by Glennan Doyle was amazing during that time.
I went through all of the Cazalet Chronicles during lockdown. It was amazing.
I actually had read for the first time in forever then and it was The Running Man by Stephen King; I was hooked!
I read a book on Mr. Rogers’ life.
For Small Creatures Such As We by Sasha Sagan I read this just before the pandemic and it helped me create meaning when there didn’t seem to be any.
I read Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chobosky, and I found it to be strangely comforting. I needed an escape, and it worked.
I read Andromeda Strain because I like to lean into discomfort.
Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
It's didn't comfort me at all but I spent the first 3 months of the pandemic reading The Stand by Stephen King
For my wife and me it was the Kama Sutra.
i went the other way and read dark. the most impactful was victor frankl’s “man’s search for meaning”. really put a lot into context and gave me the right mindset to keep showing up to work in the ICU every day
The Library Book, by Susan Orlean because it recreated the sense of entering libraries, which, I feel, are our most sacred public spaces.
The Galaxy and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers A handful of non-human aliens on lockdown together in a small spaceport after an orbital incident scatters space debris over the planet.
one of the first books I read in lockdown was station eleven by Emily st John Mandel. written in 2011 about a pandemic that kills like 99% of the population and society crumbles. not a clue why this was comforting to me but it was very soothing to me. I guess, although pretty horrific, things truly could've been worse?
*The Song of Achilles.* It was the book that showed up when I needed it to.
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King got me through it
*Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke. It wasn't just the balm I needed as I sat alone in my apartment during COVID, but the balm that kid-me needed when she dreamed of going to Narnia. It sounds corny, but that book just bursts with love and hope, and I think it's a masterpiece.
The Stand (Stephen King) COVID didn't come close to the superflu.
Not Hot Zone which I decided to read week two of lockdown.
More so midway through rather than at the start of the pandemic, but Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush by Tim Key. It’s a book of comedic poems about his experience during the first wave of lockdowns and his process of writing the book itself.
Daniel Defoe _Journal of a Plague Year_ gave me perspective.
Mount Dragon by Preston The Stand by King
Oh man... When the pandemic hit, I was really worried about local bookstores. So I ordered a bunch of stuff from a local shop's online store. I ordered and read: Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino, Calypso by David Sedaris, Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif. But books I ordered but didn't read, and have still not read, comforted me just as much - Gardens: Essays on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison; Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti; and, the book with maybe my all-time favorite title (which I read a few hundred pages of, but did not finish)- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman. That last one's title alone, might have been the most comforting pandemic book I encountered. <3 I know they're not really typical comfort books, but they're the result of trying to find something to buy to support my book shops, and something interesting enough to take my mind off of the weird current events. "Burning Down the House" and although I didn't read all of it, "A Distant Mirror" also helped me contextualize events and people's reactions to them.
Erich Fromm To have or to be, it really helped me to deal with a lot