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I read it in the fall of 2021, so the pandemic had been around for a while by
I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to read a book set in the world I
Before it was published in 2022, Carly Moore serialized Panpocalypse online during the early days of pandemic
There’s an eeriness and an urgency to it that I instantly connected with
The next pandemic-centric book I read was The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
It came out at the end of 2021, but I didn’t read until this past summer
I had the same experience with it that I had with Panpocalypse: I fell into it hungrily
Despite centering these devastating events, it’s a quiet, character-driven book
Then the pandemic comes, and life is no longer ordinary — until it is
That’s the part that settled something within me, that made me want to reach for more
I was tired of having to recalibrate my understanding of “ordinary” every time I started a new
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But many people have looked at me askance, or told me they’re not ready
What about books that include the pandemic and then seem to move past it? I loved R
Eric Thomas’s Kings of B’More, a YA novel about two Black queer besties trying to
What about nonfiction? I recently read Ivan Coyote’s latest book, Care Of, a beautiful collection of
But Coyote’s writing is steeped with the loneliness of those early months, and the overwhelming sense
I wept reading Care Of, but they were good tears, cathartic tears, tears that reminded me I’
John Mandel’s latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, which is set in the future but features a
But I have friends who absolutely cannot pick up a pandemic novel: it’s still too close
As far as I can discern, there’s no pattern, no formula we can use to figure
Every pandemic book is going to affect every person differently
A cathartic escape for someone — maybe a romance set in 2020 that ignores the pandemic — might feel like
It’s okay to seek out books about the pandemic and it’s okay to avoid them