Coronavirus: What to read during the self-isolation period
So you are stuck at home and after 2000 episodes of Law & Order decide you need a book instead. Our literary editor asks top writers and critics for their picks.
So you are stuck at home and after 2000 episodes of Law & Order decide you need to binge on a book instead. What’s the right book to read in this new era of self-isolation? I decided to ask some writers and critics for their picks.
I said they could choose anything they liked, but added that the idea was to offer readers a wide range of books to tide them over in coming weeks, months, years, depending on how serious coronavirus becomes. I didn’t want all of them to recommend Albert Camus’s The Plague or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
They replied with enthusiasm. Here’s the pandemic reading list.
ADRIAN MCKINTY
Author of recent bestseller
The Chain
As a result of knee-replacement surgery, I spent most of December and January unable to leave my apartment. Effectively I was self-isolating before it became a thing. I had grand plans for reading big books I had somehow missed (The Man Without Qualities, The Magic Mountain etc) but in the end I found being inside so depressing I began reading comedies and never stopped. The book I most enjoyed was Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a wealthy young woman suffering various psychological problems who decides to self-isolate for a year and try to sleep for as much of that as possible. It’s a satire of rich Upper East Side WASP culture but it’s also a satire of the way we live now, and luckily it’s one of those satires that makes you laugh rather than weep. When you’re stuck inside for a long time, laughter is the best medicine. Avoid Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Trust me on this.
HELEN GARNER
Writer
The perfect book for a pandemic is Charles Portis’s 1968 novel True Grit.
Mattie Ross is 14 when a cowardly thief shoots her father dead. She hires a burnt-out gunslinger called Rooster Cogburn and sets out with him in wintertime to hunt the killer down.
I am crazy about Mattie’s storytelling voice. Its blunt spartan rhythms and surging narrative drive conjure up a character so severely righteous, so innocently hilarious, that I want to let out shouts of joy and envy. You haven’t read it yet? Coronavirus is giving you a chance not to waste the rest of your life.
CHARLOTTE WOOD
Novelist, author of The Weekend
For me, it’s got to be Jerry Saltz’s How To Be An Artist, published this week.
He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for New York magazine, and the book is a list of 63 ‘‘rules” for artists on getting to work, trusting your own weird instincts, letting go of envy, looking ‘‘hard and openly”, generosity towards other artists, having courage, embracing the exhilarating freedom that a frugal life in art will bring you, and more.
He says: ‘‘Art is not about understanding or mastery — it’s about doing and experience.” (Rule No 5) The book is a superpowered injection of optimism and energy, and anyone who makes art should read it.
ANDY GRIFFITHS
Author of the Treehouse books, almost models in self-isolation.
Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is a modern comedic masterpiece.
Fifty-year-old failed novelist Arthur Less travels the world attending a series of dubious literary events in order to escape the one event he most dreads having to attend: the wedding of his ex-boyfriend. Greer is ruthless as he puts his antihero through a series of the most wonderfully conceived misadventures and humiliations. The prose is a delight to read and you’ll most likely find yourself stopping regularly to admire a well-turned sentence or simile. A joyful reading experience that will leave you exhilarated and uplifted.
BEEJAY SILCOX
Writer and critic
Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is the patient zero of genteel literary deadpan; the source-code of the most joyful of quarantine companions, from PG Wodehouse to Douglas Adams. It begins with a diagnosis: three indolent hypochondriacs who decide they are pathologically overworked. The only viable cure, an extended water-adjacent vacation. And so they head to the Thames with too much baggage and a terrier whose singular ambition is “to get in the way and be sworn at”. Published in 1889, and famously never out of print, Jerome’s meandering masterpiece alternates between uproarious, feckless chaos and bucolic reverie. It’s earnestly ridiculous and utterly timeless.
ASHLEY HAY
Novelist
We’ve been revisiting the complete works of Mo Willems for younger readers at our place (particularly the Elephant and Piggie series, and his avian oeuvre from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus through to The Pigeon Goes To School) and finding them apt across all ages. Try them for handy advice and often surprisingly relevant recommendations: about sneezing, about improvisation and waiting, about cheering each other up, about perseverance and revelation, about small acts of random kindness. The pigeon’s constant levels of outrage meet Piggie’s innate optimism in a strangely familiar combination, and they’ll all make you laugh out loud.
JAMES BRADLEY
Novelist
The obvious choice would be to hit the pandemic literature; not just classics such as Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’s The Plague, but more recent contributions such as Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City, Jose Saramago’s Blindness or Ling Ma’s Severance. But if we’re all going to be confined for weeks on end, I suspect the real panacea will be books buoyed by the expansiveness of their understanding of human and social complexity: perhaps it’s time to revisit Marcel Proust, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the late work of Henry James or Henry Handel Richardson’s astonishing The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.
ANNA FUNDER
Novelist
I recommend reading something very beautiful, which celebrates human connection even in the most extreme lockdown: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Jean-Dominic Bauby, the editor of French ELLE, suffered a stroke which resulted in him having no movement except in one eyelid. He managed to ‘‘dictate” by blinking, his memories of what and who he had loved, scenes of tenderness and intense living, which are this precious little book. You could also watch Julian Schnabel’s incredible film of it. Both make you feel more alive, just sitting at home.
SUSAN WYNDHAM
Writer and literary critic
The Museum of Modern Love is absorbing, moving and hopeful, a reminder that crowds and art can heal. Australian novelist Heather Rose recreates a real New York performance in which artist Marina Abramovic gazed silently at strangers across a table. Rose imagines the profound effect of those brief connections on her characters in a busy, lonely world.
GEORDIE WILLIAMSON
The Australian’s chief literary critic
In the early 1790s, a young French aristocrat based in Turin is punished for taking part in a duel. He is placed under house arrest for 42 days, in a room with a perimeter of just 36 paces. The small classic Xavier de Maistre wrote to while away his genteel imprisonment represents a comic inversion of traditional travel narrative. The room becomes the site of his grand tour; its furnishings and objects, his galleries and cathedrals. But A Voyage around my Room is not just a giddy riff in the spirit of Diderot and Laurence Sterne: it is an invitation to look upon confinement as an adventure. All that is required is to shut Netflix and open our imaginations.
URSULA DUBOSARSKY
Australian Children’s Laureate
In both writing and reading I seem to have two relentless themes: words and guinea pigs. So my first choice is P is for Pterodactyl, an alphabet book of misbehaving words. It’s the very funny joint creation of a rapper called Lushlife, a software designer and a muralist. And while I realise a wombat is NOT a guinea pig, it gets pretty close. Ruth Park’s The Muddleheaded Wombat, born on ABC radio in the 1940s and still in print, is a book I read as a child, read to my own children, and always re-read when I need cheering up.
KAREN VIGGERS
Novelist
For a fun read in these difficult times, I recommend A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson. This a surprisingly shrewd and nuanced novel about a bunch of birdwatchers and their lives and interactions. Set in Nairobi, Kenya, it’s not a stereotypical neo-colonial story. Rather, despite its light tone and humorous prose, it delves much deeper into the African psyche. This book won the ACT Book of the Year in 2009. Memorable for its quirky but believable characters, and its vivid portrayal of Nairobi, the surrounding countryside, and the amusing foibles of human nature.
BRAM PRESSER
Novelist
The Slaughterman’s Daughter by Yaniv Iczkovits is the perfect book to ward off the doldrums of isoltion. A big, joyfully exuberant romp across tsarist Russia, it follows Fanny Keismann in her madcap quest to track down her sister’s wayward husband. With only her trusty knife and the local village oddball by her side, the plan quickly comes a cropper, bringing Fanny to the attention of the tsar’s secret police. What follows is a glorious battle of wits that will have you on the edge of your seat until you fall off laughing. Think Tolstoy meets Gary Shteyngart.
ED WRIGHT
Writer, poet and critic
One book and 14 days of quarantine. A novel is not going to cut it. Not even some of the great bricks of literature such as War and Peace or Don Quixote. But what about a collected poems from a great poet? You get to read their whole career development, plus there’ll be short lyrics and (most likely) longer suites. Even better, you can read a poem more than once a day without the sensation of Groundhog Day. So who? I’m going for Les Murray. He knew a bit about isolation, and he’s good company for the breadth of his work, sheer inventiveness and magnificent facility with the language. There are times I’ll want to argue with him, but better to take out your cabin fever on a dead poet than the family.
ELISABETH STORRS
Historical novelist
A plague in the ancient world was seen as divine vengeance. There is no better example of this than that conveyed in Homer’s The Iliad. The pestilence unleashed by the god Apollo is pivotal in highlighting the internecine struggle between the invading Greek leaders. My favourite retelling of the epic poem is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which depicts the Bronze Age conflict through an intimate portrayal of the warrior king Achilles and his doomed lover, Patroclus. This exciting, sexy, vivid and visceral reimagining of one of the most famous narratives in Western literature kept me totally absorbed.
FELICITY PLUNKETT
Poet
In Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, spring’s voice insists: “I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins.” In self-isolation I would — will — re-read Autumn, Winter and Spring ahead of July’s Summer for the exaltation and hope Smith’s bravura poetics kindles. Alight and leaping with imaginative verve and exhilarating formal adventurousness, her work is always forwards-moving. Smith’s writing witnesses pain and injustice to advocate, with furious gentleness, for hope, because, as she writes in Winter: “Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.”
GREGORY DAY
Novelist
As I always say to my boys, we need the dark to see the stars. So for me the cheering up comes via a deep literary spirituality that can give us hope for the future. Truth is involved, darkness too, but all in the service of wisdom, humour and organic beauty. My go-to read then is The Fish Can Sing, by Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness. Set in the small idiosyncratic farming community of early 20th-century Reykjavik, it is more an environment than a book, full of humane angles on life and death, sea-farm sounds and textures, and wonderful stories. Just the tonic.
THUY ON
Writer, poet and critic
The Oxford English Dictionary is the definitive (albeit pompous) record of the English language, featuring as it does millions of words over decades of collation since its inception more than a century ago. But what if some were wilfully discarded because they didn’t fit into the all-male lexicographers’ idea of what should be preserved? Pip Williams’s The Dictionary of Lost Words is a fascinating novel about a girl who decided to rescue some of the “women’s words” deemed unimportant to be noted for posterity. This brilliant idea for a book touches on the interlinking of proto-feminism and the sovereignty of language.
PETER CRAVEN
Critic
Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the supreme easy-to-read romping yarn with innumerable characters, innumerable byways and people — Pierre, Natasha, Andre, Marya — who you fall in love with. This is the work of the greatest novelist who ever lived at his most approachable and seductive. He is arguably the greatest master of dialogue, certainly the greatest master of tempo, and in this one, just to bedevil the brain, there’s his bloody theory of history and his attempt to gun down Napoleon, which verges on modernism in its sweeping discursive brilliance.
LOUISE SWINN
Writer and critic
The giant Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse is my pick of a book to stave off the apocalypse. I want something utterly absorbing so that the ticking worries can’t pierce the skin — and because it’s the first in a trilogy, there’s more when you’re done. Edith Campbell Berry is a young diplomat in the League of Nations, where she finds all sorts of hijinks in Geneva after growing up in Australia, an earnest rationalist. It’s full of sex, martinis, and idealism, and the hero is a massively flawed character that I can’t help but love.
CARMEL BIRD
Novelist
During the polio epidemic in the 1940s I learnt a word, “fumigation”. Books were fumigated before reading. You could sit in the comfort of an apple tree or an armchair, losing yourself in stories. As I now sit under a wisteria, mentally following the virus, I seek the comfort of escape, but also the reality of knowledge. So I’m working my way through bookshelves where texts frequently blur between sweet escape and brutal knowledge. Starting with Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The list: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, The Book of Revelation, Mary Morris’s Women Travellers, WG Sebald’s Austerlitz, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory.
MANDY SAYER
Writer and essayist
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. If self-isolation for two weeks sounds bad, spare a thought for this 18th-century English castaway, who was marooned on a remote tropical island for 28 years. There was no toilet paper, no pasta, no rice, and no hand sanitiser. To access his own non-perishable items, such as barley and lentils, he had to grow them himself. The internet was down and there was nowhere to charge his mobile phone. The only way he could keep track of time was by making marks on a wooden cross. He was so bored by his extended solitary life that he was reduced to reading the Bible and converting an escaped prisoner to Christianity. His neighbours were cannibals and refused to go grocery shopping for him.
I will finish with one of my own: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
If coronavirus lasts a century, you will be able to read this book every hour of every day and still not understand it. In that sense, it just keeps on giving.