What better time to disconnect yourself from the disturbing news and read a few good books? Our “Coronavirus Thematic Reading List” aims to discover valuable books worth to take with you… Not on an island of course, but to be found when suddenly self-isolated with your private library.
Our favorite titles for this mad times are all classics and all worth reading:
“Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for demonstrating that love knows no barriers and that it transcends death, even when it doesn’t.
“The Pest” by Albert Camus, for accepting graciously our collective fate of a permanent sickness, as well as for pointing that life in itself is an illness.
“The Wicked Mountain by Thomas Mann, for showing that tuberculosis was not the end of the world – and that he elderly can love long after contracting it.
“The Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka, for discovering well ahead the modern times the true value of the isolation and of the toilet paper.
“The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje, for kindly reminding us what we missed when we decided last summer to postpone our visit to Tuscany, Italy.
“The Pearl” by John Steinbeck, for reminding us that hoarding paper is only a facet of a mankind’s important trait.
“The Gods Themselves” by Isaac Asimov , for demonstrating that the list of excuses to go outside during a curfew can be endless. As well as the number of people willing to push their luck under the a.m. circumstances.
“The Wall Jumper” by Peter Schneider, for anticipating some elderly peoples’ itch to defy the self-isolation restrictions in the name of an ideal. Forgive us, but we forgot which ideal.
And last and never least and never-ending “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, for recovering our memories of all the interesting little things we used to do when we had real weekends and real open cafes.