Five Classics to Read During the COVID-19 Lockdown

The COVID-19 lockdown has imposed a serious and necessary strain on social lives and mental health everywhere, but there’s a silver lining in the state-enforced solitude: ample time to read. To be sure, the current news cycle isn’t calm, but the chaos on our screens and swelling concern in our communities doesn’t need to detract from the unprecedented seclusion this quarantine spells for our day-to-day lives. Since the most socially responsible thing to do these days is stay at home, we may as well make use of the time to knock a few classics off our readings lists. 

Of course, any single list of classics can’t be comprehensive. But the five books listed below were selected for their relevance in the age of pandemics. Although Amazon and other online retailers may not deliver these books in the two-day period many have grown accustomed to, all of these titles can be purchased as e-books or accessed online—and for free. Indeed, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library, which boasts 1.4 million (!) digitized texts available to the public, Harvard University Press has made the Loeb Classical Library free to any online user until June 30, and readers can always check Project Gutenberg. So, here’s to a few well-spent weeks of reading. Politicians don’t let a good crisis go to waste, and neither should avid readers. 

The Plague | Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert |Vintage | 1991 [1947] | 320 Pages
Published in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Camus’ mid-century novel captures how plague changes people. Set in the French Algerian city of Oran in the 1940s, the novel begins with countless rats dying on the city streets. Characters like Dr. Bernard Rieux realize the medical danger, and the authorities shut the city down to prevent the plague from worsening, but it nevertheless seizes the city for months to come. If attended to carefully, Camus’ characters can be instructive examples for our own months of quarantine to come. 

A Journal of the Plague Year | Daniel Defoe, edited by Cynthia Wall | Penguin Classics | 2003 [1722] | 336 Pages
Born in 1660, Daniel Defoe was barely a child when the bubonic plague besieged London in 1665-66. His Journal, composed of flaneur-like accounts of city life, was therefore a fiction. But when it reached readers for the first time in 1722, it was received as one man’s true telling of the plague year. Today, plague-related facts and falsehoods seem to be equally intermixed. As such, Defoe’s realistic account of 1665-66 might challenge us to rethink how we speak and write about COVID-19. 

Walden and Other Writings | Henry David Thoreau, edited by Brooks Atkinson | Modern Library Classics | 1992 [1854] | 784 Pages
That I’ve included Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, in this list may strike some readers as wrongheaded. But in a time of social isolation unconventional for most, there is perhaps no better guide than Thoreau’s experiment in solitude and independence. Published in 1854, Thoreau wrote Walden about his two years, two months, and two days of living alone in a wooded cabin near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. As each of us grows accustomed to the cadence of isolation in different locations, Walden is a text that can help us weather and, ultimately, understand this period. 

Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel García Márquez | Vintage International | 2007 [1985] | 368 Pages
Set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the events of Love in the Time of Cholera, translated from the original Spanish in 1988, occur in a nameless city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast near the Magdalena River. Márquez’s novel captures the lifelong love affair of  Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. In a time when many of us are separated from those we love, Márquez’s novel serves as a useful reminder about the power of human connection (P.S.: Don’t watch the movie adaptation.)  

Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | Dover | 1997 | 112 Pages
Most often associated with Stoicism, the ideas and impressions on offer in the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations are some of the most enduring in human history. Aurelius probably wrote the Meditations while waging war between 170 and 180 AD, but his are observations about the human condition worth considering today. Indeed, Aurelius speaks across millennia when he urges ‘come to your own aid, if you care at all for yourself, while it is in your power.’ Apt advice from an ancient in the age of a pandemic whose defeat can only be earned by individuals choosing to stay home. It would seem that stoicism’s esteemed ritual of self-governance is sexy as ever.