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Reading In The Time of Corona
How books helped me through a three-month lockdown
India has been on lockdown since the second half of March. Being cooped up in a tiny apartment in Mumbai, with no prospect of leaving the place, meeting friends, or going out for a nice dinner, and the overall anxiousness surrounding the COVID pandemic, I found solace in an old companion — books. There were others too — Zoom calls with pals of old, my lovely 4-year old neighbor with whom I finished several games, the occasional Jenga/Uno/Scrabble nights, online courses, movies, TV shows, et al — but books were everpresent, stacked neatly on the wall shelves, lying half-open by the pillow, and tucked away as bits and bytes on my trusted 7-year old Kindle.
I got time to read new books and revisit old ones — and here are the ones I wholeheartedly recommend.
A. Fiction
- A couple of years back, someone gifted me a copy of On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. And I was simply blown away by both the story and the way it was told.
- Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever read.
- Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird might be fiction, but it is also a treatise on morality.
- Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City might just be one of the greatest…
