I’ve noticed more recent books I’ve been reading will make references to lock down or the pandemic, it usually doesn’t affect the story it’s more just a reference. Obviously it was such a culture global change that it’s going to make its way into art and literature. How do you feel about books including references to Covid and the pandemic? Do you have any examples where you’ve seen it done well or shoe horned in?
by DanielKix
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Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. I thought it was really well done. The two leads really got to connect over email when neither of them had anything going on because of lock down and I felt like it did a good job of capturing the strangeness of that time.
I haven’t read enough newer books to see many references yet, but John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society uses the pandemic as a practical plot point to leave his protagonist in desperate need of a new job, without feeling forced or shoehorned. It’s not treated overly lightly but it’s also not a focus of the story. It’s popcorn sci-fi and a lot of fun.
Face Time is a short story by Lorrie Moore which is the first covid based story I’ve read
It’s a big part of King’s new book “Holly”.
The Pandemic was a chapter in our history and we shouldn’t let politics erase it from history like they are trying to do to so many aspects of our history.
What Just Happened by Charles Finch and Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart are great pandemic books…there was also a good TC Boyle story in the New Yorker about March 2020
Neal Stephenson’s *Termination Shock* handles a post-Covid near future in an interesting way.
Authors choosing to include significant current events in their work is nothing new and I have no issue with it, art is a reflection of our world. When the Black Plague was all the rage it inspired several authors like Chaucer and the Brothers Grimm and Daniel Defoe and even an entire series of allegorical paintings, poems, musical pieces, and more in the form “La Danse Macabre”.
Look at a great number of books published in the months and years following 9/11. Even sci-fi/fantasy greats like William Gibson and Stephen King were including the event in their works and I’m positive that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of authors influenced by that moment in history.
I think it’s natural for art and literature to reflect the world we live in, so including references to Covid and the pandemic can be interesting. It really depends on how it’s done. Some authors seamlessly incorporate it, while others can be a bit forced. In either case, it adds an extra layer of relatability to the story. #PandemicLit
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
“Portrait of a Thief” by Grace D. Li. The main characters are Chinese American college students, and while the story is in a “post-COVID” time, it naturally includes references to distance learning, social distancing, and the increased prejudice and violence toward Asian Americans. Li does a really excellent job of acknowledging the reality of the pandemic and the profound impact on the characters’ lives without making it a “pandemic book.”
To answer the part of how I feel reading about the pandemic in books, I would say generally it makes me feel the same way as when tv shows/movies have the actual pandemic as part of the backstory, meaning it’s generally a big turn off.
To me the pandemic was pretty disheartening and difficult on a day to day basis, so when I want a little escapism (reading or watching tv/movies) I have ZERO desire to engage with it even tangentially. So generally:no bueno for me
I don’t mind it. I think it’s necessary. People need to know how monumental it was, especially with all the morons that attempt to downplay it.
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi takes place during the early days of the pandemic.
Actually the best “pandemic” book I’ve read post-2020 was The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird. It’s about a virus that is fatal to men. Apparently she started writing it before COVID was even a thing. It was eerily familiar when I read it last year.
It’s an aside but a book talk for the Hennepin County Library system in Minnesota had an author talk about how her and a lot other authors she knows switched to time travel stories for 2020-2022 or so to just get out of the pandemic headspace. It was a fascinating topic
What Never Happened by Rachel Howzell Hall.
I think it was set during, there was some mention of putting on masks to go outside, not the point of the story and felt totally unnecessary except to give us a time frame of when it took place. Generic “modern day” was plenty, thanks. I thought it was dumb but not for that reason specifically (though that is also dumb).
I’m pretty tempting to just quit any book right then and there if it mentions COVID (fiction, non-fiction talking about diseases or the subject matter are exempt). I lived it, I’m still living it, I’m so done. Fiction is to escape to a different reality, if that reality is tainted, I’m out.
It’s fiction so you can ignore it completely unless it’s the point of the story and if it is, I’m not interested in that book, but fair enough at least.
Ugh, just ugh.
So basically I’m going to skim this thread for books to avoid.
The Sentence by Louise Edrich
I’m reading SA Cosby’s “All the Sinners Bleed” has minor references to olace it in time. It’s very natural.
The best book about pandemic and social distancing rules was Sarah Pimsker’s “A Song for a New Day”, but it came out a year before covid.
I am currently reading Happiness Falls by Angie Kim and I’m really enjoying it. It takes place during the lockdown and COVID and the pandemic are referenced pretty frequently even though the story is not at all about it. It even affects different plot points as well.
I don’t necessarily want a completely pandemic-focused story at the moment, but I don’t mind if stories acknowledge it or takes place during the lockdown. It was a matter of life.
A lot of recent books were written *during* the pandemic, so the author probably didn’t quite know how to contextualize it yet. Like putting our feelings about it into words (unprecedented times and all that) because it was still happening, writing something that wouldn’t age well, would later get disproven, etc.
Also, many readers (like me), aren’t ready to relive it. The pandemic sucked and brought out the worst in people, and I read books for entertainment. I don’t want to go back there (yet).
Tom Lake mentions the pandemic (but I’m not far into it, so not sure how much of a plot point it is).
As an aside, I thought it was interesting to learn that the filming of Station Eleven, based on book about a pandemic, was shut down after filming episodes 1 & 3, due to the Covid pandemic. Everything you see in the first episode (kids in hospital being reminded to keep masks on, etc.) was filmed prior to March 2020.
Karin Slaughter’s book False Witness takes place during the pandemic (but after lockdown).
Overall I’m not a fan of books including it. I guess it just feels ‘too real’ for the escapist genre fiction I usually read, but I also don’t think we have enough distance from it yet to really process it in an artistic or literary way.
I think including it is a good thing. I guess I don’t strictly read for escapism because I want the books I read to reflect reality, including unpleasant parts of reality. Also as a big fan of the literature of manners I think it can be interesting to look at how Covid restrictions affected how people interacted and communicated with each other. Like did you ever notice how people would pull down their masks if they wanted to lower their voice and tell you something private?
Jodi Picoult’s Wish You We’re Here was written in 2020, mostly as an exercise to keep her from going crazy from being isolated on her property in New Hampshire. She never intended to make it a book to publish, but her agent encouraged her to publish after she read it. It’s set in the very beginning of the pandemic.
I would really just love to read a bunch of memoirs about what different people did during lockdown. Some people quit their jobs and moved to the country and became homesteaders, some people realized they deserved more out of life and got divorces after staying in a miserable marriage for way too long (me!!)
It was a very fascinating time because it was the first time in our lifetimes where life slowed down for EVERYONE to the point where we could do things we never thought of doing.
Jodi McAlister’s Marry Me Juliet series (two books out so far and a third on the way) are all set during the big lockdown in Melbourne and each book is the same time period but from different points of view. It’s set on a Bachelor type show where lockdown gets called on the first night of filming and so anyone who gets eliminated can’t actually leave.
I’m fine with the Covid pandemic being in books but I think it’s too soon to be reading about it personally. I need more space from it to enjoy it in books.
Dark as Last Night by Tony Birch is an amazing collection of short stories. They all feel really timeless or were inspired by (I’m guessing) the author’s childhood. The last one though is set on a Melbourne train during lockdown. I thought it really added to the book overall honestly.
I remember when movies began to incorporate texting and on-screen cell-phone representations into the cinematography and plotline. I reflexively disliked it at first, then acclimated, and now it’s completely ordinary when it occurs. I’ve been experiencing the first stage when it comes to pandemic / quarantine references in books, television, etc.
I just read Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, which is explicitly set in June 2020, and it’s so interesting seeing something set in the early days of the pandemic now. I think it works because the characters in that book have such serious things going on that COVID is very much in the background (references to masks, virtual meetings, contact tracing), but it also works as a plot device with the closure of facilities and characters getting COVID. It’s the book I’ve read that focuses COVID the most, which I would have hated earlier in the pandemic but is kind of nice to read now because it’s quite realistic. I’m curious how that would read in like 30 years though. Like why are people talking about wearing masks lol
I’m still not sure how I feel about Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. It did seem quite shoe horned in to the plot, especially as a sci-fi work it was a bit jarring to include real world events. Plus it was published in 2022 when it was all a bit too fresh and depressing.
I like it. It helps me make sense with & accept that it ever happened, and how much life changed for me (and..mostly everyone?) because of it.
I think it just makes sense to include the pandemic in a story. We don’t think it’s weird when classic literature mentions their various disease epidemics, wars, or other large events going on in their lives.
I usually avoid these but I did watch “Kimi” with Zoe Kravitz and it was solid. It was set in our pandemic world, and she suffers from agoraphobia and has to work from home. it turns into a murder mystery / home invasion/ home alone style creativity. I really enjoyed it, and it didn’t take me out of the story because covid was a part of the theme. It was a fun time.
as for books I don’t know when I’ll be ready to pick one up that has covid in the theme or universe. ITs like books are my happy place lol I don’t want o to suffer for hours of reading about what we lived through. at least not yet.
Something I liked is that when Michael Steven Fuchs revisited his Arisen series to cover the opening of the zombie apocalypse, the main medical character talked about covid directly and how he was under the impression this new pandemic was another corona virus.
I think its a good cultural touchstone and that its not out of proportion to start referencing it in fiction.
Like it or not, COVID is now a major part of our world history as a society and it makes sense it be included in literature. For example, it would be weird for someone to write a book that takes place in 1940 and not mention WW2.
I picked up journal of the plague year by daniel defoe during covid. Its a collection of journal entries from the bubonic plague times in london. I will say it was eerie reading him describe things that were presently happening. Humans havent changed all too much lol
I’ve seen passing references to it in books recently but I’ve actually been quite looking forward to the first book where it plays a significant part in the story. Just intrigued to know how it’s handled.
It’s in Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty. You can tell that she wrote 80% of the book and then added the beginning of the pandemic to the end. Honestly, I fell in love with her after reading Big Little Lies and thought Truly Madly Guilty and Nine Perfect Strangers were both much better – pretty sure changing the plotline mid-writing had a huge impact on the quality of the book.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett did a wonderful job of setting the novel during the pandemic with lots of flashes to the past.
I am surprised no one has mentioned Dayswork by Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel! It’s about a woman who spends the pandemic doing a deep dive into Herman Melville, trying to sort out fact from myth. Of course, it’s about so much more than that.
I know people see the name Melville and just groan, but this is such an engaging book! It’s as though you’ve joined the authors in jumping down a deep rabbit-hole with many branches and tunnels to explore. It’s the rare sort book that engages your brain on multiple levels, but doesn’t drain your energy.
It annoys me. I lived it. It’s too recent to have any other effect besides pissing me off lol
I’m a huge history buff and I often read fiction set during life-altering times. The pandemic was a major event that effected everybody worldwide but didn’t effect everyone in the same way. There are so many possible stories to tell . So yes I am all for covid making an appearance in books.