Have you booked your quarantine adventure yet

Eastern Mirror Desk

Dimapur, April 5 (EMN): Amid the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, people across the globe are seeking ways to keep themselves entertained while staying at home. Authors, teachers and bibliophiles have asked children and youth to utilise this time to develop a habit for reading, as it would help them to drive away boredom and explore new worlds of creativity. Alternatively, parents with young children have been advised to read to them.

Different crises call for different sorts of books.”This current one is hard for readers even though, for many of us, it has brought the unexpected gift of free time and nowhere to be, “says Sarah Lyall, a writer for The New York Times. “But it’s so hard to concentrate right now, so hard to feel calm and banish the fearful noise in your head. It is easy to feel like a child just now. The news is so frightening, and we have so little control over what comes next. Sometimes the books we loved early on can help us again.”

TIME magazine recently published some of their recommendations to read while staying at home, from “stories of pandemics and post-apocalyptic societies and triumphant narratives about spending time alone to pure page-turning escapism.” “Now may be the time to finally dig into that epic novel you’ve had on your shelf forever, revisit an old favourite or try something out of your reading comfort zone,” it said. The following are some of their recommendations:

Books about pandemics and post-apocalyptic worlds

If you’re looking to lean into the themes of the moment, these novels will take you deep inside imagined crises and the resilient characters who face them.

• World War Z, Max Brooks
• The Passage Trilogy, Justin Cronin
• The Broken Earth trilogy, N. K. Jemisin
• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead

Books about solitude

For the people in these memoirs and novels, time alone—whether self-enforced, mandated by a higher power or resulting from tragedy—provides opportunity for introspection and growth.

• Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
• Wild, Cheryl Strayed
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• The Martian, Andy Weir

Books you’ve never had time to read

These ambitious books are long, yes, but also deeply rewarding for those who commit to getting through them. Now is a great time to tackle something you’ve always found a little daunting. Some books need to teach their readers how to engage with them—don’t give up in the early pages.

• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• The Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel
• The Toni Morrison canon
• 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
• The Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrant

Escapist thrillers, fantasies and super fun books

Sometimes, we need to laugh, get caught up in a page-turning adventure or just let our minds wander elsewhere. These novels and personal stories will draw you in and take you far away.

• My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
• I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron
• Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James
• The Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Kevin Kwan
• The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling