Corona relief (sort of), in literature

For those of you idle enough to be browsing blog pages during our corona crisis, welcome to our site! 

The site is germ free, but not wiped clean, because, to pass the time in which you are forced to stay put in your house, reading blog posts instead of something more useful to do, here are some relevant reading suggestions:

1.  Albert Camus’ The Plague.  Takes place in North Africa, and relates what happened when the country was stricken by a rodent-borne plague.  A short, readable, sobering tale.  Available of course, in English translation

2.  Daniel Defoe’s  A Journal of the Plague Year, published in the 1700s, about what happened in England in the 1600s when the plague struck.  Apparently somewhat fictionalized, but still sobering, diary-like account.

3.  Boccaccio’s Decameron.  Light relief, as a series of tales are told in turn by members of a group of young people holing up in the countryside outside of Florence as they flee the plague in Italy.