Describ­ing con­di­tions char­ac­ter­is­tic of life in the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry, future his­to­ri­ans may well point to such epi­dem­ic viral ill­ness­es as SARS, MERS, and the now-ram­pag­ing COVID-19. But those focused on cul­ture will also have their pick of much more benign recur­ring phe­nom­e­na to explain: top­i­cal book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-cen­tu­ry press at the faintest prompt­ing by cur­rent events. As the coro­n­avirus has spread through the Eng­lish-speak­ing world over the past month, pan­dem­ic-themed read­ing lists have appeared in all man­ner of out­lets: Time, PBS, the Hol­ly­wood Reporter, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Haaretz, Vul­ture, Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture, and oth­ers besides.

As mankind’s old­est dead­ly foe, dis­ease has pro­vid­ed themes to lit­er­a­ture since lit­er­a­ture’s very inven­tion. In the Euro­pean canon, no such work is more ven­er­a­ble than The Decameron, writ­ten by Renais­sance human­ist Gio­van­ni Boc­cac­cio in the late 1340s and ear­ly 1350s. “His pro­tag­o­nists, sev­en women and three men, retreat to a vil­la out­side Flo­rence to avoid the pan­dem­ic,” writes The Guardian’s Lois Beck­ett, refer­ring to the bubon­ic plague, or “Black Death,” that rav­aged Europe in the mid-14th cen­tu­ry. “There, iso­lat­ed for two weeks, they pass the time by telling each oth­er sto­ries” — and “live­ly, bizarre, and often very filthy sto­ries” at that — “with a dif­fer­ent theme for each day.”

A lat­er out­break of the bubon­ic plague in Lon­don inspired Robin­son Cru­soe author Daniel Defoe to write the A Jour­nal of the Plague Year. “Set in 1655 and pub­lished in 1722, the nov­el was like­ly based, in part, on the jour­nals of the author’s uncle,” writes the Globe and Mail’s Alec Scott. Defoe’s diarist “speaks of bod­ies pil­ing up in mass graves, of sud­den deaths and unlike­ly recov­er­ies from the brink, and also blames those from else­where for the out­break.” A Jour­nal of the Plague Year appears on these read­ing lists as often as Albert Camus’ The Plague, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “Camus’ famous work about the inhab­i­tants of an Alger­ian town who are strick­en by the bubon­ic plague was pub­lished back in 1947,” writes PBS’ Court­ney Vinopal, “but it has struck a chord with read­ers today liv­ing through the coro­n­avirus.”

Of nov­els pub­lished in the past decade, none has been select­ed as a must-read in coro­n­avirus quar­an­tine as often as Emi­ly St. John Man­del’s Sta­tion Eleven. “After a swine flu pan­dem­ic wipes out most of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, a group of musi­cians and actors trav­el around new­ly formed set­tle­ments to keep their art alive,” says Time. “Man­del show­cas­es the impact of the pan­dem­ic on all of their lives,” weav­ing togeth­er “char­ac­ters’ per­spec­tives from across the plan­et and over sev­er­al decades to explore how human­i­ty can fall apart and then, some­how, come back togeth­er.” Ling Ma’s dark­ly satir­i­cal Sev­er­ance also makes a strong show­ing: Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture describes it as “a pan­dem­ic-zom­bie-dystopi­an-nov­el, but it’s also a relat­able mil­len­ni­al com­ing-of-age sto­ry and an intel­li­gent cri­tique of exploita­tive cap­i­tal­ism, mind­less con­sumerism, and the drudgery of bull­shit jobs.”

Since a well-bal­anced read­ing diet (and those of us stuck at home for weeks on end have giv­en much thought to bal­anced diets) requires both fic­tion and non­fic­tion, sev­er­al of these lists also include works of schol­ar­ship, his­to­ry, and jour­nal­ism on the real epi­demics that have inspired all this lit­er­a­ture. Take Richard Pre­ston’s best­seller The Hot Zone: The Ter­ri­fy­ing True Sto­ry of the Ori­gins of the Ebo­la Virus, which Gre­go­ry Eaves at Medi­um calls “a hair-rais­ing account of the appear­ance of rare and lethal virus­es and their ‘crash­es’ into the human race.” For an episode of his­to­ry more com­pa­ra­ble to the coro­n­avirus, there’s John M. Bar­ry’s The Great Influen­za: The Sto­ry of the Dead­liest Pan­dem­ic in His­to­ry, “a tale of tri­umph amid tragedy, which pro­vides us with a pre­cise and sober­ing mod­el as we con­front the epi­demics loom­ing on our own hori­zon.”

Below you’ll find a meta-list of all the nov­els and non­fic­tion books includ­ed on the read­ing lists linked above. As for the books them­selves — libraries and book­stores being a bit dif­fi­cult to access in many parts of the world at the moment — you might check for them in our col­lec­tion of books free online, the tem­porar­i­ly opened Nation­al Emer­gency Library at the Inter­net Archive, and our recent post on clas­sic works of plague lit­er­a­ture avail­able to down­load. How­ev­er you find these books, hap­py read­ing — or, more to the point, healthy read­ing.

Fic­tion

• Ammonite by Nico­la Grif­fith
• The Androm­e­da Strain by Michael Crich­ton
• Beau­ty Salon by Mario Bel­latin
• Bird Box by Josh Maler­man
• Blind­ness by José Sara­m­a­go
• The Book of M by Peng Shep­herd
• The Bro­ken Earth tril­o­gy by N.K. Jemisin
• Bring Out Your Dead by J.M. Pow­ell
• The Child Gar­den by Geoff Ryman
• The Children’s Hos­pi­tal by Chris Adri­an
• The Com­pan­ion by Katie M. Fly­nn
• The Decameron by Gio­van­ni Boc­cac­cio
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
• The Dooms­day Book by Con­nie Willis
• The Dream­ers by Karen Thomp­son Walk­er
• Earth Abides by George R. Stew­art
• The Eyes of Dark­ness by Dean Koontz
• Find Me by Lau­ra van den Berg
• The Great Believ­ers by Rebec­ca Makkai
• Jane Eyre by Char­lotte Bron­të
• Jour­nal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
• Jour­nal of the Plague Years by Nor­man Spin­rad
• The Last Man by Mary Shel­ley
• The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
• My Side of the Moun­tain by Jean Craig­head George
• My Year of Rest and Relax­ation by Ottes­sa Mosh­fegh
• The Old Drift by Namwali Ser­pell
• Oryx and Crake by Mar­garet Atwood
• Pale Horse, Pale Rid­er by Kather­ine Anne Porter
• The Pas­sage tril­o­gy by Justin Cronin
• The Plague by Albert Camus
• The Pow­er by Nao­mi Alder­man
• Real Life by Bran­don Tay­lor
• The Road by Cor­mac McCarthy
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• Sev­er­ance by Ling Ma
• Sta­tion Eleven by Emi­ly St. John Man­del
• The Stand by Stephen King
• They Came Like Swal­lows by William Maxwell
• The Train­ing Com­mis­sion by Ingrid Bur­ring­ton and Bren­dan Byrne
• The Trans­mi­gra­tion of Bod­ies by Yuri Her­rera
• The White Plague by Frank Her­bert
• Wilder Girls by Rory Pow­er
• World War Z by Max Brooks
• The Year of the Flood by Mar­garet Atwood
• Year of Won­ders by Geral­dine Brooks
• The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stan­ley Robin­son
• Zone One by Col­son White­head

Non­fic­tion

• The Amer­i­can Plague: The Untold Sto­ry of Yel­low Fever, The Epi­dem­ic That Shaped Our His­to­ry by Mol­ly Cald­well Cros­by
• And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
• The Com­ing Plague: New­ly Emerg­ing Dis­eases in a World Out of Bal­ance by Lau­rie Gar­rett
• A Dis­tant Mir­ror: The Calami­tous 14th Cen­tu­ry by Bar­bara W. Tuch­man
• Flu: The Sto­ry Of the Great Influen­za Pan­dem­ic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kola­ta
• The Ghost Map: The Sto­ry of London’s Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Epidemic–and How It Changed Sci­ence, Cities, and the Mod­ern World by Steven John­son
• The Great Influen­za: The Sto­ry of the Dead­liest Pan­dem­ic in His­to­ry by John Bar­ry
• The Great Mor­tal­i­ty: An Inti­mate His­to­ry of the Black Death, the Most Dev­as­tat­ing Plague of All Time by John Kel­ly
• His­to­ry of the Pelo­pon­nesian War by Thucy­dides
• The Hot Zone The Ter­ri­fy­ing True Sto­ry of the Ori­gins of the Ebo­la Virus by Richard Pre­ston
• Net­worked Dis­ease: Emerg­ing Infec­tions in the Glob­al City by A. Har­ris Ali and Roger Keil
• Pale Rid­er: The Span­ish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Lau­ra Spin­ney
• Pox: An Amer­i­can His­to­ry by Michael Will­rich

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Clas­sic Works of Plague Fic­tion: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shel­ley, to Edgar Allan Poe

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Nov­el the Coro­n­avirus Has Made a Best­seller Again

The His­to­ry of the Plague: Every Major Epi­dem­ic in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

The Nation­al Emer­gency Library Makes 1.5 Mil­lion Books Free to Read Right Now

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The apoth­e­o­sis of pres­tige real­ist plague film, Steven Soderburgh’s 2011 Con­ta­gion, has become one of the most pop­u­lar fea­tures on major stream­ing plat­forms, at a time when peo­ple have also turned increas­ing­ly to books of all kinds about plagues, from fan­ta­sy, hor­ror, and sci­ence fic­tion to accounts that show the expe­ri­ence as it was in all its ugliness—or at least as those who expe­ri­enced it remem­bered the events. Such a work is Daniel Defoe’s semi-fic­tion­al his­to­ry “A Jour­nal of the Plague Year,” a book he wrote “in tan­dem with an advice man­u­al called ‘Due Prepa­ra­tions for the Plague,’ in 1722,” notes Jill Lep­ore at The New York­er.

In 1722, Defoe had rea­son to believe the plague might come back to Lon­don, and wreak the dev­as­ta­tion it caused in 1665, the “plague year” he detailed, when one in every five Lon­don­ers died. This was not a sto­ry of heroes mak­ing sac­ri­fices to save the city. “Every­one behaved bad­ly, though the rich behaved the worst,” Lep­ore writes. “Hav­ing failed to heed warn­ings to pro­vi­sion, they sent their poor ser­vants out for sup­plies,” spread­ing the infec­tion through­out the city. Defoe earnest­ly hoped to head off such cat­a­stro­phe. He wrote to issue an admo­ni­tion, as he put it, “both to us and to pos­ter­i­ty, though we should be spared from that por­tion of this bit­ter cup.”

The cup, Lep­ore writes, “has come out of its cup­board.” But so too has the resilience found in Albert Camus’ 1946 nov­el Le Peste (The Plague), based on a real cholera out­break in Alge­ria in 1849. Though fic­tion­al, it draws on Camus’ study of his­tor­i­cal plagues and his expe­ri­ence as a mem­ber of the French Resis­tance. Camus seems to have found the plague as metaphor par­tic­u­lar­ly uplift­ing, nick­nam­ing his twins Cather­ine and Jean, “Plague” and “Cholera,” respec­tive­ly.

Whether we see it as a sto­ry of a siege brought on by sick­ness, or an alle­go­ry of an occu­pa­tion, Camus wrote of the nov­el that “the inhab­i­tants, final­ly freed, would nev­er for­get the dif­fi­cult peri­od that made them face the absurd­ness of their exis­tence and the pre­car­i­ous­ness of the human con­di­tion. What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plagues as well. It helps men to rise above them­selves.” Defoe might dis­agree, but plagues in his time were not also accom­pa­nied by wide­spread Nazism, a dou­ble cri­sis that might dou­bly force us to “reflect on what is real, what is impor­tant, and become more human,” says Cather­ine Camus of the soar­ing new pop­u­lar­i­ty of her father’s nov­el.

We can do this through read­ing in our real-life quar­an­tine. “Read­ing is an infec­tion,” Lep­ore writes, “a bur­row­ing into the brain: books con­t­a­m­i­nate, metaphor­i­cal­ly, and even micro­bi­o­log­i­cal­ly” as phys­i­cal objects capa­ble of fer­ry­ing germs. Plagues are mass-exis­ten­tial crises on the lev­el of WWII or the Lis­bon earth­quake that shook the faith of Europe’s intel­lec­tu­als. They are also set­tings for love and ter­ror, from Boc­cac­cio and Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez to Edgar Allan Poe and Mar­garet Atwood.

Vul­ture has pub­lished an “essen­tial list” of 20 plague books to read, includ­ing many of the clas­sics men­tioned above, and a book that is hard­ly remem­bered but might be thought of as an ances­tor to Atwood’s plague-rid­den futures: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, pub­lished in 1826 dur­ing the sec­ond of two vir­u­lent cholera pan­demics. In the nov­el, Shel­ley claims to have dis­cov­ered the sto­ry in prophet­ic writ­ing about the end of the 21st cen­tu­ry, telling of a dis­ease that wipes out the human race. If you’d rather not indulge that kind of fan­ta­sy just yet, you’ll find vary­ing degrees of imag­i­na­tive and sober­ly real­ist fic­tion and his­to­ry in the list of plague clas­sics below, all freely avail­able at Project Guten­berg.

A Jour­nal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

His­to­ry of the Plague in Lon­don by Daniel Defoe

Loimolo­gia: or, an His­tor­i­cal Account of the Plague in Lon­don in 1665 by Hodges et al.

The Last Man by Mary Woll­stonecraft Shel­ley

Plague Ship by Andre Nor­ton

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Plague by Ted­dy Keller

The Decameron of Gio­van­ni Boc­cac­cio

A His­to­ry of Epi­demics in Britain by Charles Creighton

A His­to­ry of Epi­demics in Britain, Vol­ume II 

An account of the plague which raged at Moscow, in 1771 by Charles de Mertens

A brief Jour­nal of what passed in the City of Mar­seilles, while is was afflict­ed with the Plague, in the Year 1720 by Pichat­ty de Crois­lainte

Cher­ry & Vio­let: A Tale of the Great Plague by Anne Man­ning

Libraries may have shut their pos­si­bly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed books behind closed doors, book­stores may be deemed nonessen­tial, but reading—and writing—about plague years feels like a nec­es­sary cul­tur­al activ­i­ty to help us under­stand who we are apt to become in such times.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Nov­el the Coro­n­avirus Has Made a Best­seller Again

The His­to­ry of the Plague: Every Major Epi­dem­ic in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness