Every year right after Memorial Day we are bombarded with lists of recommended summer vacation reading, some of which are so daunting that nervous people may choose not to go on vacation at all. But Memorial Day is seven weeks away, and we need something good to read right now, in this strange enforced vacation period. It seems to me that the best strategy is to blend the themes of our quarantine reading into the themes of our peculiar situation in a positive way. Medical books must be avoided at all costs of course, along with the classic plague stories of Albert Camus and Daniel Defoe – not the right thing at all. Reading choices are personal, so I won’t even pretend to suggest what you should read during your virus vacation. But I can tell you what I’ve been reading so far. My luckiest choice was a long novel, “A Gentleman in Moscow,” by an author who should be better known, Amor Towles. It is the deceptively simple story of an aristocratic Russian, Count Rostov, who in 1922, after
Every year right after Memorial Day we are bombarded with lists of recommended summer vacation reading, some of which are so daunting that nervous people may choose not to go on vacation at all. But Memorial Day is seven weeks away, and we need something good to read right now, in this strange enforced vacation period. It seems to me that the best strategy is to blend the themes of our quarantine reading into the themes of our peculiar situation in a positive way. Medical books must be avoided