When this is all over, we’ll bust out the doors and enjoy in-person book clubs again. We’ll meet at the library or bookstore. We’ll cherish easy access to a wide and diverse selection of books. For now, the best we can do is flee the scene — via escapist fiction, prescient sci-fi or tantalising romance. Of course, any type of reading is a luxury during such unprecedented upheaval. For those who have the time, attention span and emotional capacity, it is a wonderful distraction. But different people need different books in this moment. Consider, the 9 types of readers you meet in quarantine:
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The working parents who are suddenly also stay-at-home parents — and lucky to get through a page of a magazine before passing out. These “readers” crave little more than reading the backs of their eyelids. They are caught in an all-day juggling act, and most books are too heavy to juggle. The solution for parents and anyone else who is wildly distracted — and exhausted: short stories, and they must be funny. Think David Sedaris’s ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day’ or Ali Wong’s ‘Dear Girls’.
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The escapists running away to fantastical worlds. We hear the weather is nice in Narnia this time of year. Readers are fleeing to appealing worlds that share little in common with our own, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and George R.R. Martin’s Westeros. Hogwarts, too. Enjoy the armchair vacation, escapists; no need to hurry back.
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The parents of young children who are reading (and rereading) every kids book they own. In that previous lifetime known as The Before, these readers might have curled up with ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ — now it is ‘Where the Wild Things Are’. ‘Dark Places’ turned into ‘Oh! The Places You’ll Go,’ and ‘The Green Mile’ was replaced with “Green Eggs.” A Seuss-ed out parent’s first stop post-quarantine: Checking out the maximum number of new titles from the library for a refreshed selection.
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The seize-the-day readers keeping busy with new skills. The overachievers among us will emerge from quarantine smarter — and with better buns. Those who are self-soothing by making bread might feast on ‘Sourdough’, a novel by Robin Sloan. Others will find inspiration from self-help gurus or in instructional tomes. Your apocalypse self turned out to be your best self? Girl, stop apologising, as Rachel Hollis would say.
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The Netflix enthusiasts who ran out of shows to watch — and are reading the books their favourite series were based on.Those who have quarantine-and-chilled straight out of things to watch can find new material in the books that inspired their favorite shows. After binge-watching ‘You’, read the novel by Caroline Kepnes; or perhaps Harlan Coben’s ‘The Stranger’ after streaming the Netflix series of the same name. There will even be time for a healthy debate on which was better, the book or adaptation.
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The benched athletes who consider turning pages a less than ideal but somewhat viable exercise option. In the midst of the curveball that is this crisis, sporty titles are helping satiate those who typically prefer spring training to spring releases. ‘War Fever’, a new book by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, examines how baseball converged with the country’s last terrible pandemic. Among the tidbits revealed: In 1918, Babe Ruth had the so-called Spanish flu twice — so baseball, at least, has been here before.
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The bucket-list readers who are finally checking off ‘War and Peace’ Size matters to these readers, who have time on their hands and tomes on their shelves. Some are returning to their high school English syllabus, tackling those long, challenging titles that might otherwise have taken months to complete. Popular contenders include ‘Middlemarch’, by George Eliot, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, by Alexandre Dumas and ‘Ulysses’, by James Joyce — all over 750 pages.
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The solo quarantiners desperate for human interaction — and settling for romance novels. There is still time for a knight (or knightess) in protective armor to appear, pledging to remain by your side in quarantine and in freedom. In the meantime, the attention-starved are living vicariously through romance novels. ‘In Five Years’, by Rebecca Serle, might keep these lonely hearts company, as would Andre Aciman’s ‘Call Me By Your Name’.
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The masochists devouring pandemic sci-fi. This global pandemic is only unprecedented to those who have not kept up with disease-plagued science fiction. Ah, the empathy readers now feel for characters grappling with deadly viruses, desolate towns and extraterrestrial complications. These books offer good perspective, too: Aliens have yet to descend to chase us out of quarantine. Best of all, titles like ‘Station Eleven’, by Emily St. John Mandel, and ‘Cold Storage’, by David Koepp, have what we all want: an ending to this stranger-than-fiction madness.
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