WITH the recent extension of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), most PR pros would probably have had their fill of Netflix series binges, news updates, and other on-line activities.
With more time on our hands, maybe it’s time to switch to something different and try good old-fashioned reading for a change. Reading, after all, has its way of stirring one’s imagination by opening our minds to new worlds, perspectives and ideas to reflect on. And of course, giving us great food for the soul.
That’s why “5 Books to Read If You’re Stuck at Home Thanks to Coronavirus” by Jessica Stillman in Inc.com is a fascinating selection of plagues past and future, and how they impact on people from different generations. Selected by Columbia University English professor Jenny Davidson, her picks are a feast of outbreak-related titles that will remind you of our shared humanity, distract you for days, and get you thinking about how the diseases impact society.
‘The Decameron’ by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron which is subtitled Prencipe Galeotto is a collection of novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work set during the time of the Black Death, which hit Europe in the 14th century and killed something like half the population. There are parallels nonetheless with what is happening today, as we have a glimpse of lockdowns past.
Just like now, people then went into isolation and got bored. “The premise of the book is that a group of young noblemen and—women, people of great privilege who have been able to flee the plague-ridden city, are telling each other stories to while away their time together in the luxurious villa to which they’ve retreated,” explains Davidson.
By imaginatively connecting you with these shut-ins of the past, The Decameron might ease your isolation as well as your boredom. Davidson warns that “the description of the plague in the frame narrative is very vivid and quite horrifying, but the stories and characters are quite humorous.” The book captures the feeling of suspended animation and disrupted normality that happens in an outbreak.
‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ by Daniel Defoe
This historical novel by the author of Robinson Crusoe was first published in March 1722. It is the imagined diary of one man’s experiences in the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague struck the city of London, in what has become known as the Great Plague of London.
What Davidson finds striking is that the book’s “story-telling mechanism incorporates early versions of epidemiological data that we’re paying attention to during the coronavirus outbreak.”
Just as we have news anchors updating us with the latest casualty figures, “Bills of Mortality were the 17th-century reporting method by which individual neighborhoods in London tallied up each week’s deaths and assigned them causes. Defoe incorporates those data to convey the arc of a disease on the rise.”
‘The Plague’ by Albert Camus
The Plague written in 1947 is a fictional story written about the very real town of Oran in Northern Algeria. Many consider this novel to be a war allegory of the French resistance to the Nazis in World War II, pointing out the futility of human aspirations and the inevitability of suffering.
In the novel, the plague is a symbol of many things—the harsh, meaningless universe, the human condition or war—but all of them mean suffering and death. The people of Oran deal with this meaningless suffering in many ways.
The book was written just after World War II, “when the world was all too familiar with fear and disruption.”
Just like what we are experiencing, The Plague “is very vivid in conveying what it feels like to be in a city hit by an epidemic and what it feels like to be in quarantine.”
With this, “it also conveys how important it is to retain our humanity and our sense of connection to others in times when so much is at stake,” Davidson explains.
‘Feed’ by Mira Grant
This page turner is part of a sci-fi series about a near-term future when a man-made virus causes a zombie apocalypse.
Davidson is quick to point out that the book isn’t just a more literary version of The Walking Dead. It is about “two main characters, a brother and sister, part of a news team in a world in which people are very hesitant to come into contact. They’re reporting on a presidential campaign in which there is corruption and manipulation at the highest level, not least concerning the virus.”
‘Severance’ by Ling Ma
Davidson calls this brilliant book one which she “most strongly recommends to people trying to take their mind off the news.”
The book follows a pair of millennial office workers who just keep on going to work after an apocalyptic attack sweeps New York City. “It is about the intersection of immigration and global capitalism in modern cities and the breakdown of human communication and meaningful human contacts that occur as a consequence,” she says.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premier association for senior professionals around the world. Millie F. Dizon, the senior vice president for Marketing and Communications of SM, is the former local chairman.
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Image credits: Leonid Yastremskiy | Dreamstime.com