Reading amid the pandemic: Books and authors in 2020

With a microscopic organism upending life as we know it, the realm of books was among the few which held its own, operating near normally in this tumultuous year. The flow of new titles, across all genres, continued unabated and provided readers a safe haven for a troubled psyche. For avid readers, confined to homes and deprived of opportunities of external sources of leisure, it was a dream opportunity to work through pending piles and acquire fresh material.

But amid the host of autobiographies and biographies, examinations of political partisanship – and their social effects, new looks at history and more as well as a wide array of fiction for all tastes and moods, the worst health crisis the world faced in over a century found its own niche.

While there is no shortage of books on coronavirus, some representative ones could include physician and evolutionary biologist Frank Ryan’s “Virusphere: Ebola, AIDS, Influenza and the Hidden World of the Virus”, which explains why epidemics are inevitable and their benefits, science journalist Sonia Shah’s “Pandemic” about the interplay of history, politics and science in tackling the scourge of disease, and John Barry’s “The Great Influenza : The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”, which not only chronicles how the Spanish flu of 1918-20 devastated a world already laid low by years of war, revolutions and other upheavals, but also shows how the political handling is as important as the medical measures.

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