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A pandemic is no new phenomenon. When COVID-19 hit last year, aside from the practical health guidelines, the average person had no idea how to deal with something of this magnitude. Then came contemplation on previous global health crises and the chilling idea of a plague as explored in literature. Book recommendation lists started floating around as the quarantine bound us to our homes, with titles like, âThe 20 Best Pandemic Books to Read During Coronavirusâ and âEerily prescient 2020 plague novels.â Like many people, I was reluctant to indulge my fears and sadness about the state of the world by reading books about the same things that were plastered all over the news. But being bored to tears for months was a great motivator for me to add some pandemic books to my reading list. ....
I read Ling Ma’s Severance in December 2019, just weeks before COVID-19 emerged in China. If you’re not familiar, the novel surrounds Candance Chen, a young woman who lives and works in New York when Shen Fever strikes. This fictional virus renders people zombie-like, turning them into shells of their past selves. The afflicted are trapped in a loop enacting daily tasks in mindless repetition until they die. There is no cure, and the virus sweeps the globe in a slow-moving apocalypse. “The End begins before you are ever aware of it,” the first chapter opens. As I read those words in late 2019, part of our world was churning toward an end of its own but of course I couldn’t know it at the time. ....