Across the world, many people are currently in lockdown to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Frontline workers and essential services deal with the realities of a pandemic head-on; the rest of us find ourselves in a situation many have never faced before. Some of us are trying to do our jobs from home, often shouldering new responsibilities and worries; many others have watched their livelihoods shrink or disappear. From my house I’ve watched articles and discussions pop up about what might help us cope with our new socially and geographically limited lives. We’ve downloaded Houseparty, we’re holding virtual pub quizzes, we’re playing Animal Crossing. A lot of us are also reading.
So here is my #quarantine book list/ books chosen either because they are about being in a lockdown situation- or they will help you to (mentally) escape -
— Ella Berthoud (@Ellaberthoud) March 24, 2020
1.Room-Emma Donoghue
2.A Gentleman in Moscow -Amor Towes
3.The Count of Monte Cristo-Alexander Dumas
1/3 @thenovelcure
Time provided a list of thirty books and series to read during social distancing. Vanity Fair asked staff to contribute ‘the most absorbing, distracting, engaging’ books they could think of. The critics at the Independent drew up a list of forty , featuring a range of writers from Dickens to Harper Lee. Ella Berthoud , bibliotherapist at the School of Life, made some suggestions for ‘quaratine reading’ on Twitter, chosen because ‘they are about being in a lockdown situation’, or will ‘help you to (mentally) escape’. Even in isolation, and with reading a particularly solitary habit in our society, we’re finding ways to make it social. Lauren O’Neill, at Vice, set up a ‘Corona Book Club’ , starting with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind is hosting The Anatomy of Melancholy Book Club , group-reading an abridged version of Robert Burton’s 1621 text, a 'treasure trove of esoteric learning’.
A 1628 edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Wellcome Library)
Our turn to books hinges on the comforting notion that in times of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, reading can act as a lifeline - to distract us, amuse us, and connect us with worlds we are shut out of through time, imagination or situation. Patients in nineteenth-century asylums, coping with often difficult psychiatric symptoms whilst isolated from wider society, seem to have had the same recognisable impulse to self-soothe with reading. The anonymous author of Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer: Being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum places clear emphasis on the importance of books during his stay in the asylum following a suicide attempt. 1 He seeks out ‘rational companionship and literary conversation’, looks over newspapers and periodicals with breakfast each morning, and reads in his bed during the early hours when he struggles to sleep. The Royal Edinburgh Asylum’s patient library, consisting of well over one thousand volumes at the point of our narrator’s stay, offers him a world to escape into.
“Shut up within the walls of this little world, one day was exactly like another in its monotonous course; but I now had a new world of books in the small library of the Asylum, and a most novel and most interesting world of life in the strange society around me.”
Likewise, asylum staff appreciated the immense importance which reading held for those in isolation. J. Burchell Spring, Chaplain at the Bristol Asylum, reminds the readers of his report in 1874 that for asylum patients, books were even more of a lifeline than for those outside asylum walls. "When it is remembered how much consolation well chosen books bring to the healthy and the sane," he writes, "we need not be surprised if they should be valued by those who are shattered in mind and body, and who, in a measure, are shut out from those thousand distractions which meet us in the busy world."2
A small pile of my post-apocalyptic and dystopian books.
My own reading habits in times of stress have always tended toward the post-apocalyptic and dystopian. Reading about other worlds which have been torn apart by zombie hordes (Max Brooks’ World War Z), overcome with sleeplessness (Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon), or shattered by human language becoming poisonous (Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet) somehow made my own anxieties feel less intense. Stories about the end of the world as we know it via nuclear war (Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow), plant extinction (John Christopher’s The Death of Grass) or climate change (J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World) hit a little more close to home. In looking for reading material during the last few weeks, I couldn’t help but feel that picking up something like Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), Blindness (José Saramago), or Find Me (Laura van den Berg), might make for a more anxiety-provoking than anxiety-relieving experience.
It seems a lot of us are struggling to choose our reading topics. Haaretz’s ‘Coronavirus Quarantine Reading List’ is comprised of fifteen apocalyptic novels. Time’s list included nine books or series which are post-apocalyptic, and seven about emotional or physical solitude. Moshfegh’s novel, Vice’s choice, is what they call “big self-isolation vibes”. The Bethlem Museum choose to approach their concern about the ‘mental health effects’ of our social isolation measures by reading a text exploring melancholia. Penguin Classics, publishers of Albert Camus’ The Plague, have reported a huge upswing in orders for the novel, loosely based on an 1849 cholera epidemic. Staff at Guardian Australia, meanwhile, shared “good books which make us feel good. Books about none of that other stuff. Books that we can really, truly escape into,” and readers suggested their own ‘comfort reads’. Berthoud’s own recommendations present an interesting dichotomy: do we read the books which deal directly with the ideas and situations which preoccupy us? Or do we read around them, looking for distraction?
Asylum doctors in the nineteenth century faced a similar quandary. Should patients be reading books which dealt directly with their issues, or would those texts prove harmful? Physician George Man Burrows railed against the ‘“teeming and cheap press” which gave readers “lamentable proofs of the degradation of humanity,” detailing grisly crimes. When a person began to show the first symptoms of mental illness, he believed, they should be prevented from reading the newspapers.3 Burrows also advocated the restriction of books. ‘Hypochondriasis’, familiar to us today as a chronic anxiety regarding health, was long considered a physical disease.4 But in 1828, Burrows begins to suggest this might be a mental illness, and suggested that 'nervous' individuals could induce it in themselves through reading. Burrows writes of Rousseau, the "unhappy vapourer", who "fanc[ied] himself afflicted with every [disease] of which he read". Philosophers and the "unlearned" were not the only readers at risk: even doctors could fall prey to hypochondria through their medical reading.5 Reading on the subject of religion could also “prove hurtful, and aggravate the insane” where religious delusion was a driving factor in a patient’s illness. Samuel Tuke, grandson of the founder of the York Retreat, likewise suggested patients should be prevented from reading material related to their “peculiar notions.”6
Honoré Daumier’s painting, The Imaginary Illness (La Malade Imaginaire), 1860-62
Doctors most often suggested that reading should be instructive, or at least distracting. W. A. F. Browne, at the Crichton Royal Asylum, reports on various patients who have been successfully distracted from their concerns. A suicidal patient was “seduced into a temporary forgetfulness of his woes” through translating Guizot and Vertot; another, a “morose misanthrope”, applies himself to Hume’s History of England. But Browne, unlike other doctors, also suggests that reading on-topic could be beneficial for patients. One man at the asylum, convinced that he was the husband of the queen, was encouraged to read the Morning Chronicle which brought headlines of the Queen’s real marriage. A patient who had been “seduced […] from the region of fact, reality and reason” was given ten volumes of Malte Brun’s Physical Geography to wade through, challenging his “morbid suggestions.” Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, featuring a hypochondriac protagonist, was read and translated by another patient, encouraged by Browne with no apparent concern that reading works about hypochondria might influence an already-vulnerable patient to it. Directly confronting a patient’s problems, challenging them through their reading material, was an alternative to using the library for simple distraction - and could form part of the regime intended to help them cope with their situation.7
Some of us seek escape from the everyday realities of living in a pandemic; like the anonymous asylum patient who wrote Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer, reading offers us a way out of the ‘monotonous course’ of isolation. Others of us seem to be turning to novels about disease and destruction as a way of understanding our own predicament more deeply. “We are not responsible for the coronavirus,” Albert Camus’ daughter Catherine says, “but we can be responsible in the way we respond to it.” Perhaps novels which feature world-ending worst case scenarios, can offer us a way to imagine what could happen if the response to our own current crisis is one of selfishness and greed; and encourage us, through the anxiety, to think of the bigger picture when it comes to our own actions.
*downloads Ling Ma’s Severance*
Sources:
1 J. Burchell Spring, Chaplain's Report, Annual Report of the Bristol Lunatic Asylum (1875).
2 Anonymous, Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer: Being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum (Royal Edinburgh Asylum Press, 1855).
3 George Man Burrows, Commentaries on the causes, forms, symptoms, and treatment, moral and medical, of insanity (T. and G. Underwood, 1828), pp. 448-49.
4 Esther Fischer-Homberger, ‘Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century - Neurosis of the Present Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 46 (1972), 391-401.
5 Burrows, pp. 466-470.
6 Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (Isaac Pierce, 1813).
7 W. A. F. Browne, various reports from Crichton Royal Asylum, 1839-1844.