If you are ever feeling really down, remember Giovanni Boccaccio’s cheery observation from the 14th century that in plague-infested days “a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat.” See, you must be feeling better already …

Here are some feel-good classics:

The Plague — Albert Camus

The quintessential novel about how the human psyche reacts in times of plague, confinement and fear of death. The characters in Camus’ story reflect the entire spectrum of behavior, ranging from the scientific, matter-of-fact approach of Rieux, a doctor who combats the plague ravaging the Algerian port city of Oran, to the profiteering Cottard, who relishes in the collective misfortune but eventually goes mad, and Father Paneloux, who finds solace in God’s will but is eventually taken ill. The Plague is an ode to humanity in its darkest times.

A Journal of the Plague Year — Daniel Defoe

Camus was a fan of Defoe and owes much to the Englishman’s compelling piece of faux journalism, in which plague-ridden London in 1665 is the seething ant colony of human foibles that comes under the magnifying glass. (It is written as a supposed eyewitness account, but Defoe was only 5 at the time.) The narrator muses on everything from divine will and the rise of con men to the rights and wrongs of shutting people in their houses. There are vivid vignettes including a brutal scene in which blaspheming boozers at the Pye Tavern in Houndsditch taunt a distraught man who has just seen his wife and children flung into a mass grave. Defoe ends on the bleak note that the survivors’ gratefulness to God would prove short lived and that they would slide back into their old habits.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Unlike Defoe, the debonair and adulterous diarist Pepys is a bona fide witness to the horrors of the bubonic plague epidemic of 1665 that killed a quarter of Londoners. It’s a haunting vision of depopulation, fires in the streets and the ceaseless tolling of bells. Famously declaring “God preserve us all!” he loses close acquaintances including his baker to the pestilence and chews tobacco in the hope that it is an antidote. While extremely careful in some respects, Pepys is also an oyster-slurping playboy with a penchant for extramarital liaisons who takes astonishing risks in visiting his mistress, whose servant died of plague. His career goes from strength to strength and he finally describes 1665 as a year in which he “never lived so merrily.”

The Betrothed — Alessandro Manzoni

Compulsory reading for Italian high school students, The Betrothed gives a historically accurate account of the bubonic plague that wiped out a quarter of Milan’s population in 1629-1631. Particularly poignant is Manzoni’s description of the crowd’s descent into a collective psychosis and the public lynching and unfair prosecution of people wrongly accused of intentionally spreading the plague, the “untori.” Parallels with recent attacks on people of Asian descent are painfully obvious.

The Decameron — Boccaccio

In a lighter approach to the plague theme, Boccaccio imagines a group of 10 youths fleeing the Black Death ravaging Florence and finding refuge in the Tuscan hills. They entertain themselves by narrating a tale a day for 10 days, giving 100 stories ranging from the tragic to the facetious and ribald (Decameron means “10 days” in Greek). If you can’t find a copy in your solitary confinement, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 movie adaptation, with music by the old maestro Ennio Morricone, is an excellent alternative.

Death in Venice — Thomas Mann

A writer develops an obsessive, unrequited love for a beautiful youth. Meanwhile, a mysterious cholera from the Ganges quickly spreads through Venice’s maze of canals. Mann’s novella is less about the plague than about the tension between Apollonian restraint and Dionysian abandon, but it is obligatory reading, and you will succumb to Mann’s beautiful writing.

The Last Man — Mary Shelley

The Last Man by Mary Shelley, who’s better known for Frankenstein, is often described as English literature’s first apocalypse novel. It takes place in the late 21st century (as described by someone living in the early 19th century — the Ottoman Empire’s still going strong in her vision of the future) when a deadly plague of unknown nature sweeps across the world. The book is heavily inspired by tragic events in Shelley’s life, such as the death of her husband and children, which is reflected in the novel’s grim ending: Humans die by the millions, until only the titular last man is left alive.

Plague in Athens — Thucydides and Sophocles

The Greek historian Thucydides wins his place on our list for being not only an eyewitness but also a survivor of the plague that tore through Athens from 430 B.C. There’s no consensus about what the disease was, but it was vicious: It caused unquenchable thirst, fever, spasms, ulcers, vomiting and total memory loss. It weakened Athens in its war with Sparta and claimed the life of the city’s great statesman, Pericles. Thucydides notes that it also sparked a breakdown in law and morals, with people frittering their money away on life’s pleasures. In his tragedy Oedipus Rex, performed in 429 B.C., Sophocles opens the action in a city brought low by plague. “The fire-bearing god, the most hateful pestilence, hath swooped down on our city,” as the playwright puts it. And that’s before things turn truly tragic!

Nemesis — Philip Roth

In this brief and powerful book, a young physical education teacher in Newark, New Jersey, tries to keep a level head as polio consumes his community. Panic gradually takes hold in the 1950s Weequahic neighborhood, with no cure in sight and no understanding of how the disease spreads.

The Andromeda Strain — Michael Crichton

When a research satellite crashes in Arizona, everyone in a nearby town dies from a mysterious ailment that either clots their blood or causes them to to kill themselves in bizarre ways. The race is on for scientists from the Wildfire task force to contain the alien micro-organism and understand why two very unlikely people appear to be immune.

Zia Weise and Nicholas Vinocur contributed depressing reading.