by Joelle Boland

I had a writing professor in college who liked to say, “The greatest gift we can give each other is the gift of time.” If that’s right, I would like to thank COVID-19 for rendering my former job useless, and my former employer for freeing me from the bonds of employment. I know millions of others find themselves in a similar situation right now: faced with the priceless gift of unlimited spare time due to sudden and unexpected joblessness. I don’t know how everyone else is spending their new abundance of time, but I have chosen to spend mine reading books about the end of the world.

I started on this apocalyptic reading binge as a joke, a funny story to tell at parties, whenever we’re allowed to have those again. But something about it has felt surprisingly satisfying. It’s felt right. Reading these books hasn’t added to my stress. Instead, I’ve found that they fit like keys in the lock of my anxious mind. There’s a dissonance between my experience of how mundane daily life is, right now, in self-isolation, and my knowledge that New York City hospitals are a war zone, and that people all around the world are afraid, their lives on hold. Pretty much the only thing I can do is stay indoors, to eliminate the risk of getting sick or getting other people sick. But I’m bored. More than that, I’m guilty for even having the luxury of ennui.

I don’t think there’s anything I could read right now that would make me forget about the Coronavirus. Any escape into fantasyland would be tinged with guilt and dread. So here are some of the books that have kept me occupied in isolation, and have helped me forget about this mess we’re in, by immersing my imagination in even bigger, scarier messes: escapist fiction that whisks you away to someplace worse.