EFTL faculty offer up some favorite and topical books to read (and re-read) every year. Our usual summer reading list was disrupted by the pandemic, but we are now providing a reading list to while away those long, socially distanced winter nights! In addition, we have assembled some reads about past quarantines and pandemics – both real and fictional.

Faculty Picks

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II, by Jacques Lusseyran

As You Like It, by William Shakespeare

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehesi Coates

The Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh

Humankind : A New History of Human Nature,  by Rutger Bregman

The Line that Held Us, by David Joy

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's

Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

Real Life, by Brandon Taylor

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen 

A Surgeon in a Village, by Tony Bartelme

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

We Were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

 

Viral Stories

A Beginning at the End, by Mike Chen

The Book of M, by Peng Shepherd

Blindness, by Jose Saramago

Dracula, by Bram Stoker

The End of October, by Lawrence Wright

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by John M Barry

The Great Mortality, by John Kelly

The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, by Richard Preston

The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, by Laura Spinney

Pandemic, by Sonia Shah

The Plague (French: La Peste), by Albert Camus

The Rationing, by Charles Wheelan

Severance,  by Ling Ma

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

 

Quarantine Reads

Chaucer, a European Life, by Marion Turner

The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio

Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe

"The Masque of the Red Death," by Edgar Allan Poe

Year of Wonder, by Geraldine Brooks