Jump to content

Plague Lit...


The Marquis de Leech

Recommended Posts

Given current events, I thought it would be (morbidly) interesting to compile a list of books and stories focused on disease, plagues, and epidemics.

The ones that immediately spring to mind:

  • The Stand, by Stephen King. Bonus points that it's an influenza epidemic.
  • The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe. Something to muse on while in quarantine. :)
  • The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio. I haven't read this one, but it strikes me as gloriously appropriate reading material during the Corona Virus.
  • Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.

Any others?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You have to include World War Z by Max Brooks on this list.

On the surface it may be a book about a zombie war but it is really a book about human nature and reaction to what is still, in fact, a virus, Brooks hits the nail on the head so many times in this book with how it starts, initial reactions, profit mongers, government reactions, real news being hard to distinguish from fake news, panic of populace, finding new normals, and eventually getting our shit together enough to fight back.

Amazing how prescient Brooks was when he wrote the book over a decade ago, it's eerie how many parallels it draws, I almost expect to hear that the Coronavirus vaccine when it eventually comes out will be called "Phalanx".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Minette Walters has been writing an historical series set in England during the Black Death; there are two out now, The Last Hours and The Turn of Midnight.

The last part of the third volume in Norwegian novelist (Nobel Prize Winner 1928), Sigrid Undset's brilliant historical trilogy,  Kristin Lavransdatter, The Cross takes place in the time of the Black Death.

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year which is 1665, the last year the Black Death came to London; The Diaries of Samuel Pepys are brilliant about this last Black Death wave too.

Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) is set in Philadelphia during the great Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793.

The Painted Veil (also a film) by Somerset Maugham.

Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years (1988) by Roberta Kalechofsky, set in Germany.

There are so many -- a very significant fiction genre.  Hey, we can also read about epidemic in The Book of Revelation.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson, although it's somewhat in the background of the main storyline.

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, and several of Reynolds' other books in the Revelation Space setting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

You have to include World War Z by Max Brooks on this list.

On the surface it may be a book about a zombie war but it is really a book about human nature and reaction to what is still, in fact, a virus, Brooks hits the nail on the head so many times in this book with how it starts, initial reactions, profit mongers, government reactions, real news being hard to distinguish from fake news, panic of populace, finding new normals, and eventually getting our shit together enough to fight back.

Amazing how prescient Brooks was when he wrote the book over a decade ago, it's eerie how many parallels it draws, I almost expect to hear that the Coronavirus vaccine when it eventually comes out will be called "Phalanx".

I'm reading World War Z as well. Great book, I'm kicking myself for not reading it earlier. I'm trying to catch the real-world people that he mentions, but leaves unnamed for legal reasons, which often requires mental time-travel to 2006. So far, I've caught Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell as the US president, Howard Dean as his vice-president (and one of the interviewed survivors/narrators), Jon Stewart, Ann Coulter, P. Diddy and Paris Hilton as some of the celebrities in the Long Island house.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Gorn said:

I'm reading World War Z as well. Great book, I'm kicking myself for not reading it earlier. I'm trying to catch the real-world people that he mentions, but leaves unnamed for legal reasons, which often requires mental time-travel to 2006. So far, I've caught Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell as the US president, Howard Dean as his vice-president (and one of the interviewed survivors/narrators), Jon Stewart, Ann Coulter, P. Diddy and Paris Hilton as some of the celebrities in the Long Island house.

That was Bill Maher on Long Island going at it with Ann Coulter.

The fuel gatherer (shit shoveler) is Carl Rove (Turdblossom).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Zorral said:

Minette Walters has been writing an historical series set in England during the Black Death; there are two out now, The Last Hours and The Turn of Midnight.

The last part of the third volume in Norwegian novelist (Nobel Prize Winner 1928), Sigrid Undset's brilliant historical trilogy,  Kristin Lavransdatter, The Cross takes place in the time of the Black Death.

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year which is 1665, the last year the Black Death came to London; The Diaries of Samuel Pepys are brilliant about this last Black Death wave too.

Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) is set in Philadelphia during the great Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793.

The Painted Veil (also a film) by Somerset Maugham.

Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years (1988) by Roberta Kalechofsky, set in Germany.

There are so many -- a very significant fiction genre.  Hey, we can also read about epidemic in The Book of Revelation.

 

Some of those sound quite interesting reads, particularly Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys ones, well as an adult they do, I remember we did the great plague of 1665 and the great fire of 1666 in history when I was only 8 or 9 and found it pretty scary :wacko:.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Jen'ari said:

Some of those sound quite interesting reads, particularly Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys ones, well as an adult they do, I remember we did the great plague of 1665 and the great fire of 1666 in history when I was only 8 or 9 and found it pretty scary :wacko:.

Not to mention that Pepys is succinct, and whether intentional or not, as he was writing only for himself, often very funny. And exasperating -- and the more history one knows of 17th C England and particularly the English-Dutch war, one enjoys it even more.  He also does the Great Fire.

I first read parts of Pepys and Defoe when a sophomore and still only read books like a literature student, so their brilliance rather escaped me. 

It would be another couple three years or so before the lightbulb went off and I realized that literary and historical scholarship, research and pleasure were the perfect pair, each illuminating each -- along with art and music too!

Defore was also a spy, a journalist, and the author of Robinson Cruoso -- as interesting a figure as Sam Pepys!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Not to mention that Pepys is succinct, and whether intentional or not, as he was writing only for himself, often very funny. And exasperating -- and the more history one knows of 17th C England and particularly the English-Dutch war, one enjoys it even more.  He also does the Great Fire.

I first read parts of Pepys and Defoe when a sophomore and still only read books like a literature student, so their brilliance rather escaped me. 

It would be another couple three years or so before the lightbulb went off and I realized that literary and historical scholarship, research and pleasure were the perfect pair, each illuminating each -- along with art and music too!

Defore was also a spy, a journalist, and the author of Robinson Cruoso -- as interesting a figure as Sam Pepys!

Thanks for the heads up, Pepys diary has been something I've meant to read for quite a while now I've just never gotten around to. 17th Century England was certainly a very turbulent time especially given only a few years earlier there was Cromwell and the abolition of the Monarchy etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Jen'ari said:

Thanks for the heads up, Pepys diary has been something I've meant to read for quite a while now I've just never gotten around to. 17th Century England was certainly a very turbulent time especially given only a few years earlier there was Cromwell and the abolition of the Monarchy etc.

Pepys had a front row seat for a lot of it, once he moved up in the admiralty office, which was run by Charles II's brother.  He was in their actual company more than once at important times in the War.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

classical antiquity has plenty of recitation on plague--though it less the story than the setting:  thucydides on the peloponnesian war, sophocles on thebes, ovid, the opening of the iliad. and, of course, the exodus. the revelation, all of the biopolitical management techne of public health in the levitical rules.

fairly plain that plague has been our great enemy for as long as we've kept records.  as hippocrates says in his treatise on epidemics:

Quote

The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future- must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm. The art consists in three things- the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of the art, and the patient must combat the disease along with the physician.

on the other hand, it has been our great servant, as noted by foucault in discipline and punish when he writes of the “political dream of the plague,” requiring the “penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of complete hierarchy that assured the capillary function of power” (loc. cit. at 197-98). “Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of contagions, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder” (loc. cit. at 198). We see that “rulers dreamt of the state of plague” (loc. cit. at 199).  cf. my notes on garcia marquez's LTC in this connection.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...