April 16, 2020 - Palgue Years

While we are waiting for this quarantine to end, let me remind you not only that great works of literature have been written during plague years in the past, but that books have indeed been written about that experience as well. As I'm sure you all recall, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote his most famous work The Decameron after the epidemic of 1348. That book is structured as a frame story and contains 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death. This book is available from Project Gutenberg as a download. In 1947, Albert Camus, wrote The Plague. Plague sweeps through the French Algerian city of Oran. The response to it allows the author to ask a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. Camus won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. This book is available on Overdrive but has a hold list on it. The final book I would draw to your attention is The Stand by Stephen King. This book has been described as King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published in 1978. I remember reading the book then, and for months afterwards I jumped every times someone near me coughed or sneezed. This book is also available through Overdrive.

We are getting closer to the end of the Safer at Home order that is now in place. What the next order will be is anybody's guess and I, for once, will not speculate. We here (virtually) at the library are working hard to bring you programs online. We are continuing to order, receive, and process real books so that when that time comes -- which it will-- when we can at least crack open our doors wide enough to make curbside deliveries, there will be new physical books. Some of those new titles are listed below.  Enjoy and stay well!