Whether you’re meditating or filing for unemployment, the COVID-19 health crisis has left those of us in privileged positions with ample freetime. Take advantage of this cultural reset to train your most important muscle: the brain (although we know a lot of you are also hitting that home gym). 

For those of us who’ve been pretty much exclusively reading GQ and Men’s Health, here are five appropriate texts to read in the time of Coronavirus.

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Love In The Time of the Cholera 

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A passionate, ardent example of magical realism for those of you who want a global perspective, the Colombian Nobel-winner’s most romantic novel deals with the truth and complications of life and love. For those of you missing your boo during quarantine, this is an ideal read.

The Plague

by Albert Camus

The French existentialist philosophers classic about a plague that strikes the ALgerian city of Oran digs deep into questions about the human condition. On the nose to say the least, but there is strange comfort in knowing somebody’s mind went there during their own pandemic.

1984

by George Orwell

You’ll remember this one from high school if your teacher was halfway-decent. With all the misinformation running amok right now, we could learn a lot of important lessons from revisiting Geogre Orwell’s classic dystopian tet about a man trying to survive a society that would control and deceive him.

The White Album

by Joan Didion

A journalistic classic that set the standard for Literary Nonfiction, this collection of essays about the late 60s and early 70s in California sees the legendary writer rubbing shoulders with Jim Morrison, The Black Panthers, Georgia O’Keefe, and her own existential dread. A worthwhile read for those of us feeling the same—and longing for adventure in the form of a history lesson.