A Pandemic Playlist, Part 1 - Books

If you're staying inside to stop the spread of COVID-19, you'll need entertainment, so I've put together a "pandemic playlist" of disease-related media for your consumption (of course, while this list is lighthearted, do please heed the health and safety recommendations of the WHO and CDC). We'll start with some good old fashioned books:

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton: After I read "Jurassic Park" at a way-too-young age, I took a deep dive into Crichton's oeuvre.  One of my favorites was "The Andromeda Strain," a sci-fi thriller about a group of scientists who race to contain a deep-space microbe. The science is less believable than "Jurassic Park" (the titular microorganism breaks the laws of physics in several ways), but the story builds to a pleasing crescendo.

Bird Box by Josh Malerman: Out of the many, many post-apocalyptic books out there, "Bird Box" perhaps best replicates our current plight - there are no zombies or aliens breaking down our doors, only an invisible and inscrutable killer spreading around our communities, forcing us inside. The book got a big-budget Netflix adaptation starring Sandra Bullock, but the semi-ridiculous premise (everyone who sees some mysterious something goes homicidally insane before committing suicide) obviously works best in print. 

The Stand by Stephen King: The Mack Daddy of all plague books, and for good reason - it presents a memorably nightmarish world devastated by "Captain Trips," a bioweapon superflu that kills 99.4% of the human population. I remember working through a phone book-thick paperback copy in middle school with the cover depicted above, and marveling at the foreboding ending in the expanded edition.