Best Books To Read During Quarantine 2024

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Book cover, “How to Be Good,” by Jolenta Greenberg and Christine Meinzer (courtesy of HarperCollins)

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Best Books To Read During Quarantine

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Sick of puzzles and video conferencing? This weekend I have some advice: work on becoming a better you.

For tips, I turn to my friends Jolenta Greenberg and Christine Meinzer, hosts of the podcast, “By the Book” and authors of the new book, “How to Be Great.”

“I like to be grateful,” says Meinzer, citing several books that recommend focusing on gratitude. “I know some of us are not particularly lucky, but there are still things to be thankful for and life reminds us that, as hard as we feel right now, we have so many people to be thankful for.”

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“My favorite tip is how to hide a dirty sink – keep it full of dirty dishes!” Greenberg laughed. “It’s just full of fun tips where, oh right, maybe I don’t have to take myself too seriously. (It’s important to have fun and a sense of humor when it comes to working from home) because it now can feel like the center of the universe.

Personally, I wanted to learn how to better connect with my friends and family (even before these orders stay at home). Greenberg took me some advice from his e-book “Pantsdunk: (Kalsarikani) The Finish Way of Entertainment”.

“I had a few apple cider rosés in my pants, and I found a way to stay in touch with my friends,” she said. Honestly, I find silly or really silly or maybe sentimental GIFs and just send them a message.

“Just write one sentence for people,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about the greeting, the conclusion, or the ‘how are you?’

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The conversation might not be deep, but it might just take the pressure off trying to think of something worth staying in touch with.

“Roughly two-thirds of self-help writers are men, and two-thirds of readers are women,” says Meinzer, “so not everyone writes with someone like you in mind.”

Our news is free on To make sure you get our coverage: Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter. To support our nonprofit public service journalism: Donate now. Best Books to Read During the Pandemic on Race: Codeswitch The Codeswitch team has been embroiled in a months-long debate, which we are trying to resolve once and for all. Which books are better to read during this pandemic? Books that connect you with our current reality? Or help you escape?

The code-switching team has been embroiled in a months-long debate that we’re trying to settle once and for all: Which books are the best to read during this pandemic? Books that connect you with our current reality? Or help you escape?

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We have heard that many people read all they can about plagues and epidemics: the history of the Spanish flu, yellow fever, bubonic plague. And of course people are piling up books on racism, anti-racism, and white supremacy as fast as they can, trying to contextualize this “moment.”

On the other hand, there are many people who avoid all this as much as possible. Instead, they bask in the comfort of books that take place in happy times and places, and have happy beginnings, happy middles, and (most importantly) happy endings.

But in the midst of this debate, we spoke to someone who convinced us that perhaps walking away from reality is a false choice. Farrah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of African American literature at Columbia University. For a lot of black literature, she says, it’s a “both, and” situation. In her classroom, the reading lists are filled with books by black authors who don’t want to ignore the cruelty of the world around them – but don’t ignore the beauty. People like Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston.

“In my department, we don’t shy away from the problems, but we recognize that it’s the community space that we build together that helps ease the tension,” Griffin says. “None of these texts offer escapist reading, although some of them, in their beauty and the beauty of their language, give us a moment to remember, you know, that there is something very beautiful in life.”

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We spoke with Farrah about relevant authors, what she’s currently teaching, and the unique pandemic classification that inspires her students. This interview has been edited and expanded for clarity.

At the end of last semester, you assigned students in your Introduction to African American Literature class a creative writing assignment (which you later wrote for the Boston Review). Tell us about that assignment and what inspired you to do it?

You know, in March we suddenly had to leave campus and, for lack of a better word, students were kicked out. We were all kind of thrown up. So I thought we should stop and slow down. And I said, you know, I’m not teaching them about a book a week anymore. We are all at this critical moment. And I decided on a creative project. Some chose to do creative work, but I left it open to them what they thought would be a creative project. My thinking was influenced by Toni Morrison and the way she often talks about how important it is to think critically about developing the potential of our ideas. And this is the time to sit and reflect, and think not only how to take apart a book, but how to think of something, how to make it out of dust, out of something new. How to make something in a crisis.

For sure. Therefore, in addition to asking them to do a creative project, I asked them to respond to a series of questions. And we did this as a kind of discussion, but I gave them suggestions. Those prompts were inspired by Arundhati Roy’s article about how the pandemic is like a portal. We’re going through a portal, and there are ways to decide how we want to get out the other side. So inspired by Roy, I ask them: What things about their life pre-pandemic do they want to leave behind? What kind of things did you find? What kind of things do you value more? And what kind of world would you like to see on the other side? On the other hand, how are you ready to build that other world?

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Those were the incentives. And I told them that no one is going to check the grammar – that we are only doing this together and we have to listen to what each other has to say. And they thought a lot about those questions. And I think, you know, the feeling of not being judged for them really liberated them and they shared beautiful ideas and thoughts.

What do you love about reading everything you write? What really inspired you when you read it?

These are very high-achieving young people – that’s why they’re at Columbia. And I think they all realized how busy and full their lives were. Not fulfilled in a good way, but just trying to achieve. This prevents them from forming the human relationships that are important to them. And what they realize is that what they miss is being in each other. At 18, 19, 20, they just wanted to slow down the rat race and meet other people. That really made me wonder what we do with our young people at 19 years old of hyper-education?

This is the first time we learn about the type of differences, whether they are racial differences in people who are most vulnerable to them, or class differences, or a particular need.