Trying to Imagine Post-Pandemic Life? Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison Can Help
By Michelle Orange
May 8, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
A lesser mystery of the pandemic: how to square the rise in total book sales (roughly 10 percent in 2020) and the number of readers (roughly all of them) who over that same period described the struggle to conquer a single paragraph, much less all, of “Middlemarch.” A year of dread, loss and social tumult has stretched at both ends the extent to which taking a new book in hand constitutes an act of hope. If the ability to immerse oneself in another world has wavered, it would appear that the will to do so endures, bound up, for now, in the piles of un- and half-read books fortifying our respective holding cells.