THE WORLD OF WRITING

Reading in the Time of Corona

ince the lockdown began Waterstones have reported a 400% rise in book sales, with particular increases for modern classics. Seeing particularly strong sales were titles such as Gabriel García Márquez’s and , as well as Toni Morrison’s , F Scott and Sylvia Plath’s . Perhaps preparing to get stuck in for the duration, a lot of readers have been buying epics such as Tolkien’s (1,178 pages in the single volume HarperCollins), Tolstoy’s (1,440 pages in the Penguin Classics edition), and Proust’s (over 4,000 pages in any edition).