The Books Swallowed by the Black Hole of the Coronavirus

There are moments when one can dive into the sustained dream of a book and stay there for hours. The spring of 2020 was not one of those times. If you weren’t actively battling COVID-19 or grieving a loved one, your life was likely all of a sudden relentlessly logistical: the sudden evaporation of childcare, the Tetris of fitting multiple working adults inside one tiny apartment, the paranoid wiping down of groceries. Reading often felt impossible, even for those of us who love to read. How could anyone focus long enough, amid all the chaos and grief, to absorb complex ideas? Instead, I found myself flicking through the latest headlines and my multiple email inboxes, or obsessively checking COVID-19 case statistics in my area. The world was on fire, and it was hard to tear my eyes away.

It wasn’t just bad for readers. Early 2020 was simply a very bad time to publish—and publicize—a book. First-time author and staff writer Olga Khazan, whose book came out on April 7, reflected on the experience of releasing a book into on Twitter “I realized I felt guilty for feeling so robbed, and honestly just acknowledging the guilt and frustration was a good step forward.” The publishing industry mostly moved online, and suddenly publicists couldn’t easily send out physical review copies, whether because of supply-chain issues or because the books