When the pandemic put the kibosh on our normal lives, people found various outlets to pass the time and help cope. Some Marie Kondo’d their way through decades of unworn clothes and knickknacks. Friends around the world connected and reconnected by phone, FaceBook, Instagram, and in Zoom rooms. Some bibliophiles polished off their “TBR” stack. […]
Pandemic
Books that Sustain Us: Redux
The 2014 Curious Cats Read debut blog post explored how books can help sustain us during difficult times. As I write this more than six years later, many of us are confronting unprecedented challenges of sudden physical solitude and social isolation coupled with uncertainty and fear arising from the COVID-19 global pandemic. This seemed an […]
The Chaos of Contagion
Imagine sitting at your desk, driving a car, doing the dishes, changing a diaper, having sex, performing brain surgery….and suddenly, inexplicably, being struck blind. Imagine that scene repeating over and over across a city. Then imagine the mass hysteria that inevitably begins, rising to a fevered pitch. “Blindness” does that, but not in a usual sci-fi style of writing. Instead, this work, authored by a Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the late José Saramago, reads more like Dante’s poetry than any hot zone adventure.