I leaned heavily into catharsis. I was mostly listening to novels as audiobooks:The Stand, The Girl With All The Gifts, WWZ (and lots of other zombie contagion books.)

Also started a weekly Netflix party for zombie and contagion movies: Sean of the Dead, Train to Busan, WWZ, Girl With All the Gifts, etc.

I’m a biologist by education, so I also dove into reading everything that was being published about the novel coronavirus and Covid 19. Everything I could get my hands on in terms of scientific papers, but also histories of other epidemics like the black plague and Spanish flu.

I was consuming info in hyperdrive, but I have a lot of sympathy for people that went into a reading slump, too. That was such a weird time, and US politics made it so much weirder for some of us.

Jackson’s read on people, her powers of observation, are spooky good.

I keep trying to tell people who have only read ‘The Lottery’ in school to go read other stories of hers. She was an amazing writer.

I think she’d also have been the one to stand next to at any party. She saw everything.

I was listening to Night Vale at that point too.

I read a lot of Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman when I needed something escapist.

I binged on pandemic books and films: The Stand, Train to Busan, The Girl With All The Gifts, Mexican Gothic, Sean of the Dead…

Anything with a contagion in it, I was there for it.

Love me some catharsis.