Cosby, John le Carré, Dervla McTiernan, William Shaw, Lori Rader-Day, Anthony Horowitz, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, and their like. I filled my quiet hours, instead, with crime and thriller fiction by S.A. However, like so many other folks who began this pandemic with grand reading ambitions, I found it difficult to stay focused on beefy yarns, my attention shattered by waves of anxiety involving the virus, America’s increasingly poisonous politics, and the absence of regular interactions and events that have long been part of my life. Yes, over the last two years I have read some Dickens and Tolstoy, and I even found time to savor the single unread Richard Russo novel in my library: 1988’s The Risk Pool (479 pages in first-edition hardcover). Well, things didn’t quite work out that way. An extended period of quiet and isolation, I figured, offered a chance to finally tackle those. My shelves had long groaned under the weight of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Michael Faber’s The Crimson and the White, John Sayles’ A Moment in the Sun, Peter Matthiesen’s Shadow Country, and other such doorstopper volumes-none of which I had yet managed to get through. Actually, I had in mind a specific sort of reading material: big books. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, shuttering businesses and compelling everyone to stay locked away at home, I imagined it as a unique opportunity to catch up on my reading.
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