Digital Book Club

A neglected Kindle…

Hermione: Your Kindle looks tatty.

Viola: You introduced me to it. Years ago. You don’t seem to be using yours much lately.

Hermione: Er, no. Busy, you know.

Viola: We should read more.

Hermione: How about we have a book club? Download the same book to Kindles and post comments by an email thread? One with the highest word count in the comments wins.

Viola: With a limit on copying and pasting from the original text.

Hermione: OK. Ten percent quotes max in the posting. How about a Somerset Maugham?

Viola: Good choice. Very classic. Haven’t read him for fifty years.

_________

Voice-over

A reading solution for states of emergency or lockdowns. Digital book club to avoid those vociferous virus-laden get-togethers.

Station Eleven

A tale of a faster, deadlier pandemic…
Kirsten: It was a woven tale.
Miranda: Meaning?
Kirsten: It started in the present, or at least, a present, jumped forward and back. Characters died and came back to life in earlier times.
Miranda: I read the premise: a post-apocalyptic story about a virus which almost eliminates human life.
Kirsten: Yes, yes. Takes out 99% of the population and kills in a day or so. Not like Covid which is much less lethal and almost languid.
Miranda: Reading such a book in the middle of a pandemic?
Kirsten: Unsettling. Highlights the fragility of human life, and the unsustainability of our civilization.
_________
Voice-over
“Survival is not enough” is a theme of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Published in 2015, it seems as prescient as scientists warning that Covid is just a precursor of pandemics yet to come.