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[Humdinger]

I've started reading again somewhat recently, these are the books I've finished so far:

The Plague (Albert Camus): It's amazing how a novel from almost eighty years ago can capture so many of the same fears, behaviours and paranoias which occurred decades later in the Covid pandemic. Camus' plague might be fictional but his grasp of human behaviour is astonishingly on-point and he paints an incredibly vivid picture of how the city changes throughout the various stages of the plague, and how the myriad characters react to it for both altruism and cynical self-advancement. The optimistic end-note is a bit out of place, as the book feels more like a chronicle than a judgement until that point (as the narrator says) but the book is a remarkable testament to how well-observed writing can stay relevant for decades and how human nature remains the same even as technology and time advances at pace.

If I remember right, the plague in The Plague is a metaphor for the meaninglessness of life or what Camus called the absurd. The characters represent different ways of dealing with that. You can read it as a story about a pandemic, but you can also read it at a philosophical level. Nearly all of Camus' works reflect his preoccupation, in one way or another, with the theme of the absurd.

Thanks for the thoughts about The Talented Mr. Ripley. I was thinking of picking that one up eventually, just for entertainment.