Reading a Pandemic Novel After a Pandemic

I first read Station Eleven in 2016, four years before any of it felt relevant. Emily St. John Mandel wrote about a flu that kills most of humanity and the fragments of culture that survive. I reread it in 2022. The experience of reading a novel about a pandemic collapse while still processing a real one is something no review I had read prepared me for. The book had not changed. Everything else had.