The internet is bristling now with prescribed lists of appropriate quarantine reading. Camus' nightmarish, rat-infested novel of a plague ravaging a nondescript Algerian town and of what qualities and vices it brings out in the townsfolk is on many of those lists.

But The Plague is also getting many stand-alone hymns of praise as a very special masterpiece packing a special wake-up wallop in these pestilential times.

Finding these hymns persuasive (and a little ashamed that I've not previously read The Plague or anything at all by the acclaimed Nobel laureate) I have scurried to buy and to read it.

And what joy that, at a time when a quarantined Canberran cannot go to the shops to buy lots of the essentials of Canberran life (such as Norwegian smoked eel, lobster glace, handmade Belgian chocolates, quails eggs, Wagyu beef fillet steak and wild Chilean seabass canapés strips), books for one's e-reader are magically purchased and delivered to your device, in a trice, without one having to even poke a nose out into the diseased world.

A copy of The Plague arrived in my e-reader (instantly, effortlessly, silently, like a ghost entering a room through a wall) within five minutes of my shopping for it after reading Matt Purple's passionate advice to read it in his piece 'There's Nothing Less Conservative Than A Pandemic'.

Of course, to digress for a moment, I know not all of us are readers and that zillions of you, making good use of the quarantined time forced upon us all, have taken up all sorts of new things.

Perhaps you are teaching yourself Finnish, or knitting, juggling, exorcism, flower arranging, or (I am doing this myself and in recent days have spoken with a candid Walter Burley Griffin who turns out to be an ecstatic supporter of light rail for this city and who begs us not to vote Liberal in October's ACT elections) how to hold successful séances.

Then, too, even those of you who already love to read may want to turn to something other than plague fiction.

If your life has been tragically Shakespeareless till now here is the chance, with quarantine keeping you at home to soar up out of that gutter.

The great Shakespearean actor Sir Patrick Stewart is urging us, in these sickening times, to believe "A [Shakespeare] sonnet a day keeps the doctor away".

At the rate of one a day there are five months' worth of sonnets, by which time the foul fiend of COVID-19 may be on the run and you with your new knowledge will be able to swagger on to Tom Gleeson's ABC TV show Hard Quiz with Shakespeare's sonnets as your Special Subject.

But back to Camus' The Plague and to Matt Purple's piece about it in which he says, in passing, that fine fiction has special powers to communicate momentous truths.

"Terrifying figures [about COVID-19] blare off the TV," Purple trembles.

"[Thousands] dead in Italy and up to 1.7 million Americans could die.

"And then you walk outside and see people milling about as they always have, enjoying the vernal sunshine.

"It's as though there are two dimensions, the news world and the world nearby, and you struggle to reconcile them, to determine which one is more real.

"Even the most immersive board game won't help much there.

"But literature can provide, and the best work of fiction ever written about an epidemic ... is The Plague by Albert Camus.

"Camus' novel tells the story of the French Algerian town of Oran, which suffers an outbreak of bubonic plague.

"The setting is not glamorous. Oran, Camus emphasises, is ugly and boring [and] its people sleepwalk their way through life."

"The Plague is first and foremost a story of habits, the everyday routines of the people of Oran, which are inevitably disrupted by the epidemic.

"These habits, whatever Camus might make of them, are inherently conservative.

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"Man is not made for radical disruptions; he doesn't like hearing, as CNN keeps haranguing us, that 'life as we know it is about to change'.

"We don't like upheaval ... [our] daily walks, those evening beers, even our commutes to work, provide a structure without which life would be intolerably chaotic.

"This is why some have been so slow to grasp the severity of the coronavirus.

"It isn't selfish individualism, low-information naiveté, or American exceptionalism so much as the simple fact that we're human.

"We're reluctant to give up what we know in favour of the unfamiliar, even when the authorities say we must. And if we have to, we quickly seek to impose our habits again, like a template.

"Thus does Oran remain in denial even after it accepts the plague, as people question the statistics, harrumph that it will pass over quickly."

Do read this novel. Camus makes the very ordinary town and its very ordinary people seem eerily, unsettlingly like Canberra and Canberrans.

Find out what becomes of Oran and in doing so perhaps you will get a glimpse of what is about to become of us all.

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