Which should probably be re-titled, The I-Told-You-So Plague.

Have you ever loved a book so much, been so enthralled by the action, so entranced by the characters, so high on a book that, the second you closed the back cover, you went back to page 1 and read it through again? And maybe again.

That’s how I felt in the 1990’s, the first time I read The Coming Plague. Which is no small feat, given that, in the hardcover edition – which probably weighs 10 pounds – the main text is 622 pages long, and the very interesting footnotes another 105 pages. The Hot Zone, which also came out in 1994, may be a faster, easier read – but it felt like bad fiction next to The Coming Plague.

I actually read it more than twice that year. My mother had run away from home and was doing a stint in Thailand, doing something financial for the U.S. government (which involved signing the paychecks of everyone in the Asian theatre but I’m not sure what else), my grandmother had just died, my grandfather had been moved into independent living (and probably should have gone right into assisted living, to be honest), and I was being a good, eldest daughter, trying to make up for mom’s absence by flying down and spending a lot of time with him. The elderly sleep a lot, often in an armchair, with the TV blaring, waking up only to yell at you if you change the channel; so I brought TCP as plane reading and, when I finished it, went back and read it again. And then again. (I read very quickly.)

I do admit that, after the first read, I skimmed a part in the middle that – for me – dragged. It’s the part where Garrett explains, in the middle of the section on Aids, what viruses are and how they work, and why they’re so hard to defeat. I probably read it through the first time but, every time after that, I lightly skimmed the first few pages, then frankly slid past it to where the action picked back up again. When I talk about doing this with some of the longer poetry in LOTR, my husband calls it, “skipping the boring parts” but that implies that I’m leaving out whole chapters of LOTR, which is not true. And I read the afternotes, which makes up for it.

After I initially read TCP, I revisited it every 10 years or so, but I don’t take p-books with me on long flights anymore, and my wrists aren’t strong enough to read it in bed, so it requires a conscious effort. And then, in 2020, we were doom-scrolling TV news, and suddenly there was Garrett, being interviewed about the Cassandra-like ending of her book. And then there she was again, being consulted about current events. And then again.

So I tried to read TCP again. But it was too much, what with the clapping and the wiping down of the groceries, and the TV news pictures of piles of body bags piling up nearby, and the enforced inactivity and togetherness in an apartment as small as ours. We had to turn on Game of Thrones or Westworld instead. Wow, you want an intense experience, binge-watch those babies all weekend and every night during a pandemic. I may as well have re-read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which predicted what was going to happen with American society as a result of something like the pandemic.

I’ve read a lot of books about plagues and diseases: Plagues and Peoples, The Cholera Years, Flu, Pox Americana, The American Plague, The Speckled Monster, When Germs Travel, In the Wake of the Plague, The Fever Trail, Armies of Pestilence, The Great Influenza – and I know I have a book about polio and one about Aids, and another book about yellow fever around here somewhere – just to name a few. And those are just my p-books.

The Coming Plague is still my favorite. (The Cholera Years comes in second, and is, physically, a lightweight paperback and easy to hold.)

But maybe buy TCP on e- (even the paperback is too heavy to read in bed). i think it would read okay in e-. After all, Popular Crime does… (More on Popular Crime another day.)

My nephew – who is absolutely not a reader but gets books from me every Christmas anyway, mostly glossy books about sneakers or monsters – and I share a love of disaster stories: plagues, plane crashes, sinking boats, floods, animal attacks, people lost in the woods, serial killers. His parents don’t share this interest and can’t figure out why he loves to watch this stuff on TV (and, now that he’s away at college, on his phone, to the shock of their credit cards).

I’m not sure why my nephew is into this stuff. I like learning about how people figure things out: the scientists at the beginning of The Coming Plague racing through the jungles of Africa, tracing back to patient zero, trying to figure out how to contain the spead. And my favorite part of the Air Disasters TV show is the end: looking at how people need to change their behavior to prevent another accident. As a change management person, I puzzle through how to influence people to shift their behavior in a positive direction.

Wow, this post has gotten really long – well, it’s a long book.

Do you like reading about diseases and disasters? Why? Share your favorites in the comments.