Pandemic poetry and prose

Pandemic poetry and prose in three months

Positive effects of the pandemic and quarantine do exist.
for me, it was a chance to begin reading many books, some of which I should have already read as a repentant English major.
I usually read pretty fast, but when you tackle more than one book at a time, some of these took longer than usual. But, in the past 10 weeks, I've managed to read 11, with two more underway.
Poetry: 

• Yes,  even though I skipped around, I did read both of them completely. First was Mary Oliver's Devotions, uplifting and thought provoking. Second and most recently completed, was  a Valentine's gift from my wife Susan, was Charles Bukowski's Betting on the Muse,  a sometime dark and extremely.  honest book of stories and poetry about through side of living.

Non-fiction: 

• Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm, about the 1900 Galveston hurricane...brilliant journalism and writing.
• David McCullough's Brave Companions, short portraits of some well know and not well know people in history...terrific writing.
• Neil H. Suneson's Roadside Geology of Oklahoma, one I won't read all the way through, but more than half, about areas of the state I'm interested in.
• Paulo Coelho's Warrior of the Light, an inspirational book  of page long essays about accepting failure and living.
• Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a re-read from years ago, makes you look inside yourself, and give a new perspective to living in a pandemic.

Fiction:

• Willa Cather's My Antonia, a book I should have read long ago...what description and story telling.
• Wendell Berry's That Distant Land, another book of shorter stories set in a fictional rural town, full of insights and writing that makes you laugh, and cry it is so real.
• Richard Adam's Watership Down, from the stories he told his kids, about rabbits...delightful writing.
• Anton Chekov, Selected Stories, because I'd never really read him, what characters and short portraits of real life in working Russia.

Still underway:

• John Grisham's The Guardians, a thriller as usual, which I started in mid March, and just put down as I tackled these others.
• Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a classic I may never have read, started two weeks ago, and it's slow going, at 600 plus pages.

Ps: Eight of these books were purchased at Best of Books in Edmond, two I found on our shelves, and one came from elsewhere.