As usual, I'm reading multiple books at once, including more than one fiction book. At this time, the fiction books that I am focusing on are the following:
The Plague by Albert Camus - I swear, if I picked up this book without knowing the geographic and historical contexts, I might think it was written about the current real-world pandemic. It's THAT close to what's happening now, both in the literal storyline and the allegorical perspectives. Camus wrote it over half a century ago, and it's almost as if he predicted society's behavior during the covid pandemic.
August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Given that the third volume of March 1917 of Solzhenitsyn's The Red Wheel series was recently published in English for the first time (and it's on my Christmas list), I thought I'd try reading the first book in his The Red Wheel series. It's great so far, as I expected it would be. This series is a blend of historical non-fiction and fiction (a personal favorite sort of writing - I have many books that use this sort of storytelling), and reading about the fictional characters experiencing these monumental real-life events adds a lot to the understanding of both the characters and the history.