As you can imagine, brick-and-mortar bookstores have been taking quite a hit. In the U.K., Waterstones finally shuttered their stores due to the coronavirus. But just because the physical locations are down doesn’t mean no one is buying books. Online book sales continue to be a viable option. While one would think that this would lead to a surge in ebooks, it looks like readers are hungry for the physical experience as well.

According to The Guardian, sales went up a whopping 400% week on week. Yeah, that’s a whole lot of extra books, but that isn’t the most interesting part. What’s unexpected is that people aren’t necessarily disappearing into bouts of escapism. While I’m sure there are plenty reading your typical thrillers, mysteries, and beach reads, the genre getting a “significant uplift” are classics.

These classics include One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Beloved, The Great Gatsby, and The Bell Jar. It’s also probably no coincidence that a lot of those could tangentially be associated to either ailment or isolation. Along those same lines, Dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World are on the list of those with a reported boost. 

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And that’s not all. Pretentious tomes like The Goldfinch and Infinite Jest are also getting quite the increase, along with War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, and In Search of Lost Time. 

“Our bestseller is Hilary Mantel[’s The Mirror and the Light] – those 900 pages aren’t going to seem daunting any more and it’s doing really well,” said Waterstones’ Bea Carvalho. “And we’ve seen really good sales for the classics – those bucket list books, the ‘I’ve always wanted to read it’ type things such as Infinite Jest.”

The fact that people are turning to said “bucket list” reads isn’t exactly comforting. After all, we are in a situation where many people are concerned they could very well be kicking the bucket sooner rather than later. Either that or they figure they could use all the extra free time to actually buckle down and dive into a challenging classic. I guess any book is a great choice though.

Have you started taking time to indulge in some of the classics, or are you reverting to lighter, more genre-heavy fare? What do you think of online book sales surging? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: The Guardian

Image Credit: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash