Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm stocking up on books my Buddhist teacher has written that I've not read yet. Insurance against despair, I guess. I finished the new mystery by Val McDermid last night, and she cleverly wove the pandemic into the plot, in that there is a warning to the detective to stock up on masks, etc., by her friend who is a doctor, and by the end the main characters are settled into lockdown. What she will write next is sure be interesting. How do you solve a case from home? I guess that is what police and others are doing as we speak, or are they? They are first responders and are taking risks with our russian roulette health situation. With the last couple of new books I've read, the pandemic hasn't appeared and I did ponder how relevant they were to NOW. I suppose the best thing is to read history, then there is less sense of unreality to the plots. It is, however, delicious to escape into these recently published clueless books about a world now gone. Will it return? Not unchanged it won't. This pandemic shift is too huge, and we will be selfconscious about our actions when and if we, say, go to a baseball game or a movie theater or stand and watch a parade. It will be strange, just as now everything is strange. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Began to Normalize the Pandemic. Weird days.