5 CLASSICS TO READ, WHILE SELF-ISOLATING.

If you need to find a silver lining in this current situation, and during this social distancing, which is going to last for at least three weeks longer, now it's a great time to catch up on some reading — after all, this national quarantine probably means you've got a little more time on your hands. And if, like me, you've committed yourself to finally checking off a few texts from your literary wish list, you'll at least emerge from this period having cultivated a little more culture or having learned a thing or two. But if you're not quite sure what to read next, don't worry: I'm sharing the books I'm re-reading while self-isolating (and explaining the reason why I picked them up again in the first place) to offer you some ideas for your next literary adventure. While some people regularly tear through texts at a rapid rate, many others struggle to find the time — which can often seem like a luxury in itself — to sit down and relish reading material without distractions. But now it's an ideal season to do just that. When you're not working from home, levelling up your kitchen skills, squeezing in a quickie Instagram workout in your living room, or entertaining yourself in other self-soothing ways, picking up a good book can be a productive way to escape stressful and anxious thoughts for a bit by briefly immersing yourself into another world, whether by way of a fictional narrative, the memoir of someone you admire, or an informative non-fiction book that lets you dig deeper into a subject you're dying to know more about (food, fashion, art, psychology, or self-help, for example). And for those of you who could use a suggestion or two, see ahead for four selections of unforgettable classics, straight from my bookshelves, obviously in the original languages, which are perfect for re-reading from a different perspective and diving deeper into their meaning and style, once our attention is not concentrated mainly on the plot.

1) "Tender is the night" by F.S.Fitzgerald: during particularly emotional times, I always turn to fiction to distract myself, and Fitzgerald's books provide a dreamy, parallel world where to live for some moments, with his sophisticated, evocative descriptions of the French Riviera and glittering atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties, 

2) "The end of the affair" by Graham Greene: set in London during and just after the Second World War, the novel examines the obsessions, jealousy and discernments within the relationships between the three central characters, and is considered among the author's best novels since it also an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn't live without but struggled to live with.

3) "The English patient" by Michael Ondaatje: in case you're one of the few people who have never read the book nor seen the movie, , the novel centres around an Italian villa towards the end of the Second World War, where four variously damaged characters come to terms with the past, and among them the English patient, who actually is not  of English nationality, but a Hungarian desert explorer on his deathbed, recounting the story of his doomed love affair with a married woman, member of his last expedition. The book is to be savoured in its richness of adventure, re-read for its sensua l descriptions  of the desert, which is a character in itself and to be remembered for the richness of the author's writing style, rich in well-timed silences and ellipses to speak volumes. 

4) "Out of Africa" by Karen Blixen: an epic, romantic drama inspired by the Danish author's memoir of her life in British East Africa in the early 20th century, which is also a powerful, lyrical meditation on her coffee plantation and a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there, and to the landscape she fell in love with.

5) "Mrs. Dalloway" by V. Woolf: an example of the author's stream of consciousness narrative, thanks to which the reader gets thrown into the female protagonist's mind and her world, creating a sense of intimacy with this high-society Englishwoman during post-World War I London.

And if these books succeed in fascinating you to the point of becoming emotionally obsessed by their plots and entangled in their exotic settings, you can also soak up their atmospheres by watching the successful film versions, since all of them have at least one... Enjoy!