Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel was published in 2014 and I read it in 2020, which was not the reading environment the author intended. The novel is about a flu pandemic that kills most of humanity. I read it over four days in a quiet apartment and it was one of the strangest reading experiences of my life.

What the novel is actually about is not the pandemic but what survives it. The central idea — 'because survival is insufficient' — is the Trekkian quote turned into a thesis. The world after catastrophe still needs theater, music, the things that make life more than survival.

Reading it during an actual pandemic made the thesis feel less philosophical and more urgent. The novel had anticipated something about how I was already feeling and named it before I had.