Restaurants and shops are closing. Thanks to the coronavirus, people are being told to stay indoors and avoid social or business gatherings.

School’s out, and the kids are at home, so if you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad, you probably need a break. Maybe it’s daytime and they’re on the TV, watching DVDs or playing videogames, so you can’t binge-watch Netflix.

What are your options?

In a word: READ.

In a society that has, increasingly, reduced our free time and our attention spans, the good old-fashioned book has taken a beating. A lot of us have probably forgotten what it’s like to relax with a cup of tea or hot cocoa, curl up with a good book and spend the next several hours getting lost in its pages. What better time to rediscover it?

Starbuck’s is closed. So, spend that $5 you’d usually spend on a caramel latte and buy an ebook instead. Hey, if you have a Kindle Unlimited account, you can read a lot of books for free! And you can do the same with thousands upon thousands of public-domain books and magazines available via a simple Google Books search.  

Maybe even get your kids off the TV and encourage them to read, too. With school out, wouldn’t it be nice if they were learning something? Back in the 1990s, when the Harry Potter books came out, kids started reading in droves. The good news: Harry Potter’s still there, and not only that, it’s spawned an entire genre of great fantasy novels out there that are perfect for kids.

You can read a book with your kids, or you can tell them about one that made your own childhood special. Maybe you’d forgotten all about it in the hustle and hurry over everyday life. But now that life has slowed down, take a moment to remember the adventures you had. Revisit them. Start new ones. Share them with your kids. Maybe introduce them to a Hobbit or a faerie, an elf or a dragon.

If the coronavirus has you scared, try taking your mind off it with some fictional scary tales.

Maybe you’re not into fiction and you enjoy learning about the real world. Books can help there, too. There are biographies, books on ancient history, pop culture, political figures, our nation’s highways and a host of other topics. You’ll learn about things you never even imagined could have existed, and if the books are well-written, you’ll have fun doing it.

Sure, it’s a good idea to keep up on the news about COVID-19, but there’s only so much of that you can read before it becomes repetitive and downright depressing. Instead of spending all your time worrying and lamenting the current situation, you could be reading about heroes who have triumphed amid adversity. There are plenty of books out there about great women and men who’ve changed the world in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. In times like these, such stories aren’t just entertaining, they’re inspiring.

There have always been a lot of reasons to crack open a good book, but our increasingly fast-paced, Twitter-obsessed world has made it seem like we just don’t have the time for one. This crisis might last for a while, so you may even want to start a series.

Now, we do.

It’s the perfect opportunity to start reading, and you don’t even need to go to a bookstore to do it. You can get books online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Wordery, Books-a-Million or dozens of other places.

So, what are you waiting for? This world isn’t much fun right now, but there are whole new worlds of fascination and adventure just waiting for you in the pages of your next favorite book.