Literature is a canvas for creativity. For readers, it could well be a coping mechanism — where the quality of writing is secondary to the respite it provides. Would you consider the Twilight saga as good literature? Probably not, but the author Stephenie Meyer did manage to sell over 100 million copies and have it translated in 37 languages. The Internet community Wattpad, an outlet for fandoms to unleash their imagination via fan fiction and original fiction — a lot of it that might get you hooked ­— announced last year that it surpassed 80 million users, a 23 per cent increase from 2018. It's now a breeding ground for narratives that would otherwise be unthinkable. As a result of the pandemic, you get to read about how someone has to quarantine with One Direction's Harry Styles, Aladdin having to rescue Agrabah from the deadly virus and a girl texting Blake Richardson from the Brit pop outfit New Hope Club because she's bored. We sieved through the slew of virus-themed fiction to pick three interesting titles, and invited Kinjal Parekh, a 22-year-old book blogger from Kandivali, to give them a read.

Absolutely unbelievable
"I couldn't read this with a straight face," Parekh confesses, about Corona Virus x Flu Virus, where the plot is as popular as a dramatised reading on TikTok as it is in written form on Wattpad — "Corona is the new girl in town and EVERYBODY hates her!!! one day she met a real charmer by the name of Flu who knows everybody!! will he even notice her!?" The meme-format it follows (switching the letter case or deliberate capitalisation) perhaps correlates to its 36,200+ reads. "I have no clue how the story crossed the writer's mind," she says. A plausible explanation, she shares, is an attempt to boost visibility. "You get a higher ranking when you match the SEO [search engine optimisation] searches. So, you have to be in tune with hot topics like merging corporates or in this case, the virus."