It seemed trivial given the scale of the crisis outside, but it turned out I wasn’t alone. If recent reports are to be believed, the entire population of the quarantined world is (a) launching a podcast, (b) taking online exercise classes, (c) hosting dinner parties on Zoom, or (d) spending their waking hours with their noses buried in a gargantuan novel.

“Reading matter” was one of six post-pandemic boom areas identified by the BBC: “Another pursuit that’s popular with people who have time on their hands right now is settling down with a good book.” “Looking for a respite from the news?” asked The New York Times. “You might find solace in reading.”

Arts pages were quickly saturated with recommendations, celebrity reading lists and even advice on how to read in self-isolation. Speaking to Britain’s Independent newspaper, self-proclaimed bibliophile Andy Miller suggested reading no more than 50 pages a day, especially if you are “tackling a big book”. “You don’t want to make reading synonymous with your incarceration,” he said.

There is something unsettling in this vision of quarantine as self-improvement exercise – a chance to catch up with what Jeffrey Archer has been up to since Kane and Abel (1979), or to finish Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy. Perhaps that’s because it articulates the eerie disconnect between the billions adapting to the grind of self-isolation and the urgent nightmare being played out in hospitals around the world.

But this desperation also articulated the very real challenge facing a world robbed almost overnight of the every day – whether going to work or meeting up with friends.

Reading’s ability to make up some of the lost ground it has ceded to television, video games and the internet was noticeable, even if for some people it was a short straw in the absence of watching football or the Olympics, or attending the Sónar music festival, or the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Or was something else going on? Had lock­down reminded people normally busy with Weibo or Minecraft what reading was capable of? After a couple of weeks in lockdown, and without intending to, I put this suspicion to the test.

I work for the Keats-Shelley House, in Rome, where 199 years ago the English poet John Keats died of consumption. (Keats has been mentioned in dispatches during the current pandemic because, having arrived in Italy, he was quarantined for 10 days on a boat in the Bay of Naples while the city was in the grip of a typhus outbreak.)

The museum, like all public buildings in Italy, closed its doors to visitors in early March. To help fill the void, I launched a synchronised reading group through Twitter and Facebook, inviting people to join me in reading the same text at the same time – “together and alone”.

The idea was inspired by Keats himself. At the end of 1818, he wrote from London to his brother George in the United States: “I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o’Clock – you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.”

The appeal of this particular idea, at this particular moment, was that reading retained its traditional low-key, intimate character, but thanks to technology, created a community. In the first three weeks, we were joined by people from Pakistan to Nashville, Mexico City to Istanbul, Seattle to Sweden.

Introverts had no obligation to do anything other than join in. Extroverts – like the actor Julian Sands – could send in videos of themselves reciting that week’s poem. But what moved me most deeply was the response from Italy itself at about the moment the Covid-19 crisis was reaching its peak. “L’idea è gentile e semplice. E per tutti,” reported La Stampa newspaper. “The idea is kind and simple. And for everyone.”

Before I began wrestling with such lofty ideas, the thorniest literary issue raised by the lockdown was which book to choose.

In “Letter from Chengdu”, published in The New Yorker last month, Peter Hessler noted many of his 60-plus students quaran­tined around China “had been reading books or watching movies and shows that made them think about fear or claustrophobia”.

Similarly, the most popular fiction titles that flashed past my eyes included (in no particular order): Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague; 1947), Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), Stephen King’s The Stand (1978) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). These all tell the story of a con­tagion, are shaped by a contagion or evoke a dystopia with eerie parallels to the present.

It didn’t matter that Wuhan-400 was a biological weapon originally called “Gorki-400” – presumably when the threat to American supremacy originated in Moscow rather than Beijing – or that it is little more than a minor and frankly absurd plot device.

Noticeable by their relative absence are novels offering light relief. Miller, for instance, craved a story that “[reflects] my anxiety but doesn’t necessarily amplify it, some­thing that taps into the current universal experience”.P.G. Wodehouse’s jollity, he argued, would be like “nails down the blackboard”.

There were exceptions. British comedian Stephen Fry revealed that Wodehouse, along with Agatha Christie’s whodunits, were “speaking to [his] soul” currently – and not, as one TV host assumed, Greek tragedy and Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Similarly, British-Pakistani novel­ist Kamila Shamsie told BBC Radio 4 she wanted books to distract her from the coronavirus, such as Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932).

What Fry and Shamsie’s selections have in common, apart from lighter prose, is a comforting sense of familiarity as a way of combating isolation. Re-reading favourite books and reacquainting ourselves with much loved characters takes on deeper, more poignant resonance when we are denied contact with our flesh-and-blood family and friends.

Something similar might also explain the rush to buy heavyweight classics, whether recent or not: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara.

Choosing books that have stood some test of time makes sense during a period of profound uncertainty, when a yearning for any kind of stability might make the four great classic Chinese novels seem a better bet than a hotly hyped debut by an unknown.

The trilogy’s sheer scale satisfies several demands. Its plot, which is filled with challenges, peril and battles, is exciting and diverting. Tolkien’s exaltation of camara­derie, decency and cooperation is suitably elevating but does not neglect suffering, fear or death. The wistful, almost elegiac tone flirts with sentimentality, which is not unwelcome just now.

Moments of grandeur are counterbalanced by characters such as Samwise Gamgee, whose enjoyment of the every day – pipe smoking, good food, strong rope, gardens – as a defence against inconceivable darkness offers an object lesson for our present.

Nor does it hurt that Tolkien knew what he was writing about. The Lord of the Rings not only engages with a deep literary tradi­tion (Anglo-Saxon poems, Norse sagas) but also the historical traumas that produced it. The hardships undergone by Frodo, Sam, Aragorn and the rest draw on Tolkien’s first-hand experience of World War I – he fought in the infamous battle of the Somme – and its sequel, during which large parts of the trilogy was written.

Tolkien’s world in crisis provides a tem­plate for many of the dystopias currently so popular. One irony of reading Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006) or even Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness during our current predicament is the contrast between fiction and reality.

Those books prepare the reader to expect endless battles, pitiless villains, constant peril and a lot of zombies. The truth, at least in part, has turned out to be rather different. The heroes are medical workers battling an invisible enemy with insufficient protective gear and too few ventilators. If there are zombies, they are all too often national leaders who failed to act in time. As for the rest of us, the only action we have seen is staying home, washing our hands and doing as little as possible in the hope of doing no harm.

For many this would be a nightmare without the threat of a pandemic. One feature of the past few months has been the sight of extroverts flocking to social media to bemoan the closure of their temples – bars, restaurants, football stadiums, con­cert venues and even workplaces – before offering prayers that Zoom will allow them to survive an instantly less gregarious, less social and less material world. For intro­verts, self-isolation is not so far from busi­ness as usual.

If there were an Introverts Olympics, reading would feature promi­nently as the most individual of indi­vi­dual activities – without even an oppo­nent to dilute one’s solitude. Talk is not only sur­plus to requirements; it is often unwel­come. Movement is equally unneces­sary, beyond the occasional turning of a page.

It is little wonder reading has proved almost uniquely well adapted to surviving this seismic shift in mood that has swept away large parts of the entertainment industry. Reading’s lo-tech, low-main­tenance self-sufficiency now seems robust rather than oldfangled.

“What a book offers that I most need myself is a way to slow down,” wrote Margaret Renkl in The New York Times on March 30. “A book doesn’t drag me along at the speed of life – or the speed of breaking news – the way television shows and movies do. A book lets me linger, slowing down or speeding up as I wish, backtracking with the turn of a page. When I pause to ponder the words I’ve just read, my hands and eyes fall still, and the story stops, too.”

The intimate bond a reader can form with their reading material allows both a soothing sense of “slow time” and a feeling of control, however temporary or limited that might be. These benefits slot easily into advice about managing our mental health in lockdown: about relaxation and enter­tain­ment, about managing time, about finding alternatives to news headlines. Britain’s National Health Service used a graphic of someone reading to illustrate their checklist of “Mental well-being while staying home”.

What has been particularly eye-opening over the past few weeks is how reading has expanded its usual core strengths of indivi­dual comfort, often aided by technology and social media, to offer opportunities for social connection.

Readers, writers and literary institu­tions from schools to magazines, bookshops to universities have dreamed up ingenious ways to unite people through reading – whether they are separated by thousands of miles, or by the width of a self-isolating bedroom wall. Authors such as David Walliams and businesses like Audible have released stories and audiobooks, often for free. J.K. Rowling relaxed copyright restrictions so teachers could broadcast readings of Harry Potter for their students.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, children’s authors have dreamed up some of the most innovative and enterprising ways to bypass current restrictions. British writer and illustrator James Mayhew launched StoryTime4HomeTime. At the end of each day that schools are closed, he posts a teatime story on YouTube. Working in real time without a script, he narrates in a calm, soothing tone that brings relief and joy in equal measure.

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If this weren’t impressive enough, you can watch him illustrate each day’s tale at the same time, drawing and painting his accompanying picture upside down. His audience is encouraged to interact with Mayhew, and can even win the painting they have just seen created.

The way in which reading can bridge a gap between a profoundly personal experi­ence and a kind of shared communion fits not only the reading I do with my daughter but my ambitions for the Keats-Shelley synchronised reading group.

One of the few things that has made this melancholic, unsettling and alienating period bearable is the many ways that reading has helped foster compassion and warmth, often between complete strangers living on opposite sides of the world. Whether this reading renaissance will be fleeting or long lasting remains to be seen. But for now, it is enough that we read and know we are not entirely alone.