Kidnapped (notes)

Public domain ebooks might be a good way to stay amused and edified during plague time. For example, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, known as a boy's adventure story, in fact details the intricacies of manners, social position, notions of honor, and the limitations of masculine pride in the Scottish highlands, during the time of the Jacobite uprising of the middle-1700s. The Wikipedians say the novel is about "justice," and that's in there, too, among uncounted arguments about how gentlemen should behave. It begins with a rousing shipboard battle with an alarming body count for a boys' book (or maybe that's what makes it so), and then tracks the two main characters through various physical trials as they cross the wild, sparsely populated Scottish outback. Their narrative includes many encounters with hill people, scrupulously describing dialects and customs, and the writing is fairly brilliant throughout. The Bloomsbury Group excommunicated Stevenson from the canon for some reason, relegating him to the children's section of the library, even though his admirers included (as the Wikipedians tell it): "Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Emilio Salgari, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton."