This time, I'm talking about The Plague by Albert Camus.  Honestly, I'm not sure what to take from this novel.  As one might expect, it's a novel about a plague striking a town in Algeria, presumably in the 1950s, or so I would guess from what I know of Camus.  It's not really stated.

For a novel, it's awfully philosophical, although, again...Camus.  But it's another one of those stories where not a lot actually happens.  More and more, I'm feeling like plot doesn't matter as much as I thought.

Character didn't seem particularly major in this novel, either, which kind of goes back to the lack of action in an amusingly existentialist way...  Perhaps this is a more Sartrean concept, but the existentialist idea is that we are our actions...and in this novel, the characters seem very vague, and that's probably because they never did anything.  Roundabout way of proving the point, but hey, why not?

What I did get out of the book, in terms of philosophy, is the fragility of human life.  The idea of a plague, something that we associate with the middle ages, something that isn't supposed to happen in modern life, coming along and wiping you off the earth is a pretty powerful one, but it becomes more powerful in the modern era when the idea of an afterlife is much less certain.  If one lives with the assumption that there is no afterlife, then living deliberately becomes all the more important.