As a child, I had no trouble devouring the books I found at the library. I’d come home, arms filled with borrowed treasures, and read novel after novel after novel. With time, I became older and busier. While my love for books never faded, I found myself struggling to find the time and motivation to read through books as quickly as I had in the past.
Rediscovering a love for reading came in the form of wading into water; I didn’t dive in with just any text. The books I read to get me out of a reading slump were quick, entertaining, and thought-provoking.
The titles featured in this list have all of those elements, and they help me every time I find myself stuck in a reading slump.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, 1986
Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl’s castle. To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there’s far more to Howl–and herself–than first meets the eye.
Book Description from Goodreads
Whether you’re a lover of the movie or simply a lover of cozy atmospheres, Howl’s Moving Castle is the perfect book to read on a rainy autumn day. The story follows Sophie, a young-woman-magically-turned-old, who claims she is just plain. She meets the charming (yet often gossiped about) Howl, and the two begin an adventure that brings them to unique characters and guides them through many enchanted doors. One of the best parts of this novel is how well-crafted and thoughtfully laid out all of its pieces are. By the end of their journey, everything clicks perfectly into place. You’ll find yourself cheering for Sophie, rooting for Howl, and smiling from the joy of adventure.
If you enjoy Howl’s Moving Castle, you can continue following the Wizard Howl through two other books from Diana Wynne Jones: Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways. Maybe your reading slump will end by embarking on more adventures with Sophie and Howl.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
Book Description from Goodreads
Never Let Me Go is a difficult book to explain. It’s hard to categorize it into a single genre; saying “science fiction” doesn’t seem to capture how devastatingly plausible the situations in the novel feel.
Without giving too much away, Never Let Me Go is about the devastation of an oppressive system and the people who succumb to the restrictive conditions they are placed in. It’s about childhood and regret and the funny ways in which memory works.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s talent is his ability to write about normal people (and, no, I don’t mean Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which is a novel I have many issues with). While any other writer would have written about someone who overturned the system, conveniently winning the world and finding themselves wrapped in their lover’s arms by the end, Ishiguro chooses to write about the people who don’t do that. He writes about people who see everything unfold; he writes about the person who the hero should be fighting for.
The writing is clever, devastating, and beautiful. There are twists and turns that are cleverly laid out throughout the text. You’ll be unable to let the book go, and you’ll be desperate to find out more about Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and Hailsham.
Never Let Me Go has been adapted into a film starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley. Ishiguro also has several other excellent novels. My favorites include The Remains of the Day and Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro recently published Klara and the Sun (2021).
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, 2017
Seven students are avoiding going to school, hiding in their darkened bedrooms, unable to face their family and friends, until the moment they discover a portal into another world that offers temporary escape from their stressful lives. Passing through a glowing mirror, they gather in a magnificent castle which becomes their playground and refuge during school hours. The students are tasked with locating a key, hidden somewhere in the castle, that will allow whoever finds it to be granted one wish. At this moment, the castle will vanish, along with all memories they may have of their adventure. If they fail to leave the castle by 5 pm every afternoon, they will be eaten by the keeper of the castle, an easily provoked and shrill creature named the Wolf Queen. Delving into their emotion lives with sympathy and a generous warmth, Lonely Castle in the Mirror shows the unexpected rewards of reaching out to others. Exploring vivid human stories with a twisty and puzzle-like plot, this heart-warming novel is full of joy and hope for anyone touched by sadness and vulnerability.
Book Description from Goodreads
Tsujimura writes the story of children who, for various reasons, have chosen to stop attending school in Japan. They stay home, play video games, or reminisce about the friends they had long ago. These children are brought together when their mirrors glow white-bright and invite them to a magic castle in their mirrors.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror is an exciting read because of the small mysteries embedded into the text. While reading, I became wrapped up in a quest to look for clues between the pages for this treasure hunt. Tsujimura also entrances with the mysterious stories of the children in the castle. You’ll slowly learn why everyone has ended up at the castle and the conditions that prevent them from attending school.
The novel had me gripped from start to finish. I was particularly struck by the incredibly real nature of the bullying that Tsujiura writes about and how intense that bullying can be in East Asian cultures. That being said, some of the novel’s most powerful themes are emotional well-being, human connection, and the importance of reaching out. The novel heals you while you read.
Similarly to Ishiguro’s work, I think this novel dabbles into a few genres; there are elements of both fantasy and realism. It is a tender story that I feel will resonate with many people who wish to look back on their childhoods.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, 2013
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace–and will touch lives in a way she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox–possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami in Japan. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
Book Description from Goodreads
A second-generation Japanese American girl, Nao, moves to Tokyo. She struggles with her loneliness and her connection to her American side, reflecting a common struggle amongst Asian Americans who feel “split” between their Asian and American identities. She writes a diary that captures her life, the mysteries of her family, and the journey of coming back to the country of her ethnic heritage. Ruth, a writer, finds the diary many years later. She plows through the diary, hoping to find Nao by the end of it.
A Tale for the Time Being is a return narrative about immigrants converging with their ethnic heritage. Ozeki presents a novel that shows a forms form of healing for Asian Americans, who are uniquely trapped between an American identity, in which they are constantly denied of their American-ness, and an Asian identity, in which they are constantly denied of their Asian-ness. Nao and Ruth’s journeys to each other illustrate that unique loneliness that comes from an Asian American’s denied identities.
The text itself is also very creatively done. You’ll be forced to confront what exactly it means to be a “time being.” You’ll learn what it means to preserve your life in words and reach out, through time, to someone else through storytelling.
It was hard to not feel attached to Nao in the same way that Ruth became attached to Nao’s diary.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, 2015
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’s time-traveling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold…
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Book Description from Goodreads
If you follow the rules of this small, AC-less cafe, you’ll be able to travel back in time. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a series of heavily related short stories. Each one is about regret, love, friendship, and family. The stories are relatively short, but that won’t stop you from becoming attached to the characters and their desperate wishes to see that one person for one final time.
The short stories may help with breaking the reading slump, as the end of each story serves as a natural breath mark. It’s like reading a tiny tiny book within a (slightly) larger one. And this larger one is the beginning of a series. The other books in the series are Tales from the Cafe: A Novel (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, 2) and Before Your Memory Fades: A Novel (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, 3). The third book in the series will be released on November 15, 2022.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, 2020
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Book Description from Goodreads
The concept of a catalogue of all of the different directions your life could’ve taken, based on the various choices you made, isn’t necessarily a new concept. It’s been written about many times in the past. While I don’t think this is my favorite approach, I do think it is effective for what it is. Haig takes a personal approach to regret, desire, and loneliness. Many readers will find a piece of themselves in Nora.
The text is simply written, which will help with a faster, reading-slump-escape reading experience. While the concept is nothing new, you may find that you’d like to continue reading books with that particular concept.
If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio, 2017
Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail – for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he’s released, he’s greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.
As one of the seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.
Book Description from Goodreads
If Howl’s Moving Castle’s cozy atmosphere doesn’t do it for you and dark academia is more your taste, try If We Were Villains. Oliver is an incredibly engaging narrator; he’ll keep you wrapped up in his story. And the most appealing part of the novel is the atmosphere. Rios does an excellent job of establishing the mood.
Some parts are written a bit awkwardly (I find the best word to describe some bits to be “goofy”). As a post-graduate who also went to a vocational high school, I can tell you confidently that no one speaks the way these students speak. No theater concentration students uses that many Shakespeare quotes (unless it’s a joke) past first-year. It’s especially awkward when these are used during more tense moments…
Regardless, if your slump is hitting you around October, this might be the perfect book to get you in the mood for autumn. Ultimately, it is a page turner.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, 2021
An unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Book Description from Goodreads
Love is food, food is love. That cliche is especially true in Korean American families, where language and culture barriers divide members of the family. When saying “I love you” feels like chewing tar, we hand each other our favorite dishes and some plates of sliced fruit.
Zauner, like Ozeki, examines that split-identity crisis faced by many Asian Americans. Zauner, half Korean and half white, struggles with claiming her Korean side after her Korean mother passes away.
Zauner’s memoir is beautifully personal and honest. As a fellow Korean American, I found it validating to read someone’s experiences with their parents be so similar to my own. And it was refreshing to see a Korean American story, as there are so few of those stories out there.
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Dolls: red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight–for Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, it doesn’t matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three women become best friends when they are young and struggling in New York City and then climb to the top of the entertainment industry–only to find that there is no place to go but down. Into the Valley of the Dolls.
Book Description from Goodreads
Three women in Hollywood, balancing love, family, careers, and addictions to barbiturates. Valley of the Dolls is a whirling book filled with classic, 1960s Hollywood scandals. The glitz and glamour of showbiz is spliced with the harsh realities of the working conditions of women and the cruelty of addiction. Susann captures the despair associated with a rise in success and that success’s subsequent crumbling.
Shocking, entertaining, and honest, Valley of the Dolls is a controversial best-seller that’ll keep you reading. I remember finishing this (rather large) novel within a couple of days The novel was heavily criticized when it was first released, but I find that it is, in large part, due to Susann’s willingness to explore Hollywood topics formerly considered improper and unworthy of exploration (leading to critics labeling the novel as “dirty”). The characters are interesting, and you’ll become very invested in their fates.
Any childhood book series!
Nothing cures a book slump better than nostalgia. As a child, I distinctly remember my father reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to me. My bother read The 39 Clues with me, and we tried to put together all of the clues ourselves. When home from a long weekend or half-day, I’d lean back in my chair, stick my feet up on my desk, ignore how the desks’s sharp edge dug into my ankles, and plow through the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.
During the summer of 2020, I found myself bored, unmotivated, and alone. Like many people stuck in quarantine. I hadn’t read much in a long time, and I could feel myself craving a book. There was nothing I wanted to do more than reread the Percy Jackson series. I dug the dusty books out of my childhood collection. Each chapter made me relive the age I was when I first read the books.
The words we read capture our memories, even if the text itself has nothing to do with our personal lives. Sometimes, the key to getting out of a reading slump is just remembering what it was like to be a middle schooler deeply in love with reading.