5 Books to Help You Find Your Reading Groove
So, you’re a reader. You read a lot. You read so often that people come to you specifically for book recs. When someone asks you what you’ve been reading lately, it’s always a new title.
Which means when you enter into a reading slump, it probably feels like you’re failing at something, right? We get it. It’s hard, but if you’ve hit a wall with you’re reading, don’t worry! This doesn’t mean you love it any less. Sometimes life gets in the way of the things we love most, and our interests oscillate just like everything else with which we choose to spend our time.
You will find your reading groove again—in the meantime, we wanted to help. Whenever I feel my want to read wavering, I reach for certain books that always help me get back into it. I wanted to share a few of those with you here, and I think if you pick any of these titles up, you won’t be sorry!
5 Get-Me-Back-Into-Reading-Please Books!
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Synopsis: For August, running into a long-ago friend sets in motion resonant memories, and transports her to a time and place she thought she had mislaid: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything.
August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were amazingly beautiful, brilliantly talented, with a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful promise there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where mothers disappeared, where fathers found religion, and where madness was a mere sunset away.
Why It Helps Me: Another Brooklyn was my first Jacqueline Woodson book, and my favorite over all. It’s short, her sentences are concise, and it’s full of the kind of emotion that moves me. Stories about friendship, both in childhood and in adulthood, are few and far between, and Jacqueline Woodson captures the complicated feelings of growing up and, sometimes, growing apart. When I’m feeling my reading in need of a reboot, I reach for my copy, turn to a random chapter, read a few of her gorgeous sentences and I’m ready to go.
Kent State by Deborah Wiles
Synopsis: May 4, 1970. Kent State University. As protestors roil the campus, National Guardsmen are called in. In the chaos of what happens next, shots are fired and four students are killed. To this day, there is still argument of what happened and why.
Told in multiple voices from a number of vantage points -- protestor, Guardsman, townie, student -- Deborah Wiles's Kent State gives a moving, terrifying, galvanizing picture of what happened that weekend in Ohio . . . an event that, even 50 years later, still resonates deeply.
Why It Helped Me: When Jill went to Winter Institute in January 2020, she texted me and said, “I was just at this panel for a new book coming out and I think it might be interesting.” She read it on the plane home, forced it into my hands (lovingly!) and told me I had to read it. I read it in less than an hour. It’s unlike any multi-perspective book I’ve ever read, and filled to the brim with emotion. I was so inspired reading it, we knew we absolutely had to interview the author in season one—and we did!
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Synopsis: Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
Why It Helped Me: I love short story collections and I feel like it’s beyond time they get the same recognition as novels do. Sabrina & Corina is one of the best collections I’ve ever read, and short stories are perfect for reading slumps. Instead of one chapter in an entire book, you can sit down and read an entire story and feel accomplished!
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Synopsis: Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.
Why It Helped Me: Make no mistake, this is an emotional and heavy book (as it should be.) But Tayari Jones writes with such brevity that you fly through the pages. The dialogue is so good and the passing of time is done masterfully. Reading An American Marriage is like being swept up in a swift but strong wind. It takes your breath away.
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Illustrated by Jim Kay
Synopsis: The monster in Conor’s backyard is not the one he’s been expecting — the one from the nightmare he’s had every night since his mother started her treatments. This monster is ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd — whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself — Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.
Why It Helped Me: While my husband was studying abroad, he happened upon a bookstore in Zurich and was taken by this cover. He read it front to back on a train to Berlin, and I woke to a message from him saying: When I get home, you have to read this book. A year later, I sat down with it, poured over the pages, and then cried for an hour straight. It’s a challenging, emotional and perfect story about grief and the different ways we navigate it—especially as children.
All of these books are available at our Bookshop.org site! What books have helped you out of your reading slumps? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all of your bookish updates!
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