Trying to get back into reading?
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read
Books to rekindle your passion for the printed word
Reading is hard, especially when you’re burned out from assigned textbook reading or long hours of work. Many of us were voracious readers as children. We went through book after book until for some reason — be it sports, extracurriculars, or studying — life got in the way. And in college, making friends and our academic struggles did too.
We all remember our childhood bibliophilia, and many of us want to get back into reading for fun and to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. I’ve come up with a list of books that, while a breeze to read, still have impressive literary depth. Here are my recommendations, all relatively short and all stories that I love:
- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut: Vonnegut is a master of literary wit and a truly original writer. (You may have read the excellent Slaughterhouse-Five in high school.) He wrote 14 full novels and dozens of short stories that analyze, with bizarre humor, American life. A Vonnegut novel feels like the best kind of beach read: You fly through the pages, but never feel like you’re wasting your time. While they’re all great, Mother Night is undoubtedly my favorite . Set during the Second World War, Mother Night is the “memoir” of Howard Campbell, an American double agent working as a Nazi propaganda chief. The absurdity of war and modern life takes center stage as Campbell becomes the darling of a white supremacist dentist, the target of a Soviet spy, and the object of unrequited love.
Liked it? Read Vonnegut’s Bluebeard and The Sirens of Titan. Also try George Saunders’ bizarre short stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. - The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: Everyone is talking about the TV series, but the book is incredible and worth every page. Atwood is renowned for her ability to create entire universes that are eerily similar to our own. The Handmaid’s Tale will make your feminist blood boil, and you’ll undoubtedly make comparisons to Western society today. Some scenes are sexually graphic and disturbing, but they accurately reflect the sexual violence that women regularly suffer. Atwood won’t let you forget that.
Liked it? Read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin for its commentary on gender. Also try Island by Aldous Huxley and its attempt at utopia. - Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto: Yoshimoto is a Japanese writer who expertly portrays the struggles of everyday life. Kitchen, a collection of two novellas, is touching, a breeze to read, and accessible. She explores the meaning of family in an ever-shifting, uprooted social world to devastating effect, with jokes thrown in along the way. Kitchen is a little nutty, but the protagonists’ struggles may seem familiar to their own with a little literary twist.
Liked it? There are many great contemporary Japanese writers who have been translated into English. Try Haruki Murakami’s story of love and mental illness, Norweigan Wood, or the melancholy No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Yoshimoto’s other works are also excellent. - Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich: Not for the faint of heart, Voices from Chernobyl is a study of grief, loss, and meaningless death in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, has created what some call a new form of literature: She interviewed dozens of survivors, including the mothers of deformed children and the wives of the mutilated first responders, and let them speak for themselves. Her work is a devastating look at unrelenting grief and sadness and a strong cautionary tale of the dangers of nuclear power.
Liked it? Read Alexievich’s other books translated into English: Zinky Boys on the Soviet-Afghan War, War’s Unwomanly Face on women’s role in WWII, and Secondhand Time on the sad post-Soviet Russia. Japan at War, an oral history that follows ordinary Japanese people through WWII, by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook is also excellent. - The Periodic Table by Primo Levi: Famous for his Holocaust survival memoir, Primo Levi was also a chemist and an inventive novelist. In The Periodic Table, he names every chapter after an element and uses this unique idea as a jumping off point to weave an all-engrossing story that analyzes the strange 1930s through 1950s in Italty. Levi’s years as a reckless freelance chemist, interludes that take place in mystical lands, and Levi’s exploration of his fragile mental state make an engrossing read.
Liked it? Read other autobiographical novels like the sexually charged and sad Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, a young working class French man’s memoir of abuse. - The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin: The greatest living literary science fiction writer, Le Guin is a master of world building and political analysis. Set on a moon run as an anarchist colony, The Dispossessed follows Shevek, a scientist drawn by the supposed academic freedom and resources of his people’s original capitalist home planet. Needless to say, neither society is perfect and following the conflicts in Shevek’s mind becomes an all-engrossing pursuit for the reader. From the beauty and terror of political revolutions to the perils and rewards of farm work, coupled with a precise dissection of gross income inequality, The Dispossessed is truly a novel for our times.
Liked it? Read Le Guin’s other path-breaking novels like the aforementioned The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest, which explores environmental racism through allegory. Also try N.K. Jemisin’s speculative fiction series The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. - I Love Dick by Chris Kraus: Yes, the title is provocative, but Kraus’s masterpiece of feminine obsession is unforgettable (as is the experience of reading this in public). Through dozens of letters to the proverbial Dick, a pretentious social theorist, Kraus tears apart the art world, lays out her own deep-rooted insecurities as a failed filmmaker, and exposes academia’s ingrained misogyny. As her failing marriage to a French theorist and her obsession with Dick suffocate her, you’ll find yourself gasping for air, too. If you like memoirs and a piercing story, I Love Dick is perfect.
Liked it? Read the other two novels, Aliens & Anorexia and Torpor, in Kraus’s study of her marriage, failure, and the beginnings of middle age. Also try poet Eileen Myles’ autobiographical novel, Chelsea Girls, which hits as hard as Kraus’s work.
