27 Nov 2019

We asked our booksellers to share a book that got them out of a reading rut.

Leanne Hall recommends Stargazing by Jen Wang

For some reason graphic novels always get me out of a reading slump – perhaps because it feels refreshing to focus on visuals as well as words? Reading a good graphic novel feels like food for my eyes and a pep-up for my brain. Stargazing by Jen Wang recently rejuvenated me; it focusses on the friendship between two very different girls – quiet and studious Christine and creative free spirit Moon. The cosy world of tweens comes across so clearly, with the two girls bouncing between school, church, music practice, Chinese lessons and tutoring, and I really felt Christine and Moon’s growing pains around fitting in, meeting expectations and being a good friend.

Megan Wood recommends This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes

Fear not, this isn’t a self-help book. Unless you need help getting out of a reading rut. I committed the cardinal sin of judging a book by it’s cover when I picked this one up, but then tore through it on the first and every subsequent reading. If I’m ever in a reading rut, I find myself going back to this.

This Book Will Save Your Life was my introduction to A. M. Homes, and I haven’t looked back since. It’s a quirky story about kindness, generosity and the weirdness of people, and while it’s quite different to her other writing, it’s definitely not one to miss. In this book, Richard is living an isolated life, trading stocks from his treadmill in his LA home, when he has a health scare. On his way home from the hospital, he stops at a doughnut shop, and it is from here he reflects on his life, and begin his random acts of kindness, including lending his car to said doughnut shop owner who desperately wants to try driving a Mercedes, airlifting a horse out of the sinkhole forming near his house, and putting a crying, fed up housewife up at a hotel after finding her sobbing in the supermarket. This is such an interesting book on the exploration of doing good, and the reactions from other people about what would motivate someone to do that. I love it because it’s a bit weird, bizarre things keep happening, but it’s written in a style that makes it so easy to read and makes the odd happenings not seem that strange.

Marie Matteson recommends Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Reading ruts are unfortunately part of the job of bookselling – always reading, always reading with a purpose. Last year I found myself in a long rut. Reading was work and after work I didn’t want to read any more. Then came a reading copy of Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. I looked at it and thought, it’s short and I have enjoyed her other books and my WiFi is playing up. So I picked it up. Best decision ever.

Ghost Wall is completely immersive, I read it in one sitting and over a year later it still pops back into my head fully realised at unexpected times of contemplation. As to the story – not by choice Sylvie is spending her summer before the end of high school in an iron age Northumberland hut. That’s all you need, an entry point.

Georgia Brough recommends Star-Crossed by Minnie Darke

Somewhere towards the end of last year I had the biggest slump to end all slumps. I’d read what felt like hundreds of books in 2018, and I’d felt uninspired and bored by a disappointingly large number of them. In the lead-up to Christmas and summer, I just wanted to give my brain a rest. Then, Minnie Darke’s Star-Crossed landed in my hands. In this novel, budding journalist Justine bumps into Nick, an old friend and aspiring actor on whom she had an enormous crush as a kid. With old feelings bubbling up to the surface, it becomes apparent to Justine that Nick is a ‘true believer’ – in horoscopes, that is. So, in an attempt to get Nick’s attention, Justine begins fiddling with the star signs in her paper to influence him to ask her out. But the changes she makes spark ripple effects that will not only change her and Nick’s lives, but the lives of many others.

I can only really describe this book as if it were the love child of Love Actually and your weekly horoscope. It’s a warm, funny and bloody engaging rom-com without being heavy on sentimentality. It was the feel-good book I needed when I was really not feeling good at all, and it reminded me that reading doesn’t just have to be intellectually challenging; it can also be really fun. I heartily recommend it for plopping down by the pool or on the beach with this summer.

Jackie Tang recommends Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

When I find myself in a reading rut, I like to turn back to something comfortingly familiar – a favourite childhood classic or a new book with warm familiar tropes. One of the best books I’ve encountered for this is Curtis Sittenfeld’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Eligible .

There are so many ways Sittenfeld makes Austen’s original story beats and character dynamics sing in this modern retelling – Jane and Lizzie pursuing careers in New York while their mother tuts in disapproval from Cincinnati; Bingley setting the community aflutter because he’s the former star of a Bachelor-style reality dating show. I found myself barrelling through every chapter, hungering for the next ‘of course!’ moment when Sittenfeld would find the perfect contemporary analogue and taking equal pleasure in mentally disputing the choices I disagreed with (the Ham subplot). The dialogue is sharp and hilarious, the simmering hate-to-love tension between Sittenfeld’s Lizzie and Darcy is well developed and swoon-worthy, and despite its 550 pages, at no point did I feel bogged down by the length – there’s a zip and effervescence to Sittenfeld’s writing that propels you like a jet stream.

Tye Cattanach recommends The Strays by Emily Bitto

I was late to the party in reading this magnificent book. The 2015 Stella Prize winner had been sitting in my to-read pile for four years, but it wasn’t until I worked an event in which Emily was in conversation with Michelle De Kretser that I got around to reading her novel. What a treasure it is! I literally didn’t move until I finished it.

The Strays is possibly one of the most perfectly written books I have ever had the privilege to read. So beautifully written, I felt as though I was physically present in the Trentham house and its magical garden – a participant in the dinners, the parties, the drama. I fell deeply in love with these characters and felt keenly their passions, their grief, their rage, their love and their loss. So believable are they, I was convinced they must have been real people and looked them up, only to learn I was not the first to have done so. Despite them being entirely fictional, Bitto has made them real.

The highest compliment I can pay any book, is to regret finishing it so much, I read it again immediately; it’s something I so rarely do, I can count those books on one hand. But that is exactly what I did with The Strays. I cannot wait to see what Bitto writes next.

Bronte Coates recommends The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm

I don’t have reading slumps per se as I tend to be the kind of studious reader who perseveres with books, usually for work purposes. If I’m really stuck, I’ll find myself revisiting an old favourite (hullo Harry my old friend). However, I do sometimes have phases where I don’t find anything I love for what feels like an uncomfortably long time. That is until I do.

I came across Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman at one such juncture and I vividly remember how its opening chapter gripped me immediately. In this smart, sophisticated work of literary criticism, Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath and in doing so, reflects on the relationship between a biographer and the truth. I’m a long-time Plath devotee and Malcolm is both sympathetic and curious in her investigation of the writer’s legacy and how it has come to loom so large in popular imagination. This is a compulsively readable book, both thoughtful and juicy, and has the power to make you think harder about the world around you.