Best Books to Read When in a Reading Slump

A reading slump — the sudden inability to engage with books that used to be easy and pleasurable — is one of the most frustrating experiences for regular readers. The causes are various: a too-ambitious book that left you drained, a period of high stress, or simply a run of books that didn’t click. The cure is almost always the same: a short, absorbing, immediately pleasurable book that reminds you why reading felt so good. The books listed here are the most reliably effective reading slump breakers — books that work, whatever is going on.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

The single most consistently recommended reading slump book — and one of the most original novels of recent years. Piranesi lives in a vast, infinite house of halls, statues, and tides, and tends the bones of the few people who have died there; his journal, which narrates the novel, is the account of a man slowly discovering the truth about his world and himself. The mystery is immediate, the prose is clear and strange and beautiful, and the novel is under 300 pages. Clarke’s world is completely unlike anything else in fiction; once you are inside it, nothing else competes for attention.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

The most reliably funny book on this list — and the fastest way back to reading pleasure if what’s missing is joy. Arthur Dent is rescued from the demolition of the Earth (to make way for a hyperspace bypass) by his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien researcher for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What follows is one of the funniest sustained comic narratives in English: the improbability drive, Marvin the Paranoid Android, the question of Life the Universe and Everything, and the answer 42. Read in an afternoon; impossible to put down; immediately cheering.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (2012)

The warmest book on this list — a Swedish novel about a curmudgeonly widower who is planning to end his life when a young family crashes a trailer into his garden and accidentally makes themselves necessary to him. Backman’s comedy is warm rather than dark, his account of grief is honest without being harrowing, and Ove himself — rigid, principled, secretly generous — is one of the most likeable difficult characters in contemporary fiction. Accessible, short, and emotionally satisfying in exactly the way a reading slump requires.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (1987)

Murakami’s most accessible novel — a realistic, coming-of-age love story set in Tokyo in the 1960s, following Toru Watanabe as he remembers his time at university and his relationships with Naoko (the girlfriend of his dead best friend) and Midori (a direct, vital young woman who offers a different kind of life). The novel has Murakami’s characteristic atmosphere — music, solitude, loss, the strangeness of young adulthood — without his more challenging magical elements. Short, atmospheric, and emotionally direct; the best Murakami for reading slumps.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Vonnegut’s masterpiece — and the perfect reading slump book for readers who want something that demands almost nothing technically while being deeply intelligent and funny. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time and moves between the firebombing of Dresden (which Vonnegut survived as a prisoner of war), suburban American life in the 1950s and 60s, and an alien zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. The novel is short, chapter by chapter, and its fatalistic comedy — ‘So it goes,’ the refrain for every death — is among the most humane responses to horror in American literature.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020)

The most comforting book on this list — a novel about regret and possibility that has helped a great many readers through difficult times. Nora Seed, after a failed suicide attempt, finds herself in the Midnight Library, where every book contains a version of her life with different choices made. The novel is warm, accessible, and directly engaged with the question of whether the life you’re living is the right one. More reassuring than challenging; exactly what a reading slump sometimes requires.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002)

Murakami’s most immediately absorbing long novel — a mystery that draws readers in with genuine propulsion. Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old, runs away from home on his birthday; simultaneously, Satoru Nakata, an elderly man in Tokyo, discovers he can talk to cats. Their narratives gradually converge in ways that are dream-like, mythological, and emotionally satisfying. The novel is long (500+ pages) but reads quickly — Murakami’s prose is smooth and his mysteries compelling — and for readers who want to get lost in a big world, it is one of the most absorbing available.

Reading Your Way Out of a Slump

The strategy for reading slumps is not force but pleasure: choose the book most likely to delight you, not the most ambitious or the most important. Read in short sessions if long ones feel impossible. Give yourself permission to abandon books that aren’t working — there are too many good books to spend time on ones that aren’t clicking. The reading appetite returns; it always does. These books exist to speed the return along.