“Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”
If you’ve ever found yourself staring at your bookshelf, abandoning books after just a few chapters, or feeling like nothing sounds worth picking out, you’re not alone. Every reader goes through these lulls known as reading slumps. The good news is that the right books are all you need to reignite your love of reading. The best books for a reading slump are typically fast-paced, emotionally engaging, and impossible to put down. Whether it’s a gripping fantasy, tension-fuelled thriller, or a heartwarming work of literary fiction, choosing a story that instantly hooks you can help you break a reading slump and remind you why you love reading so much. So, join us at What We Reading for our best books to get out of a reading slump, from addictive page-turners to comfort reads easy to lose yourself in. If you’re wondering what to read when nothing sounds good anymore, these picks are for you.
Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt
Kicking off our list of the best books for a reading slump is Shelby Van Pelt’s acclaimed bestseller, Remarkably Bright Creatures. After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at Sowell Bay Aquarium. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously disappeared over thirty years ago.
Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors – until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son vanished. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.
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Listen For The Lie – Amy Tintera
Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married the dream guy with a big ring and even bigger home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all and, if you believe the rumours, especially popular with the men in town. But after Lucy is found wandering the street, covered in Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she’s a murderer.
It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie and its handsome host Ben Owens have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to return to solve her friend’s murder, even if she’s the one who did it.
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Legends & Lattes – Travis Baldree
After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time. The battle-weary orc aims to stand fresh, opening the first-ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success – not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.
If Viv wants to put the blade behind her and make her plans a reality, she won’t be able to go it alone. But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travellers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have imagined.
Good Material – Dolly Alderton
Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can’t work out why she stopped. Now, he is without a home, waiting for his stand-up career to take off. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn’t looking. Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him.
In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton serves up one of the best books for a reading slump, featuring two endings, demonstrating precisely why she is a true voice of a generation.
Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission – and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realises that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on his tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery – and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
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Big Swiss – Jen Beagin
Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss.
One day, Greta recognises Big Swiss’ voice in town, and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware that Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to keep her relationship going.
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Daisy Jones & The Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties. Sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ‘n’ roll she loves the most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camilla finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realises that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies.
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Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena is a literary darling while June is a nobody. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse, stealing Athena’s just-finished manuscript, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese labourers during the First World War.
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent? What if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song – complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect the secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she believes she deserves.
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The Satsuma Complex – Bob Mortimer
Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub. He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly vanishes without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading, The Satsuma Complex. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.
And so begins Gary’s quest through the estates and pie shops of South London to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life. One of the best books for getting out of a reading slump, The Satsuma Complex is a brilliantly funny page-turner featuring a cast of unforgettable characters.
Beach Read – Emily Henry
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. She writes a happily ever after; he kills off his entire cast. They’re polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighbouring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.
Until one hazy evening, one thing leads to another, and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts. Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next great American novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of a romcom montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a blackwoods death cult. Everyone will finish a book, and no one will fall in love. Really.
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Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to a local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of the world’s most critically lauded writers.
The Paris Apartment – Lucy Foley
Jess needs a fresh start. She’s broke, alone, and has just left her job under less-than-ideal circumstances. Her half-brother, Ben, didn’t sound thrilled when she asked if she could crash with him for a bit, but he didn’t say no, and surely everything would look better from Paris. Only when she shows up – to find a very nice apartment – Ben isn’t there.
The longer Ben stays missing, the more Jess begins to dig into her brother’s situation, and the more questions she unearths. Ben’s neighbours are an eclectic bunch, and not especially friendly. Jess might have come to Paris to escape her past, but it’s beginning to look like it’s Ben’s future that’s in question.
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The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries in the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the colour yellow. This improbable story of Christopher’s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighbourhood dog makes for one of the most compelling, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent times.
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Ottessa Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
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Lessons In Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it is the early 1960s, and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality.
Forced to resign, she reluctantly signs on as the host of a cooking show, Supper at Six. But her revolutionary approach to cooking, fuelled by scientific and rational commentary, grabs the attention of a nation. And soon, a legion of overlooked housewives find themselves daring to change the status quo. One molecule at a time.
Cleopatra And Frankenstein – Coco Mellors
Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in a sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, to paint freely, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives and the lives of those closest to them in ways they could never have imagined.
Each compulsively readable chapter in this novel explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
