Awesome Books to Bust You Out of Every Kind of Reading Slump

It’s awesome TV season, and binge-watching is taking over your life.
TV is great, except when it’s evil. If you’re having trouble peeling yourself away from your screens, watch a bunch of Black Mirror episodes read a hilarious media-soaked satire, like Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, or try a book that will remind you (super entertainingly) of the terrible human costs of your reality-TV addiction—I recommend A.S. King’s Reality Boy or Heather Demetrios’ Something Real, the former detailing the trauma of a former reality star, the latter focusing on a girl who’s being drawn back into unwanted reality infamy.  Or if what you really want is a taut, TV-ready page-turner that’ll hit the same plot-junkie buttons as your favorite small-screen addiction, try Lamar Giles’ Fake ID, then start your fantasy casting.

The internet is ruining your attention span.
First, thank you for making it this far. Second, we’ve all been there. What you need is a book that’s easy to read in short, digestible pieces—bonus points if those pieces are hilarious. Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, a Girl in Pieces is told in crazy-charming diary entries, which you can read while waiting for your coffee to brew or during an elevator ride. Todd Hasak-Lowy’s Me Being Me Is Exactly As Insane As You Being You is told in the form of illuminating lists you can binge on, in lieu of, say, randomly graze-reading every Wiki plot description of season two of Friends.

You just read book two of your favorite trilogy, and book three isn’t out till 2016.
I understand your pain. What you need right now is an amazing standalone, something that will get you in and out of a fictional world without the painful wait between installments. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book offers an entire magical, melancholy universe in one book; Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince is a lush fantasy story set in a futuristic Brazil reimagined as a techie prelapsian paradise; and Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, set on an island marked by its deadly, fortune-making water horses, is the perfect read for anyone fiending for the final Raven Boys book (that’s all of us, right?). Alternately, reward your readerly impatience with a stellar series you can buy all at once. Laini Taylor’s epic Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy is one of the most daring, romantic fantasies out there, and pairs perfectly with a Stadium Pal and mega-pack of Clif bars. Nothing will interrupt your reading.

You’re overwhelmed with options.
Sometimes you can’t read a book because all you can think about is all the other books you could be reading instead. One way to deal with this pernicious train of thought is to read a classic you know you should’ve already knocked off your list. No reader could regret gorging themselves on Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a hilarious heartbreaker about a Native American boy who dares to leave his reservation in search of a better education. Alternately, you could read something awesome that’s also short, so short you won’t even have time to freak out about everything else languishing patiently on your to-read list. I suggest Stephanie Kuehn’s Charm & Strange, a slim, layered novel about a boy whose dark secrets have dark secrets, or Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, a haunting dystopian romance set in a contemporary occupied England. Or you could combine the two and pick a long-standing classic that also happens to be a quick read: Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Laurie Halse Anderson’s indispensable Speak can each be read in one perspective-altering afternoon.

You’re out of love with love.
I have a friend who had to stop listening to Sam Cooke for six months after a breakup—six months! No Sam Cooke!—because the love stuff got under her skin. Sometimes it feels like every book is a love story, when you might prefer a bracing fictional slap to the face. Libba Bray’s hallucinogenic Going Bovine, about a boy’s desperate, possibly imaginary quest to save himself from mad cow disease, has just about everything (angels, wizards, parallel universes, Disney World) but a central romance plot. Or maybe an unrequited love story is what you need, as a reminder that love can be epic, life-changing, and real even if it’s never consummated: in Will Walton’s Anything Could Happen, protag Tretch hopes against hope that his best friend and secret crush is secretly gay, too, but knows his happiness rides on far more than that.

What you’re looking for is something unlike anything you’ve ever read.
There’s nothing like a bookshelf oddity, something that can only be described as, “Deadwood meets Harriet the Spy meets a postapocalyptic children’s birthday party…but on a submarine.” While we’re waiting for someone to write that, try Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us, which combines ghosts, bloody ballerinas, incarcerated teens, and impossible second chances with prose worth embroidering on a pillow. Or check out Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, a rangy, brainy take on the famous faerie ballad set among a group of bookish types on a 1970s college campus. In the super-new release stack, Martha Brockenbrough’s The Game of Love and Death is a 1930s-set romantic epic orchestrated by Love and Death themselves, and Maria Dahvana Headley’s Magonia imagines a nautical, steampunk-inflected world above the clouds.

You just read your new favorite book, and no other book compares.
This is a tough nut to crack, but I suggest you go back to basics with the Best YA of All Time. This is obviously subjective, but let me suggest a few books that are near-universally agreed upon to be the best of the best. Try Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell’s pop culture–infused, 1980s-set romance, which crackles with killer dialogue, slow-burn love, and excruciating tension, or Feed, M.T. Anderson’s blazingly smart, frightening, and funny futuristic horror/love story. Or, ya know, you can always reread Harry Potter. Line one of Sorceror’s Stone: “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” You want to keep going, right?
What do you read to break out of a rut?