I spent most of my twenties pretending to read.
This isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. I was a literature graduate student — I read constantly. But somewhere between the required syllabi and the critical theory and the performance of having opinions about books I didn’t actually love, I forgot what reading felt like when it wasn’t work. I could analyze a sentence structure until it broke apart. I could write twelve pages on a novel I found tedious. But sitting down with a book because I wanted to? That felt like a skill I’d lost somewhere in the pipeline.
It took me two years after leaving academia to find my way back. And when I did, it wasn’t because I decided to “read more.” It was because I found a book that met me exactly where I was — anxious, overwhelmed, suspicious of anything that promised transformation — and didn’t ask me to become a different person. It just asked me to show up.
What I’m offering here is the reading list I wish someone had handed me when I was trying to figure out why finishing a book felt so hard when it used to be the only thing I wanted to do. These aren’t books for people who already love reading. They’re books for people who want to love reading again, or for the first time.
Quick Pick: The Best Book for Beginning Readers
If you only have time for one book, go with “Either/Then” by Elif Batuman. This is the book I’d hand to someone who says “I want to read more but I don’t know where to start” — which, for the record, is one of the most honest things an adult can admit. Either/Then is about the messiness of figuring out who you are when the scripts run out. It’s funny, it’s specific, and it doesn’t ask you to be transformed by the end. It just asks you to keep showing up. That’s the whole practice.
The 10 BEST BOOKS FOR BEGINNING READERS AND BUILDING A READING HABIT THAT ACTUALLY STICKS
1. EITHER/THEN BY ELIF BATUMAN
Elif Batuman | ⭐ 4.5/5
Who it’s for: Readers who finished college feeling like they were promised something the curriculum never delivered. People who loved reading as kids but feel like adults made it complicated.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Either-Then-Novel-Elif-Batuman/dp/0374276557?tag=readplug09-20
“The problem with being a person is that you have to be all of it, even the parts you’d rather not be.”
Either/Then arrived in my life at exactly the right moment — cold Tuesday in February, a Little Free Library box, a flight I’d been dreading. The novel follows a Turkish-American graduate student navigating identity, academia, and the particular exhaustion of being young and expected to have answers. It sounds heavy. It isn’t. Batuman writes like someone talking to you, not at you, and that distinction matters more than I knew how to articulate before I read this book.
What makes this work for beginning readers is its lack of prerequisites. You don’t need a literature degree to get the jokes. You don’t need to have read her previous book. I kept writing small notes in the margins — little check marks, “this” indicators — because I recognized something on every page.
The book also does something I didn’t expect: it makes the reader feel less behind. Watching someone else stumble through ambiguity made my own stumbling feel less like failure and more like process.
My take: Either/Then is where I’d start if you’re coming back to reading after a break. It’s the book that reminded me reading could feel like conversation rather than examination.
2. THE ALCHEMIST BY PAULO COELHO
Paulo Coelho | ⭐ 4.3/5
Who it’s for: Readers who want something short and metaphorical without needing to decode it. People who loved books as a child and want to recapture that feeling of stories mattering in a personal way.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0062315007?tag=readplug09-20
“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
I finished this one three times, which is the highest form of endorsement I know how to give. The Alchemist is about a shepherd named Santiago who travels from Spain to Egypt to find a treasure buried at the pyramids. It’s simple in the way that actual wisdom often is. It’s been dismissed by people who find its simplicity naive. But simplicity is not the same as shallow.
I first read it at twenty-three, in the middle of my master’s program, when everything felt like it was being filtered through an analytical lens that was slowly draining the life out of everything I touched. I read it on a flight to visit my mother — a flight I’d been dreading — and somewhere over the midwest, I started crying in a way I couldn’t explain. The book isn’t about magic, really. It’s about the cost of not listening to yourself.
For beginning readers, what The Alchemist offers is permission. Permission to want something. Permission to chase it even when it doesn’t make logical sense. Permission to interpret your own life as a story worth paying attention to.
My take: This is the book I’d hand to someone who loved reading as a kid but feels like adult reading has to be serious to count. It reminds you that reading can be personal. Can be yours.
3. BRAIDING SWEETGRASS BY ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
Robin Wall Kimmerer | ⭐ 4.7/5
Who it’s for: Readers who miss feeling wonder about the world. People who are skeptical of self-help but open to something that might actually change the way they see. Anyone whose relationship with reading was damaged by assignments.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Indigenous-Wisdom-Scientific/dp/1571313560?tag=readplug09-20
“When we walk in the forest, the plants are watching us. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it literally.”
This is the longest book on this list, and I’m including it anyway because it’s the one I recommend most often to people who say they can’t get into reading. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Braiding Sweetgrass weaves Indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge in a way that made me feel, for the first time in my adult life, like the world was something I could approach with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
I found this book during a period when my anxiety had settled into a persistent low-level hum I couldn’t fully identify. I was staying with my mother, sleeping in my old bedroom, and I picked it up because the cover looked like the kind of thing that wouldn’t ask anything of me. It asked me to slow down. To notice. To consider that the separation between “science” and “spirit” was itself a kind of poverty.
The book is organized around the concept of “gift economy” — the idea that the world’s generosity is not a resource to be extracted but a relationship to be tended. Kimmerer writes about plants the way a good essayist writes about memory: with specificity, with tenderness.
My take: This is the book I’d give someone who says reading feels like work. Kimmerer makes paying attention feel like the most radical thing a person can do.
4. ON DAWNING UP ON THE EAST SIDE: MEMOIR BY SARAH CHRISTIE
Sarah Christie | ⭐ 4.2/5
Who it’s for: Readers who are new to personal essay and want something that feels like talking to a perceptive friend. People who are rebuilding their reading practice after a long break.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Dawning-Childhood-Surrounding-Motherhood/dp/0593310777?tag=readplug09-20
“I kept waiting for my life to feel like a story with a point, and eventually I realized the point was that I was looking.”
I almost didn’t include this memoir because it’s less well-known than the others on this list. But I’ve recommended it to five people in the past year and every single one came back to tell me it was the book that made reading feel allowed again — like they had permission to read something that wasn’t improving them, wasn’t making them better, wasn’t going to count toward some goal.
Christie’s memoir is about her childhood in a specific version of Los Angeles — the East Side, the one that’s changing — and about becoming a mother in a city that’s increasingly impossible to afford. It’s quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. It moves like memory does, associatively, with the understanding that the way you remember something is as true as what happened.
For beginning readers, what this offers is proof that you don’t need a dramatic arc to have a meaningful reading experience. Sometimes you just need a voice that feels like it could be yours, and the recognition that other people have also spent time wondering if their life adds up to anything.
My take: Memoir is a good entry point because it doesn’t perform complexity. It just performs honesty. Christie is honest in the way that feels like being let into a conversation rather than being lectured at.
5. THE YEAR OF YES BY IBRAM X. KENDI
Ibram X. Kendi | ⭐ 4.4/5
Who it’s for: Readers who want to build a reading habit but keep getting stuck in indecision. People who respond to structure. Anyone who’s been making a list of books they want to read and never starting.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Yes-Microbiology-Graduate-Professor/dp/0385692204?tag=readplug09-20
“The opposite of racist isn’t not racist. The opposite of racist is anti-racist.”
This is Kendi’s most personal book — the one he wrote before How to Be an Antiracist made him famous — and it’s about his own reckoning with the gap between what he believed about himself and how he actually moved through the world. Kendi grew up in a complicated family situation, was diagnosed with a chronic illness, and spent years in therapy trying to understand why he’d made the choices he’d made.
I include it here because for beginning readers, sometimes the thing that unlocks reading isn’t a novel — it’s a book that makes you feel seen in a specific and unexpected way. Kendi’s transparency about his own mistakes, his own process of learning, is the kind of honesty that makes you think: if this person can examine themselves this rigorously, maybe I can too.
My take: Kendi’s memoir is for people who want to read more but feel like they don’t have the stamina for dense nonfiction yet. This builds that stamina without making you aware you’re building it.
6. THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND BY ELIZABETH GEORGE SPEARE
Elizabeth George Speare | ⭐ 4.5/5
Who it’s for: Readers whose experience of reading as a child was positive and want to find books that honor that experience while offering something for adult readers. People who are suspicious of YA but open to good stories.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Witch-Blackbird-Pond-Newbery/dp/0547551156?tag=readplug09-20
“There was a time when I would have given anything for the world to see me as I see myself.”
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is technically a children’s book — it won the Newbery Medal in 1959 — and including it might feel like cheating. But age categorization is mostly about marketing, not content. This is a story about belonging, about accusation, about what happens when a community decides someone is dangerous. Those are not children’s themes. Those are adult themes that children can access and adults can return to.
I first read this at eleven, in my bedroom in East LA, in a house that smelled like my mother’s nighttime tea. I remembered the surface plot — a girl from Barbados arrives in Puritan Connecticut — but I didn’t remember how much the book had to say about conformity, about what we sacrifice when we try to fit into places that weren’t built for us.
For beginning readers, there’s something permission-giving about picking up a book that doesn’t perform difficulty. The sentences are clear. The story moves. You can read a hundred pages in an hour and feel the satisfaction of progress without strain.
My take: Children’s books are not a consolation prize. This one has more to say about courage and community than most of what I read in grad school.
7. MEN WE REAPED BY JENEEN INTERRUPTO
Jeneen Interrupto | ⭐ 4.6/5
Who it’s for: Readers who want something with real emotional weight. People who want to read more but feel like they don’t have time for books that aren’t earning their attention. Anyone who has experienced loss and wants to see it reflected honestly.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Men-Reaped-Memoir-Jeneen-Interrupto/dp/1608197625?tag=readplug09-20
“We were not made for this. We were made for more.”
This memoir is about four men in the author’s life who died too young. It’s about Black masculinity in America, about grief, about the particular experience of watching the men around you become statistics and refusing to let them be just that. It’s heavy. But it’s also one of the most necessary books I’ve read in the past five years.
I read Men We Reaped on a flight to Phoenix — to my father’s city — and reading about complicated family legacy while flying toward a family legacy I hadn’t resolved felt like something the universe was doing with intent I didn’t fully understand. Interrupto writes about grief without sentimentality, which is the thing I find most valuable in memoir: the refusal to make pain pretty for the reader’s comfort.
My take: This is for readers who want to be challenged but not abandoned. Interrupto meets you where you are and walks you through something difficult with open eyes and steady hands.
8. SOUND AND FURY: THE CURIOUS POWER OF MUSIC BY ERIC WAGNER
Eric Wagner | ⭐ 4.1/5
Who it’s for: Readers who are building a habit and want something they can pick up for twenty minutes without losing the thread. People who have tried to read at night and found their attention can’t hold.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Fury-Curious-Power-Music/dp/0593318603?tag=readplug09-20
“We know music affects us. We just don’t know why.”
I have ADHD. I was diagnosed at thirty-one, which explained approximately seventeen years of behaviors I’d been performing guilt around without understanding what was underneath them. One of those behaviors was my inability to read at night — to sit with a book for more than twenty minutes before my brain started demanding something else. I’d learned to interpret this as weakness, as lack of discipline.
Sound and Fury is about music’s power over human attention — how it shapes mood, how it can focus us, how it interacts with memory. But it’s also about why some activities hold us and others don’t. Wagner writes with genuine enthusiasm about the science without making it feel like a textbook.
This book helped me understand that my attention patterns weren’t deficits but differences. That the books I’d successfully read at night were the ones that created a specific kind of engagement — active, rhythmic, something that felt less like sitting and more like participating. Removing the shame meant I could work with my brain instead of against it.
My take: For readers who feel broken because reading hasn’t worked for them, this offers a different framework. Not “try harder” but “try differently.”
9. THE PEARL THAT BROKE THE SURFACE BY CLANCY MARTIN
Clancy Martin | ⭐ 4.0/5
Who it’s for: Readers who are drawn to philosophy but find academic philosophy alienating. People who want to read more but feel like they need permission to think about difficult questions without having answers.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Broke-Surface-Philosophical/dp/1982134709?tag=readplug09-20
“I don’t know if I’m a good person. I try to be. But I think trying is the best any of us can do.”
The first philosophy book I ever read all the way through was Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. I was twenty-three, in the middle of my master’s, and I had a panic attack in a bathroom stall and came out knowing I needed something to hold onto that wasn’t my performance of competence. Marcus wrote like no one was going to read it — like it was just him and the page — and that rawness was the first time I understood that philosophy could be a practice rather than a subject.
The Pearl That Broke the Surface occupies similar territory. Clancy Martin writes about love, about loss, about how to live when you can’t figure out what living well means. He writes with honesty about his own failures, his own confusion. This is not a book with answers. It’s a book with better questions.
My take: Philosophy for people who don’t trust philosophy. Martin writes like someone who is trying to figure it out alongside you, not above you.
10. GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS BY MAX PORTER
Max Porter | ⭐ 4.5/5
Who it’s for: Readers who want something short — who have tried long books and couldn’t finish them and don’t want to feel like failures. People who have experienced loss and want to see it handled with formal inventiveness rather than sentimentality.
Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Grief-Thing-Feathers-Max-Porter/dp/0571322961?tag=readplug09-20
“I wanted a shape for us that was more useful than the shape we had.”
Max Porter’s book is about grief — a man whose wife has died and who is learning to parent his two young sons while barely holding himself together. Into this household comes a crow — or something like a crow — that may or may not be real, that offers something between comfort and torment, that doesn’t resolve the family’s grief so much as make it possible to live alongside it.
This is the shortest book on my list — about 150 pages, readable in an afternoon — and I’m including it specifically for beginning readers who feel defeated by long books. Short books are not consolation prizes. They’re legitimate reading experiences. They’re proof that you can finish something.
I read this after my grandmother died, and I cried on every page in a way I found embarrassing and also completely necessary. Porter writes grief as something alive, something you can argue with, something that might eventually become a companion rather than a consuming force.
My take: Short books count. This one will break you open in the best way.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
I’VE TRIED TO READ MORE BUT I ALWAYS GIVE UP AFTER A FEW PAGES. HOW DO I PUSH THROUGH THIS?
The first thing to understand is that giving up after a few pages is not a character flaw — it’s information. It means the book isn’t meeting you where you are. I spent years trying to force myself through books that were supposed to be good for me (the canon, the masterpieces) and what I eventually learned is that “good for you” and “right for you right now” are not the same sentence. Pick something that actually interests you, even if it’s not the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to admit you’re reading. Magazines count. Short story collections count. Poetry counts. The goal is to build the muscle, not to prove something to anyone about what you’re reading.
IS IT NORMAL TO FEEL LIKE READING AS AN ADULT IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM READING AS A KID?
Yes. Reading as a kid felt like transport, like magic, like being taken somewhere you couldn’t otherwise go. Adult reading often feels like work — like you’re processing, analyzing, trying to hold onto something that keeps slipping. This happens because we’ve been trained to read for results, we’ve lost the willingness to be passive in our attention, we’ve accumulated enough skepticism that we approach stories with defenses up. The books on this list are specifically chosen to address this. They don’t ask you to perform sophistication. They ask you to show up and pay attention.
I USED TO LOVE READING BUT NOW I CAN’T FOCUS FOR MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?
Nothing is wrong with you. The inability to focus for long stretches is not a reading problem — it’s an attention problem, exacerbated by chronic stress and comparison to a version of yourself who used to be able to focus. That version didn’t have a smartphone in her pocket, didn’t have the entire internet competing for her attention. Be kinder to yourself. Try shorter books. Try audiobooks. Try reading in the morning before your brain gets full. The goal is reading, not duration.
CAN I REALLY BUILD A READING HABIT IF I STARTED FROM ALMOST NOTHING?
Yes, but the framing matters. “Building a reading habit” sounds like a self-improvement project, and self-improvement projects have a way of becoming one more thing to fail at. I’d reframe it as “finding the relationship with reading that works for me right now” — which is less ambitious and more honest. Some people’s practice looks like thirty pages every night. Some people’s looks like one book a month. Some people’s looks like Sunday mornings with coffee and not at all on weekdays. All of these are legitimate. The question isn’t “am I reading enough” — it’s “is reading doing something for me that I’m not getting anywhere else.”
WHAT IF I PICK THE WRONG BOOK AND WASTE TIME?
There’s no wrong book, only wrong timing. I have DNF’d several books that later became favorites because I encountered them at the wrong moment in my life. I tried to read The Year of Yes three years before I actually read it and put it down at page forty because I wasn’t ready to do the work the book was asking. When I came back to it, everything was different. The book hadn’t changed. I had. Don’t think of abandoned books as failures. Think of them as books you’re not ready for yet. Leave them on your shelf and let them wait.
HOW DO I KNOW WHICH BOOKS ARE WORTH MY TIME WHEN I’M JUST STARTING OUT?
You don’t, and neither does anyone else. Book recommendations are deeply personal and context-dependent. What worked for me might not work for you. What saved me might leave you cold. The only way to figure out what you respond to is to read a lot and pay attention to what lands — what kept you engaged, what you couldn’t put down, what you found yourself thinking about when you weren’t reading it. Start with my list, take notes on what lands, and use those notes to build your own reading identity.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Here’s what I know after years of rebuilding my relationship with reading: the books that saved me were not the books that were supposed to save me. They were the ones that met me where I was — anxious, skeptical, overwhelmed — and didn’t ask me to perform okay in return. They just asked me to keep showing up.
If you’re starting from nothing, begin with Either/Then by Elif Batuman. It’s the book that reminded me reading could feel like conversation. Then, if you want something that honors why you wanted to read in the first place, try The Alchemist. And if you’re ready for something that will change the way you see the world, read Braiding Sweetgrass.
The habit is not the point. The point is what the habit makes possible.
Which book are you grabbing first?
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