Entertainment
Easy Breezy Reads
If one of your New Year's resolutions was to read more books in 2015, the GoodReads Reading Challenge is a great way to keep track. The Challenge lets you know if you are ahead, on track, or behind your goal. If you are currently a few books behind your goal, you are probably starting to feel the pressure. You can see if your friends have reached or exceeded their own reading goals as well. A little competition between friends will help motivate you to hit the books. To ensure you achieve your book target this year, pick up some quick and easy reads.
Sometimes life is too hectic to commit to reading a difficult or massive book like Moby-Dick or Infinite Jest. To help you through the last few months of 2015, we've created a diverse list of quick reads. Finish out your year strong with some science fiction, romance, or YA novels. It's amazing how accomplished you'll feel when you finish reading a book in just a day or two. Better to catch up now so that you can attend your holiday and New Year's Eve parties. This list will surely get you closer to completing your Reading Challenge.
1. Office Girl by Joe Meno
Joe Meno's hipster romance is light but not fluffy. He perfectly captures that time in life when you don't know what you're doing and the future is full of possibilities.
2. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven is a gripping Science Fiction novel about a flu pandemic that kills most of the world's population. The suspenseful page-turner vividly depicts life before and after the pandemic.
3. Starter for Ten by David Nicholls
Starter for Ten is a semi-autobiographical coming of age story about the character Brian Jackson and his first year of university. It is a super fun and amusing short read.
4. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Simsion's narrator, Don Tillman, is unique because he is clearly somewhere on the autism spectrum. The Rosie Project is an incredibly entertaining and heartwarming story.
5. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell creates authentic and likable characters. Attachments is a funny and touching portrayal of friendship in the digital age.
6. The Bees by Laline Pauline
The Bees is an extraordinarily original book that takes place over the course of a year, about the lives of bees in a hive. Laline Paull imagines a dystopian world told from the perspective of Flora 717, a worker bee.
7. World War Z by Max Brooks
Best read during a thunderstorm or snow day, World War Z will have you on the edge of your seat. It uniquely recounts the story of the zombie wars from the perspective of those who fought it.
8. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
This New York Times Best Seller is a historical novel set in 1946 as London emerges from the Second World War. The novel unfolds rapidly through a series of correspondences. Despite dealing with a dark period in history, the novel is light and pleasant.
9. Looking For Alaska by John Green
John Green's first YA novel about Miles and his formative teenage years of friendship, love, and grief. Despite navigating through some teenage angst, the book offers humor and lightness.
10. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler's Wife is a suspense, romance, and science fiction novel all in one. Niffenegger guides her reader through a tangled narrative about the time traveler, Henry, and his wife, Claire.
11. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Pi, a young man, survives a shipwreck and is stranded for months on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The story is rich and wrestles with questions of philosophy and religious.
12. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Help is a wildly popular novel about black servants working in white Southern households in the early 1960s. It is a fantastic read because Stockett manages to seamlessly merge fact and fiction.
13. The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick
New York Times bestselling author, Matthew Quick, brings us another funny and tender story. Similar to The Silver Linings Playbook , Quick delivers an offbeat story with eccentric characters.
14. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein by Matthew Quick
This science fiction novel is about an adult human who comes to Earth after being born and raised on the planet Mars. His open-minded perspective allows Heinlein to reevaluate institutions such as religion, money, and monogamy.
15. Me Before You by JoJo Moyes
Me Before You is a heartbreaking love story about a woman who is hired to care for a quadriplegic man. It's a page-turner that makes the reader immediately empathize with its characters.
16. The Cuckoo's Calling by J.K. Rowling
This is the first of a new crime fiction series by J.K. Rowling published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The main character, Cormoran Strike, is a down on his luck private investigator that you just can't not root for.
17. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Don't be fooled by the title or cover art. The Husband's Secret is a griping murder mystery. Moriarty's pulsing pace and engaging characters will make you speed read to the end.
Who says reading has to be any work at all?
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