Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read
When life gets really hectic, sitting quietly with a book can feel like an impossible luxury. And when does a smartphone-mediated world feel less than hectic? Any shred of free time is too easy to fill with more work, more worrying, more commitments, and, of course, more aimless scrolling. If you really want to get any reading done, you may have to turn it into another task on the to-do list. This doesn’t require strict goals or reading challenges (unless that suits you). All you need is a willingness to dedicate a few minutes a day, and maybe a few new habits—packing a paperback for the waiting room, queuing up an audiobook for your commute. What works best for me, though, is choosing just the right book.
Despite the constant grind of my weeks, I can usually make time to turn some pages if something in those pages pushes through my distractions. I might be behind on grading papers, but if I’m obsessed with Tara Selter, the character stuck in a time loop in On the Calculation of Volume, or totally absorbed in the minutiae of a great biography of Virginia Woolf, nothing can get me to step away. It’s hard to say what book might send you down that rabbit hole, but the list below may help a harried reader pick up something they actually want to finish. I consider these books, representing varied genres, uncommonly likely to absorb, entertain, and challenge. Each is broken up into discrete units—chapters, essays, letters, stories—that provide easy stopping points, although you might find it difficult to put them down.
Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin
Instead of offering an escape from real life, Home Cooking invites the reader to consider a kind of domestic drudgery—the daily necessity of cooking and eating—with renewed humor and curiosity. Although each short essay in the collection contains at least one recipe (some quite good, some very 1980s), the sum of these parts is far more memoir than cookbook. Colwin’s writing is funny and familiar, never fussy, and reminiscent of a family heirloom dotted with personal notes and stories. She recounts her own humbling kitchen disasters, shares dinner-party tips, and expounds on the merits of bitter greens. Essays such as “Bread Baking Without Agony,” “Flank Steak: The Neglected Cut,” and “Easy Cooking for Exhausted People” are both practical and charming. Clearly, Colwin loved to cook—and eat—in the comfort of her own home, and her pleasure is infectious. As she writes, “The joy of cooking is the joy of discovery.”
[Read: You can read any of these short novels in a weekend]
Maurice, by E. M. Forster
Forster finished Maurice in 1914, but it was published posthumously, in 1971, because of the novel’s portrayal of homosexual love. Its title character, the young Maurice Hall, is a conventional English man with a vague, nagging sense that he’s somehow different. He passes almost numbly through the rigors of schooling and middle-class childhood until he arrives at Cambridge, where he meets a group of very learned young men and begins to wake up: “People turned out to be alive,” Maurice reflects. “Hithero he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be—flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design.” Maurice grows steadily more intimate with a friend, Clive, trading books and letters with him over vacation, until Clive professes his love. The rest of the novel follows their risky relationship, and feels very contemporary: Can their partnership survive life after university? How will they handle growing pressure to start a lucrative career, marry a woman, and have a family? Anyone interested in a good love story will find something to enjoy.
Gliff, by Ali Smith
Smith takes absolute delight in the English language and its history. In her most recent work, the trickster novelist combines her love of words with a propulsive plot: Gliff is partly a YA dystopian novel, partly an homage to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and entirely a vehicle for beautiful prose. In the United Kingdom of the not-too-distant future, those who resist the surveillance state and its data mining are marked as “unverifiables” and rounded up inside detention centers. The novel follows two young adults, Rose and her nonbinary sibling, Bri, who return from visiting their mother at work to find a red line painted around their house. Their mother’s boyfriend leaves with a promise to be back soon. Suddenly, they are alone, unverifiable, and unable to turn to anyone for help; they realize they must go on the run to survive. In a typically Smithian twist, the novel will soon have its own double: Make room for its companion novel, called Glyph, to be published in May.
Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet
Is anything more engaging than a good murder mystery—one that dares you to guess who did it, and why? I devoured this captivating specimen in just a few days. When the novel opens in Florence, in 1557, the body of the painter Jacopo da Pontormo lies in the chapel of San Lorenzo—in front of the frescoes he’d labored over for a decade, with a painter’s chisel stuck in his heart. The case becomes political when a lewd painting of Maria de’ Medici, the daughter of the Duke of Florence, is found in Pontormo’s room. The ensuing story—consisting entirely of letters among artists, courtiers, and religious leaders—is a wild ride through the politics and intrigue of Renaissance Italy that incorporates real historical figures. This epistolary structure is brilliant: The reader can see precisely who tells what to whom—and discern their motives for telling it. Could the killer be Agnolo Bronzino, Pontormo’s former student? A political rival of the duke? About the ending, I’ll say only that it is funny, smart, and genuinely surprising.
[Read: What to read when you have only half an hour]
Honored Guest, by Joy Williams
A book of short stories may be the best kind of work for a reader with a busy schedule. You can savor one piece in a collection, then let days or weeks pass before moving on to another. Plus, no one can stop you from reading them in any order you please. I recommend the 12 stories in Honored Guest, all full of striking detail and featuring strangely insightful narrators. Each tale abounds with existential questions and turns the familiar eerie. In “Anodyne,” a mother quits yoga to start shooting classes at a gun range; in “ACK,” a couple endures an odd dinner party on Nantucket. Williams’s stories always benefit from considered, post hoc reflection: Finish just one with breakfast, then let the images and sentences drift through your mind for the rest of the day.
The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell
A long novel can be a daunting investment of time and energy, but if you can settle into its rhythms, it can be a wonderful companion for the beleaguered reader. Just shy of 600 pages, The Old Drift glides between magical realism and sci-fi to tell the story of three entangled Zambian families over three generations. Nestled within the chronicles of these characters are chapters narrated by a swarm of mosquitos: Their hive mind takes readers from the colonial beginnings of the nation, starting with the explorer Dr. Livingstone’s “discovery” of Victoria Falls in the 19th century, to the “warm, wet future” of 2023 Lusaka, imagined from the vantage point of 2019. Because of its patchwork of perspectives, the novel can be easily read in chunks, but I found it terribly hard to put aside. This is a curious, probing book: You will find no pat conclusions or sentimentality, only a new (and very rewarding) variation on the multigenerational family novel.
[Read: Five books that’ll fit right into your busy schedule]
Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood
Lockwood’s dad is a rarity: a Catholic priest who’s both married and a father (he was already a family man when he converted, after watching The Exorcist on a nuclear submarine). His pastoral persona is equally unconventional, as he shreds guitar and lounges around the rectory in his underwear. Facing financial troubles, Lockwood and her husband move in with her parents, and Priestdaddy becomes an absurdist reflection on growing up in such an environment. Even if you read this book for only five minutes a day, you will inevitably bump into something screamingly funny, such as the author’s repeated attempts to explain Catholicism to her husband, her sister’s drunken antics at a dinner with the local bishop, and her mother’s penchant for yelling a Kool-Aid-Man-style “Oh yeah!” (I highly recommend the audiobook, in which Lockwood impersonates her family members with flair.) Reading Priestdaddy is like having a conversation with a brilliant, exuberant friend—you can’t wait to hear what she’ll say next.