13 Choicest books for you to read this summer

|By Harshita Sharma |

Have you ever been so obsessed with a book, you couldn’t sway away from binge reading it?

Whether you’ve to miss hours of overpowering sleep or lurk seconds from your brain-draining schedule.

Arching the feeling of being engaged with a book is so spirituous, however, looking for the best to read is straining. Here we’re with a list of top 13 books to look out for this summer.

1. Swing Time by Zadie Smith

The multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty. The story revolves around two young kids from London following diverging paths, growing up on the wrong side of the town. Tap dancers who meet one suspecting day, who click over the fact that they are of mixed races but eventually, with each of their lives telling a tale of their own. A quick read, the novel is refreshing and quite unlike a novel you’d expect.

To buy, click here: Swing Time

2. Almost Everything by Anne Lammot

When you are looking for some peace from the often exhausting and chaotic grind of life, pick up this hopeful and inspiring Anne Lamott book. In a collection of essays, Lamott offers up little nuggets of wisdom to get us through the day, from hard truths about ourselves to funny insights about families and how to find joy in a world where the endless news cycle can wear us down.

To buy, click here: Almost Everything

3. A Man called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Ove who lives alone in his apartment in Sweden, having lost his wife recently and retiring from work. Things take a turn for him when he gets a chatty neighbour. Soon enough, as a reader, you will get hooked to Ove’s story that is iced with humour and a cherry of grief on top. The misunderstood old man will surely leave an ineradicable impression on you.

To buy, click here: A Man Called Ove

4. When the emperor was divine by Julie Otsuka

In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience about a Japanese family that is put into an internment camp during WWII: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of expansive power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.

To buy, click here: When the Emperor Was Divine

5. The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce

Frank owns a music shop, jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need. Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann, showing her interest in his ability to find the perfect asking him to teach about music. Hitting all right notes, the book tells an uncomfortable love story between the stuck in past Frank and Vinyl black-eyed Ilse.

To buy, click here: The Music Shop

6. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

This quirky novel sets in where many people dream of living: New York City. The main character, Tess gets a job working at one of the city's most elite and elegant restaurants. In the course of the book, she learns what being young is truly like, with the fast-paced city nightlife and the hard work it takes being in the restaurant industry. It is a novel of the senses. Of taste and hunger, of love and desire, and the wisdom that comes from our experiences, both sweet and bitter.

To buy, click here: Sweetbitter

7. Signs Preceding The End Of The World by Yuri Herrera

The Idiosyncratic novel explores the US – Mexican border in magical, mythical and meaningful ways. Herrera’s protagonist Makina, stands as a female Orpheus, forced into the underworld in both literal and figurative ways as she makes a crossing north in search of her lost brother. The book is all about Herrera and Makina making a mockery of old-order American patriotism, easy to follow but tough to actually pull off. It's a trivial exercise in bold and clever writing done with vigour.

To buy, click here: Signs Preceding the End of the World

8. Ten Days In a Mad-House by Nellie Bly

This unique book is based on articles written by the author as an undercover assignment for the NY World. The book deals with a valiant female journalist’s revelation of the horrendous treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth-century America.

To buy, click here: Ten Days in a Mad-House

9. The Giver by Lois Lowry

The tormenting story is built around a twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly perfect, if colourless, world of orthodox and formalism. Life takes a full circle when he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory and he begins to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community.

To buy, click here: The Giver: Essential Modern Classics

10. Calypso by David Sedaris

Calypso is a collection of 21 semi-autobiographical essays by David Sedaris. Sedaris sets his intimidating powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. These stories are extremely funny and light-hearted, it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can.

To buy, click here: Calypso

11. Alice by Christina Henry

Alice is the tale of a young woman who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital which echoes with the screams of the poor souls inside. The book is powerful and disheartening. The titular heroine, however, quite ungracefully and almost unintentionally connects herself to the reader with her story.

To buy, click here: Alice

12. The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

The author proposes a satirical view of consumerism and attentive observation of metaphorical cannibalism. The story revolves around a young woman, Marian, who begins endowing food with human qualities finding herself unable to eat. Her growing alienation from the world due to her ingrowing observations go unnoticed until it ends in an act of resistance, too shocking. The Edible woman by most is pronounced as a groundbreaking work of fiction.

To buy, click here: The Edible Woman

13. Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

The story revolves around Sam, an Indo American writer and his fictional creation of a character Smile and his obsession for television. Smile feels infatuated with a former Bollywood actress and starts sending her love letters with the pen name ‘Quichotte’. The novel progressively shows how the lives of Quichotte and Sam tangle together in this beautiful work of fiction.

To buy, click here: Quichotte