If you want to restart your reading habit or get out of a reading rut (or slump), check out these 7 books. The compelling stories, amazing audiobook narrators and great writing in these books will restart your reading habit with ease.
Reading books can help you break from social media, refocus when you feel overwhelmed and limit your news consumption. Reading fiction can be a great part of your evening routine to help you sleep well.
Little tips to restart your reading habit when you are in a slump
If it’s been a while since you’ve read a good book, or you feel like you are in a reading slump, it’s time to ease back in to your reading habit.
Try these little tips to get started:
- Reread one of your favorite books or a book by your favorite author.
- DNF (do not finish) instead of pushing through when you can’t get into a book.
- Start with a shorter book.
- Try different formats. Do you prefer audiobooks, digital books, or a book you can hold in your hands?
- Show up 10 minutes early for meetings and appointments and bring a book.
7 Books to Restart Your Reading Habit (Even in a Slump)
The synopsis for each book comes from StoryGraph (the app I use to keep track of the books I want to read and the ones I do read). Start with these 7 books to spark your reading habit and get out of that reading slump.
1. In Five Years by Rebecca Searle
This book will encourage you to restart your reading habit because it is unputdownable.
Where do you see yourself in five years? Dannie Kohan lives her life by the numbers. She is nothing like her lifelong best friend—the wild, whimsical, believes-in-fate Bella. Her meticulous planning seems to have paid off after she nails the most important job interview of her career and accepts her boyfriend’s marriage proposal in one fell swoop, falling asleep completely content.
But when she awakens, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. Dannie spends one hour exactly five years in the future before she wakes again in her own home on the brink of midnight—but it is one hour she cannot shake. In Five Years is an unforgettable love story, but it is not the one you’re expecting. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
2. This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum
I listened to the audiobook and the narrators were so good.
Benny Abbott and Joy Moore host one of the most beloved podcasts in the world. Each week, they delight listeners with a different “against all odds” survival story, gleefully finding the weird, life-affirming humor in near-death experiences. Since their first episode on Joy’s experience with severe narcolepsy, they’ve been the best friends everyone wants to befriend—and thanks to the meticulous management of Joy’s husband, Xander, they’ve built a lucrative empire.
The problem is, their next survival story may be their own. When Benny arrives at Joy and Xander’s one morning to record, he finds shattered glass and an empty house. The one clue shedding light on the couple’s disappearance is the incomplete, previously unseen first draft of Joy’s memoir. Benny is desperate to find them, even when the police soon zero in on him as their prime suspect. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
3. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
Not a novel, but this memoir will grab your attention. Restarting your reading habit is all about finding that compelling story and this is it.
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
4. The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods
Another book by Evie Woods made my last cozy book list.
On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found. For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives. But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder… where nothing is as it seems. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
5. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Not only is this a lovely book that will inspire your reading habit, it’s becoming a movie and is out on Netflix, May 2026.
A charming, witty, and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow’s unlikely connection with a giant pacific octopus. After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in the Puget Sound over thirty years ago.
Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight tentacles for his human captors—until he forms an unlikely friendship with Tova. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
6. Heartwood by Amity Gaige
I listened to this book and could not stop listening. I was so hooked on the story and have to think this would break anyone out of their reading slump.
In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
7. Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan
Any of Annabel Monaghan’s books will make you fall in love with reading again. I’ve read all of her books and they have only strengthened my reading habit and overall joy in life. I can’t wait for her new book, Dolly All The Time.
Nora Hamilton knows the formula for love better than anyone. As a romance channel screenwriter, it’s her job. But when her too-good-to work husband leaves her and their two kids, Nora turns her marriage’s collapse into cash and writes the best script of her life. No one is more surprised than her when it’s picked up for the big screen and set to film on location at her 100-year-old-home. When former Sexiest Man Alive, Leo Vance, is cast as her ne’er do well husband Nora’s life will never be the same. Amazon | Libro.fm | Bookshop.org
My reading habit.
I am almost always reading a book and listening to a book. I get books from Libby (free) and pre-order books from authors I want to support.
I listen to audiobooks with Libro.fm instead of Audible for a 3 reasons.
1. You get a couple of free audiobooks when you sign up with Libro.fm.
2. You can choose a local bookstore to support with each order.
3. Libro.fm allows you to download your books, unlike Audible where you have to listen to them on the platform. Because you can download your audiobooks, you can share them with friends. When friends share their audiobooks with me, I listen with an app called Book Player. I’m sure there are other options!
I hope these books help you restart your reading habit so you can read more and stress less.
This post may contain affiliate links.
