This 15th installment of TRC presents to you, our dear readers, thought-provoking, immersive and soulful reads that you can’t help but curl up with, spending hours and hours reading in your cozy little nook, in your own little world.

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivia Blake

Alone With You in the Ether is a love story between a boy and a girl, but it is anything but conventional. The novel follows Regan, a bipolar artist and compulsive liar with a knack for self-sabotage, and Aldo, an anti-social theoretical mathematician with OCD and clinical depression. On one faithful day, they stumble upon each other in the Art Institute of Chicago, marking the beginning of six conversations and a relationship that threatens to consume them both. Alone With You in the Ether is a beautifully written, inward-looking and almost feverish exploration of space, time and love that attempts to examine what it means to be flawed and fractured yet still try to love as if you are not broken.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things is a compilation of Dear Sugar advice columns, many of which were initially published on TheRumpus.net. The book features letters sent anonymously from people who sought advice from Sugar on a plethora of topics ranging from romance and grief to money and family issues. Sugar weaves and grounds her sensible yet compassionate pieces of wisdom with stories from her life, bringing an acute vulnerability to the page. In a sense, the book is part memoir. Witty, well-written, irreverent, and undergirded with striking sincerity and tenderness, Tiny Beautiful Things will have readers laughing, crying, learning, and hopefully, feeling a little more seen, a little more human, and a little more compassionate by the end.

Pachinko by Lee Min-Jin

Pachinko is a historical fiction novel that spans across four generations of a Korean family who immigrated to Japan during the Japanese Occupation in Korea. The story opens in a village in Busan during the early 1900s where Sunja, the teenage daughter of a poor family, falls for a wealthy stranger and discovers that she is carrying his child. With the revelation that her lover is actually married, and with the shame looming over her family, salvation comes in the form of a marriage offer from a young minister who is on the way to Japan. In leaving her home in Korea, Sunja sets in motion an epic generational saga about one family that struggles to survive in the midst of a country that rejects them and a history that forgets them. Pachinko, with its potent mix of personal and political drama, and rich characterization, is a gripping, breathtaking tale of sacrifice, ambition, resilience, identity and love.

We hope you enjoyed this list and that you’re able to start your -Ber months right with some of these worthwhile reads!