‘Timeless’ recommendations for Autumn reading...

Adulthood is a Myth, by Sarah Andersen

I know you are stuck in between two assignments and three textbooks to read, so you definitely don’t have a lot of time to lose reading ‘for pleasure’, but I think that you can find five minutes here and there to realise that you are not the only one who has problems being an adult.

This is a not-so-serious book about a very serious problem we all have to deal with now, narrated in a very attractive way: graphic novel! Dealing from problems ranging from “Getting dressed” to “Dating”, there’s definitely a short comic that will make you realise you are not alone into this! And yes, you’ve probably seen one of these comics on Tumblr at some point, but this book brings them all together in a book you can rely on to lighten up your ‘Oh, no, I am failing my life!’ days.

Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King

Halloween is coming and this means… perfect time for one of those horror novels that everyone is praising! Yes, you’ve guessed: the perfect time of the year for some Stephen King! My recommendation for a horror book is Salem ’s Lot which, I know, is not the most popular of his books, but it’s the only one that gave me nightmares.

The classic vampire story manages to be scary not due to an unexpected turn of events or amazing actions you’ve never heard of before, but due to the vivid descriptions. King is definitely a master of description that can bring to life anything, no matter how impossible it seems. Read this and you’ll be there for Ben Mears, Straker and Barlow. Or, if you think vampires are too last season, you can try It as the movie just came out.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro’s work is intense and intriguing – I’d dare say impeccable in this story about humanity who seems to be just a concept that can only apply between ‘normals’ or between ‘donors’, but not between the two groups. This book deals with so many hard questions that it would be useless to start writing them down here and, more importantly, it will make you find different views no one has noticed before. No wonder he won this year’s Literature Nobel!

The social alienation, the cultural norm, the connection between sex and love and illness are told in a conversational tone so that if you want, you could just pretend you are having a chat with your friend over a cup of tea. And, if you want, you can pretend it’s just a work of science fiction that doesn’t raise any questions. This book gives you a lot of options and this is why it’s so damn great! Stop reading this article and start reading this book!

Illunimae, by Andy Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

This was one of the best books I’ve read this year and I plan on re-reading it before the last book in the trilogy comes out – so complex I have no idea where to start from. This book seems so superficial at first sight – you can read it as a nice science-fiction, but you can, again, see so many faces of humanity in the story that it will make you think twice. It might lack some style for the fancier reader who doesn’t want to be seen reading YA, but it compensates in form – the story is told as a dossier that follows Kady and Ezra and, my favourite character, the AI system. If you don’t trust me when I say that this is this decade’s space odyssey, just go to a library and open the volume – you’ll be intrigued enough to want to read it and then you’ll say I was right.