If you have been a reader of my blog for awhile now then you probably know that I love reading. I think that it is a great way to unwind and destress and something that everyone should try to make a little bit of time for in their lives. I thought I should share some books you are going to love reading.
Right now it’s March 2020 and we are social distancing and spending more time inside and I figured it was a good time to share some of my favorite books to hopefully give you some awesome reads to entertain yourself during this weird time in life.
There are so many great books out there and the shame is that it would be impossible to read them all. That’s why I am always looking for good books to read and when I have read a lot and have some good ones to share I like to put together a post for my readers. So that if you are looking for a new read you have some good ideas.
I find books to read on Goodreads, Brit and Co do lists of great books and I have found some great books that way. I’m a huge fan of the fact that Reese Witherspoon shares books on her Instagram. You can check it out here. I’ve gotten so many great recommendations from Reese’s new book club. Also, Modern Mrs. Darcy is a great resource for new books.
Related post: Why you should make the time to read
So here are some of the books I’ve recently read and love as well as some books that are on my to be read list this spring. I’m behind on my goal to read 100 books this year so I plan to do a lot of reading this summer. I think these are 25 books you are going to love reading.
1 Ooana out of Order by Margarita Montimore
This was a book with a fun cover and it really caught my eye on Instagram. It also had a really unique plot that I was excited to check out. On her eightenth Birthday which is New Years Ooana wakes up and instead of waking up a year older she is mentally the right age but wakes up in the body of herself years older in the future.
Hopping through decades, pop culture fads, and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever-changing on the outside. Who will she be next year? Philanthropist? Club Kid? World traveler? Wife to a man she’s never met?
This was such and interesting and fantastic read.
Goodreads rating:4.08/5
2. Tweet Cute by Emma Lord
In February I decided to read a lot of the rom-com books in my to be read pile. It seemed like the right time to read about love.
In the new YA novel Tweet Cute, two classmates who manage social media accounts for their families restaurants find themselves embroiled in a twitter battle on the Upper East Side. I read this sweet, fun, and chaste story in two days. I recommended this book to my middle schooler because it was so cute and pure.
Goodreads rating:4.09/5
3. Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
This was another great rom-com book that I read in February. I enjoyed the plot and the characters a lot and it was a pretty fun read.
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined.
Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn’t always diplomatic.
Goodreads rating:4.31/5
4. Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
This was such a great read and I absolutely flew through it. It was an emotional read though but so good.
Morgan Grant and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Clara, would like nothing more than to be nothing alike.
Morgan is determined to prevent her daughter from making the same mistakes she did. By getting pregnant and married way too young, Morgan put her own dreams on hold. Clara doesn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Her predictable mother doesn’t have a spontaneous bone in her body.
With warring personalities and conflicting goals, Morgan and Clara find it increasingly difficult to coexist. The only person who can bring peace to the household is Chris—Morgan’s husband, Clara’s father, and the family anchor. But that peace is shattered when Chris is involved in a tragic and questionable accident. The heartbreaking and long-lasting consequences will reach far beyond just Morgan and Clara.
While struggling to rebuild everything that crashed around them, Morgan finds comfort in the last person she expects to, and Clara turns to the one boy she’s been forbidden to see. With each passing day, new secrets, resentment, and misunderstandings make mother and daughter fall further apart. So far apart, it might be impossible for them to ever fall back together
Goodreads rating:4.30/5
5. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
This was such a great book. One that I have recommended to family because it was so good,
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose ofÂfice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
Goodreads rating: 4.39/5
6. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
I follow so many accounts on Instagram about reading and book recommendations. This book was everywhere when it came out and I finally got the chance to read it and it is one of my favorite books of 2019.
Such a twisty turning mystery thriller. I just could not put it down.
Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.
Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him.
Goodreads rating:4.07/5
7. One Day in December by Josie Silver
If you are a fan of love stories and romance mixed with Friendship then One Day in December is a great read. I could not put it down and devoured this book.
This book follows Laurie. Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…and then her bus drives away.
Certain they’re fated to find each other again, Laurie spends a year scanning every bus stop and cafe in London for him. But she doesn’t find him, not when it matters anyway. Instead they “reunite†at a Christmas party, when her best friend Sarah giddily introduces her new boyfriend to Laurie. It’s Jack, the man from the bus. It would be.
What follows for Laurie, Sarah and Jack is ten years of friendship, heartbreak, missed opportunities, roads not taken, and destinies reconsidered. One Day in December is a joyous, heartwarming and immensely moving love story to escape into and a reminder that fate takes inexplicable turns along the route to happiness.
I enjoyed this book so much I just grabbed the new book by Josie Silver. Can’t wait to read it.
Goodreads rating:3.97/5
8. Born to Shine by Ashley LeMieux
I’ve followed Ashley on Instagram for a while and knew some of her story. She and her husband lost the children they had raised through a contested adoption.
She wrote a book about how to still thrive in life while going through something traumatic and hard. This is why I was excited to read her book, having gone through my own struggles I find other peoples journeys to be enlightening and inspiring.
Goodreads rating: 4.27/5
9. The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez
Kristen Petersen doesn’t do drama, will fight to the death for her friends, and has no room in her life for guys who just don’t get her. She’s also keeping a big secret: facing a medically necessary procedure that will make it impossible for her to have children.
Planning her best friend’s wedding is bittersweet for Kristen—especially when she meets the best man, Josh Copeland. He’s funny, sexy, never offended by her mile-wide streak of sarcasm, and always one chicken enchilada ahead of her hangry. Even her dog, Stuntman Mike, adores him. The only catch: Josh wants a big family someday. Kristen knows he’d be better off with someone else, but as their attraction grows, it’s harder and harder to keep him at arm’s length.
The Friend Zone will have you laughing one moment and grabbing for tissues the next as it tackles the realities of infertility and loss with wit, heart, and a lot of sass.
Goodreads rating:4.92/5
10 The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern
Far beneath the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. The entryways that lead to this sanctuary are often hidden, sometimes on forest floors, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in plain sight. But those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searching for his door, though he does not know it. He follows a silent siren song, an inexplicable knowledge that he is meant for another place. When he discovers a mysterious book in the stacks of his campus library he begins to read, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities, and nameless acolytes. Suddenly a turn of the page brings Zachary to a story from his own childhood impossibly written in this book that is older than he is.
A bee, a key, and a sword emblazoned on the book lead Zachary to two people who will change the course of his life: Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired painter, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances. These strangers guide Zachary through masquerade party dances and whispered back room stories to the headquarters of a secret society where doorknobs hang from ribbons, and finally through a door conjured from paint to the place he has always yearned for. Amid twisting tunnels filled with books, gilded ballrooms, and wine-dark shores Zachary falls into an intoxicating world soaked in romance and mystery. But a battle is raging over the fate of this place and though there are those who would willingly sacrifice everything to protect it, there are just as many intent on its destruction. As Zachary, Mirabel, and Dorian venture deeper into the space and its histories and myths, searching for answers and each other, a timeless love story unspools, casting a spell of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a Starless Sea.
Goodreads rating:3.95/5
11 Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Galaxy “Alex†Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs†are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.
Goodreads rating:4.11/5
12. My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing
Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this wildly compulsive debut thriller about a couple whose fifteen-year marriage has finally gotten too interesting…
Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams, and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored.
We look like a normal couple. We’re your neighbors, the parents of your kid’s friend, the acquaintances you keep meaning to get dinner with.
We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive.
Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.
Goodreads rating:3.91/5
13. Recurision by Blake Crouch
At first, it looks like a disease. An epidemic that spreads through no known means, driving its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. But the force that’s sweeping the world is no pathogen. It’s just the first shock wave, unleashed by a stunning discovery—and what’s in jeopardy is not our minds but the very fabric of time itself.
In New York City, Detective Barry Sutton is closing in on the truth—and in a remote laboratory, neuroscientist Helena Smith is unaware that she alone holds the key to this mystery . . .and the tools for fighting back.
Together, Barry and Helena will have to confront their enemy—before they, and the world, are trapped in a loop of ever-growing chaos.
Goodreads rating:4.19/5
14. Don’t Overthink it by Anne Bogel
Another great read from Anne Bogel from Modern Mrs. Darcy. As someone who has been an overthinker since childhood this book was such a great book of helpful advice and information on why we overthink and how to get control of our thoughts.
Goodreads rating:4.38/5
Books I want to read this spring
15. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Ried
16.In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
17. You are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
18. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
19. The Holdout: by Graham Moore
20 The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver
