“You, my fulgurite”

Some books offer the perfect escape route. You can ignore the pile of laundry that sits in the basket waiting to be folded, avoid looking at the stack of lesson plans waiting to be executed, and turn a deaf ear to kids fighting over a ukulele. Instead, you can slip into someone else’s inner thoughts, fears, worries, even joys.

Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life by Gunnhild Øyehaug (translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson) 

“Sigrid has her head on her arms on her desk and is thinking. She has to change. She has to toughen up. She has to stop analyzing everything and stop being so caught up in things that she forgets all else around her, and she has to stop thinking that people are all interested in the same things as her. Because they’re not! They’re not, Paul de Man, she says, and presses his nose with her finger. Naturally, Paul de Man doesn’t answer: after all, he’s Belgian, and a photograph.”

Some books have the opposite effect. Rather than offering a reprieve, they leave you discombobulated and grumpy. You don’t delight in the character’s observations, but scoff, shaking your head and asking, desolately, “Why?!”

The New Me by Halle Butler

“I get socked in the chest, thinking about how things never change. How they’re on a slow-rolling slope downward, and you can think up a long list of things you’d rather do, but because of some kind of inertia, or hard facts about who you are and what life is, you always end up back where you started, sitting drunk on a hard, sticky chair with someone you hate.” 

But even books like these work their magic, propelling you off the sofa to tackle that to-do list, compelling you to look inward to face the work that needs to be done.