How to choose a book for tonight

Decide how much you feel like following. Recent cannabis use can affect attention and memory, according to the CDC’s summary of cannabis and brain health. If you keep losing the thread, try a shorter piece, reread something familiar, or put the book down for the night.

If you’re looking for a few ways to spend the rest of the evening, see our ideas for a night away from screens.

Short novels and linked vignettes

For when you want to stay in one world for a while. The opening scene is enough to see whether you want to settle in.

1. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Start with “A Change in Vocation.” A monk feels restless in a life that looks perfectly fine from the outside. Try the first few pages before deciding if you want to follow them on the road.
2. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Start with the title vignette. Esperanza measures the house her family has against the one they imagined. A handful of details tells you almost everything about the distance between the two.
3. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. Start with the opening sounds of the store. Keiko hears the room as a set of cues she knows by heart. Read until you can picture what the shift looks and sounds like from behind the counter.
4. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Start with “The Morning Swim.” A girl and her grandmother share a small Finnish island, and Jansson lets weather, water, and their banter carry the scene.
5. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Start with the narrator’s drawing that adults take for a hat. Look at the picture before reading his explanation. The joke still works when you know what’s coming.
6. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Start with Santiago and the boy talking on shore. Give the conversation a few pages before the fishing trip begins. You can hear their affection in the practical things they say to each other.
7. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Start with the first café story, “The Lovers.” A woman wants to revisit a conversation. The little rules of the café make the premise as much about what she chooses to say as where she goes.
8. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. Start with the corgis wandering over to a mobile library. The Queen follows and feels obliged to borrow something. It’s a satisfying setup if you want a quiet comedy.
9. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Start with the first journal entry and picture a single hall. There are tides and statues in the narrator’s enormous house. Let his affection for the place guide you through the opening.
10. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Start with the opening of the title novella. Mikage, newly bereaved, finds refuge in kitchens. Pay attention to which parts of the room she names and how much comfort she locates in ordinary objects.

Short story collections

Choose one story and give it the whole sitting. The collection will be there if you want a different world tomorrow.

11. Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Start with the title story. Its narrator describes a society that refills its lungs with air. Give yourself a moment to picture that routine before following the story into its larger question.
12. Tenth of December by George Saunders. Start with “Sticks.” A father dresses up a pole in his front yard for holidays. Watch how each new decoration adds a little to what you know about him.
13. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. Start with “The Distance of the Moon.” In Calvino’s version of the early universe, the moon hangs close enough to reach by ladder. Read for the strange logistics of getting up there.
14. The Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin. Start with “The Author of the Acacia Seeds.” Le Guin invents researchers who study animal writing. The fun is in seeing how seriously they take the problem of translating an ant.
15. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. Start with “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Follow the spy story on the first pass. If you have the attention for a reread, see how the book inside the story changes what a path can mean.
16. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Start with “The Veldt.” A room brings children’s imagined landscapes to life. Bradbury lets the room do most of the work in this unsettling story about a family and its machines.
17. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Start with the title story. A guide takes a family sightseeing, and a casual question changes the tone of the trip. Notice how much of the scene depends on who’s listening.
18. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Start with the title story if you’re up for violent satire. It pushes holiday retail into horror, with a salesperson who understands the frantic shoppers better than anyone else on the floor.
19. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu. Start with the title story and the scene where a mother folds a paper tiger. The small act of making a toy sets up a story about family, language, and grief.
20. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. Start with “Angel’s Laundromat,” the opening story in the Picador edition. Read for the narrator’s first impressions of the people she sees while doing a load of laundry.

Essays and nonfiction

One idea can be plenty for an evening. Each of these offers a place to read a few pages and sit with what you noticed.

21. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Start with “My Birthday, Kinda.” It introduces Gay’s year of noticing delights. Afterward, see if you can name one small pleasure from your own day.
22. Bluets by Maggie Nelson. Start with the first five numbered pieces. Follow what the color blue brings up for Nelson, from an object to a thought to a memory. The fragments give you natural places to put the book down.
23. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. Start with the essay on the world’s largest ball of paint. One absurd roadside attraction gives Green enough to write about what can happen when people keep adding a little at a time.
24. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Start with “Skywoman Falling.” Take the opening story slowly and notice how each creature participates in making a place to live.
25. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. Start with the Maine festival scene in the title essay. The piece moves from food reporting into difficult questions about animal suffering. Pick it for a night when you want an argument to chew on.
26. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. Start with “The I in the Internet.” The first few pages are enough to get you thinking about how an online space asks you to present yourself.
27. How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Start with “The Case for Nothing.” Odell gives attention to places and activities that rarely count as productive. Try a few pages on an evening you’ve left deliberately unscheduled.
28. An Immense World by Ed Yong. Start with the introduction. Yong asks you to imagine how other animals experience the same room. Pause with one animal and think about what you’d notice first if you had its senses.
29. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Start with “Everyone Is a Creator.” Read the short section on its own and see what it brings to mind about an ordinary creative choice you made today.
30. Ways of Seeing by John Berger. Start with the first essay and spend a moment with its images. Berger asks what happens to a painting when it leaves its original setting and appears in a book or on a screen.

Poetry and lyric books

Read a poem once for its sound and once for the image that stays with you. Several of these books cover grief or violence, even in a short passage.

31. Devotions by Mary Oliver. Start with “Wild Geese.” Read it aloud if you have the room to yourself and listen to how the poem moves from a direct address to the wider world.
32. The Carrying by Ada Limón. Start with “The Raincoat.” A memory of being cared for changes meaning once the speaker is old enough to see the work that went into it.
33. Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Start with “Aubade with Burning City.” The poem sets a familiar Christmas song against the fall of Saigon. Choose it when you’re willing to sit with a scene of war.
34. Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith. Start with the first section of “My God, It’s Full of Stars.” See where the poem goes with the idea of space as a place that can be pictured and still feel beyond reach.
35. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes. Start with “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Read it twice for the pace of the repeated phrases and the way the rivers connect places across time.
36. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. Start with the first vignette. Rankine addresses the reader as “you,” bringing everyday racism close. Read a page or two and give the scene space before moving on.
37. When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz. Start with the title poem. It brings family life and addiction into the same room, with imagery that gives the scene a scale far beyond the household.
38. Crush by Richard Siken. Start with “Scheherazade.” Follow the repeated requests to tell a story. Notice what happens to the tone each time the speaker tries again.
39. The Wild Iris by Louise Glück. Start with the title poem. It gives a flower a voice. Read through once before you decide what the speaker has been through.
40. Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith. Start with the first section of “summer, somewhere.” Smith imagines a place for Black boys killed by violence. The tenderness of the opening sits alongside grief.

Comics and illustrated books

Give the drawings time. A panel, a page, or a spread can be enough, especially if you’re already losing your place in longer paragraphs.

41. The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Start with the wordless packing sequence. The objects a man gathers for his journey tell you about the life he’s leaving before you see the strange place he’s going.
42. Here by Richard McGuire. Start with the opening spreads. Pick one corner of the room to track as the years change around it. You can read just a few pages and have plenty to look at.
43. What It Is by Lynda Barry. Open to one collage and let your eye move between the scraps of text and the drawings. Try a prompt if you feel like writing a few lines of your own.
44. The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht. Start with the first few spreads of this illustrated fable. Take in the dark, sculptural images before turning the page. It’s a good pick for an eerie mood.
45. The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher. Open anywhere and pick one spread. Trace where your eye goes first and what sends it back. The pleasure is in how Fletcher sets pictures, type, and odd observations beside one another.
46. Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. Start with the first chapter and spend a few pages with Brás, an obituary writer in Brazil. The book turns on mortality, so give yourself room to stop after a chapter.
47. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Start with “The Veil.” Satrapi moves between a child’s school day and the politics around it. Watch how the black-and-white panels make both scales readable.
48. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Start with “Setting the Record Straight.” McCloud uses comics to figure out what counts as a comic. Try the first few pages for a playful lesson in how images and words work together.
49. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Start with any Sunday strip. Give yourself a second pass for the drawing, especially when a familiar backyard becomes the setting for whatever Calvin has imagined.
50. The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. Start with the opening hospital scene. Bui’s experience of becoming a parent leads into her family’s history. Pause before the timeline widens if you want to stay with that first scene.

FAQs about reading while high

Can you read a book while high?

Yes, for pleasure, if you feel comfortable and can follow the page. Start with two pages. If you can tell what happened and want to keep going, turn the page. Save reading that requires precise recall or judgment for when you’re sober.

Why do I keep rereading the same paragraph?

Recent cannabis use can affect the attention and memory you use to keep track of a sentence. Try reading a few lines aloud, or switch to a short poem or illustrated page if you keep losing your place.

What’s a good book to read if I have ten minutes?

Try “Sticks” in Tenth of December, “Wild Geese” in Devotions, or a Sunday page of Calvin and Hobbes. Each gives you a complete piece to spend time with.

Do audiobooks work for a slow night in?

Try a story or chapter you already know. Set a sleep timer or leave yourself a bookmark if you tend to drift off. For a quiet option with pictures, try the wordless opening of The Arrival.

How can I try these books without buying them?

Search your public library’s catalog by title and author. You can also look for excerpts on the linked publisher pages. Translations and collected editions can have different page numbers, so look for the scene or section name.