Five Books That Will Redirect Your Attention
Boredom can sometimes feel like a bygone luxury in an age of screens and constant distractions—yet even with all the content in the world at our fingertips, tedium manages to creep in. Not only does it sneak up on us in waiting rooms or on airplanes; we also encounter it while scrolling idly at home. In the face of repetitive Instagram posts, cookie-cutter TV episodes, and exhausting group chats, the mind goes blank just as reliably as it might while staring out of a window. There's nothing peaceful about this mental stillness; as the day lengthens, so does the ennui.
The experience of sitting around, tired and irritated, with nothing to do, may be character building, or even healthy (studies show that it can be beneficial to developing creativity). But the process is notoriously uncomfortable: Medieval monks referred to the feeling that boredom provoked as acedia and attempted to pray it away. Charles Dickens popularized the phrase bored to death in Bleak House, when the weary Lady Dedlock complains that she's on the verge of expiring for lack of excitement. The avant-garde Situationists in mid-20th-century Paris proclaimed 'Boredom is counterrevolutionary' and turned this phrase into a rallying cry.
Contemporary sufferers tend to opt for some form of immersive entertainment. For those who might turn to a book, not just any one will do. Sometimes the listless mind craves action, adventure, and drama, but propulsive page-turners aren't the only way to dispel dullness. Plot twists or surprising facts can do the trick too; at times, a radically strange narrator or a weirdly compelling story is what we need. The following titles provide many ways out of malaise, each as distinctive as the varieties of boredom from which they offer sweet relief.
, by Alexander Chee
Chee has said that he spent 15 years writing his 2016 novel, although readers are likely to finish it in a flash—it's too much fun not to speed through. Named after the famously difficult 'Queen of the Night' aria from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, the book follows a 19th-century American, Lilliet Berne, as she makes her way from the Midwest to a New York circus and then a Parisian brothel, finally reaching the heights of French society as an opera singer and courtesan. Along the way, she witnesses the rise and fall of the revolutionary Paris Commune, flies in a hot-air balloon, and wears an enormous amount of sumptuously described dresses. This is the kind of writing to pick up when you need to lose yourself for an afternoon inside a world radically different from your own. It is also the perfect story for readers who enjoy a little high drama that, at times, borders on camp—as is so often the case in opera.
, by Peter Cornell (translated by Saskia Vogel)
Cornell's book-length essay begins with a note claiming that what follows is a manuscript constructed by a researcher at the National Library of Sweden. Regardless of its actual provenance, The Ways of Paradise became something of an underground classic in the four decades before it was published in English last year. The text is structured in a series of numbered fragments, reflecting a larger fixation on spirals and mazes of all kinds—the curl of a seashell, mimicking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage's focus on eternity, or the 'ephemeral labyrinthine traces made by the folds and creases of garments'—and drawing parallels among a swath of disciplines and time periods. Burbling beneath its torrent of information is an occult murmur, even a mild paranoia: To what end are we all connected, and what do these connections mean? Although Cornell doesn't offer his audience much of an explanation, his slow deluge of intertwined facts and stories makes it hard to stop reading. Imagine this as the holy book of a new cult devoted to the spiritual possibilities of the spiral.
[Read: The transcendent brain]
, by Bae Suah (translated by Deborah Smith)
The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July.
, by Simone de Beauvoir (translated by Carol Cosman)
America Day by Day chronicles the four-month-long trip through the United States that the French existentialist de Beauvoir embarked on in January 1947, a journey filled with mishaps, misunderstandings, and moments of joy. De Beauvoir attends parties in New York, gambles in Nevada, listens to a lot of jazz in New Orleans, finds herself confused by San Francisco, smokes marijuana for the first time, and gives a series of lectures at colleges across the nation. Although the author encountered an America still unsure of itself after the violence of World War II, many of her observations feel strikingly relevant in 2025. Between American men and women, she detects 'a mutual mistrust,' for example—their 'lack of generosity, and a rancor that's often sexual in origin' could easily be found in the present. Many of the pages documenting travels through the Jim Crow–era South dwell on the disquieting gap between the U.S. Constitution's focus on freedom and the realities of racial segregation. By the time de Beauvoir gets to Chicago, however, her mood improves, and sharp-eyed readers might notice why: There, she meets the writer Nelson Algren, who gives her a tour of the city—and, though it remains unmentioned in the text, the pair later fall in love.
[Read: The philosopher who took happiness seriously]
, by Lydia Sandgren (translated by Agnes Broomé)
Like fellow Scandinavian Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, to which it's been compared, the Swedish writer Sandgren's Collected Works exerts a hypnotic pull on the reader over its hundreds of pages. Following the publisher of a small press, Martin Berg, as he turns 50, Collected Works initially seems to resemble a reverse bildungsroman, as Martin ponders his youth in Gothenburg, his own thwarted artistic ambitions, and his friendship with Gustav, a painter. But there's a mystery at work here too: Why did Martin's wife, Cecilia, a promising academic, abandon him and their young children years ago? Alternating between past and present—and Martin's and Cecilia's points of view (as well as, eventually, their daughter's)—Sandgren creates a more complicated portrait of a modern marriage than the book's premise might suggest. As the reader absorbs with horror the growing stockpile of Martin's betrayals over the years, Sandgren probes questions of gender, success, and ambition, creating a portrait of a man and a woman fundamentally at odds that keeps its reader spellbound.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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