Are you looking to read more? Reading has so many benefits for mental health and allows you to take time out of your busy life. Here are three books that you won’t be able to put down.

We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

We Should All Be Feminists is a perfect train or lunch break read: it’s short, thought provoking and powerful non-fiction. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche writes about her own experiences to suggest the importance of feminism in society. This book was originally a TED Talk, which is a real strength of it, as it made it more concise and hard-hitting due to it being first designed to kick start conversations about feminism within a real life audience. I particularly liked how Ngozi Adiche discussed the upbringing of both boys and girls; societal expectations of men being strong and consequently being ridiculed for being anything else means that in reality, they in isolation aren’t responsible for the inequality of genders. Ngozi Adiche argues that our opinions concerning gender equality and inequality needs to change now, so the same attitudes aren’t passed onto younger generations.

This is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay

This is Going to Hurt is a fantastic book that you can really get engrossed in. Written in a diary-entry style, it follows Adam Kay’s experiences in his career as a Junior Doctor. The one thing that really stood out to me about this book was how one entry was funny but the next one was heart-breaking: a clear signifier of how difficult emotionally it is to work in a hospital. It was a brilliant, raw insight into this area of work, which I have never had before.

The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

An extremely famous short story, again, The Yellow Wallpaper is certainly thought provoking. It is one short story that has stuck with me since I read it over two years ago. The story centres around a female protagonist who has been taken away to a house by her husband for a ‘rest cure’, but she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper in her bedroom, as she thinks a figure is moving around within it. The way that Gilman writes really does make the narrator come to life on the page. There are many debates on what the figure in the wallpaper is and what she represents, so The Yellow Wallpaper does make for an interesting read.

Happy reading!