What to Read When Mercury is in Retrograde

Your go-to guide for any form of planetary mayhem, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will get you through anything Mercury throws in your path. Just remember these two words of advice: Don’t Panic. (Oh, and always carry a towel.)

Haruki Murakami’s epic novel takes place in Tokyo in 1984. Or does it? As the stories of a young woman named Aomame and a ghostwriter named Tengo converge over the course of a year, we find ourselves drawn deeper into a parallel universe that is part dreamland, part dystopia.

Feminism has come a long way since Mr. Rochester locked Bertha in the attic, but the madwoman trope in literature has persevered. Female characters are still frequently reduced to angels or monsters, and the battle over a woman’s body continues. I mean, that burkini ban in France? Talk about retrograde.

One morning, 11-year-old Julia and the rest of the world awake to discover that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow down. As the novel unfolds, Julia must cope with the environmental disasters the global deceleration sets into motion, while also navigating the day-to-day struggles of growing up.

In the age of instant messaging and Snapchat filters, FOMO has made us paranoid that everyone is living a more fabulous life than we are. Leave it to Mindy Kaling to set us straight with her unfiltered honesty, her sharp wit, and her often wildly inappropriate sense of humor.

Taking his cue from Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, John Green goes for the jugular in this tale of young love thwarted by terminal cancer. Sometimes an ugly cry is just what you need when your world is turned around and everything seems hopeless.

According to research scientist and professor Brené Brown, vulnerability has its own physics: if we are brave enough often enough, we will inevitably fall. The purpose of this book is to help us get back up again. And again. And again.