2019 Novella by Two Bestselling Authors Named Best Book for ‘When You're Stuck in a Reading Rut'
If you haven't been reading as much as you would like lately, there are plenty of riveting books that can help break you out of your reading rut. Recently, Oprah Daily has put together a list of the best books for "when you're stuck in a reading rut." One of the books making the list is This is How You Lose the TimeWar by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
This science fiction book, which is described as "an epic love story spanning time and space," has a 4.3-star rating on Amazon with over 19,000 reviews. It won a Hugo Award, Locus Award, and Nebula Award. It is about two rival agents who fall in love while exchanging letters.
"The chapters alternate between Red and Blue," Oprah Daily editor, Justine Anthony, explains. "They fall in love through a series of letters exchanged across time and space. The letters are written in the most intricate ways, such as bee stings, tea leaves, and burning lava."
When asked how the book came together, Gladstone told Eliot Peper, "We knew we wanted to write a book together long before we knew we wanted to write this book. I came off a book tour one summer feeling a powerful need for solitude, and at the same time for deep connection, as one does after a week or two of the constant light chat that characterizes that sort of thing."
Related: Best-Selling Author's Novel, With a Big Twist, Named Best Short Book You Can Finish in One Sitting
El-Mohtar echoed the sentiment when speaking about the book with Civilian Reader. "We were inspired, first and foremost, by how much we liked each other and our respective writing!" she said. "First we read each other's work, then we became friends, then we started writing each other letters, then we became better friends, then we said we should really collaborate on something together, and decided that a novella was roughly the right length for us to experiment with pairing our different voices and attempting to blend them into weird harmonies."
When asked to describe the book, she said, "Think Griffin and Sabine meets Killing Eve by way of Steven Universe. Alternately, imagine if Florence + the Machine's Lungs was a novella in which all the songs are sung to women in letter-form."
Other books that made the list of best stories to break you out of a reading rut were Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Playworld by Adam Ross, and Bombshell by Sarah MacLean.
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This story was originally published May 23, 2026 at 8:02 AM.