Time heals all wounds, but it’s hard to be patient. In the meantime, you find yourself ruminating on everything that went wrong and longing for everything that went right. Never was there a better time to get lost in a book. Reading offers a reprieve from the painful present and you might even find you’ve grown a bit by the end of it.   Check out these 5 books that not ...

Time heals all wounds, but it’s hard to be patient. In the meantime, you find yourself ruminating on everything that went wrong and longing for everything that went right. Never was there a better time to get lost in a book. Reading offers a reprieve from the painful present and you might even find you’ve grown a bit by the end of it.

Check out these 5 books that not only will help you smile, escape, or forget, but that also might become some of your favorite books of all time:

• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The beauty of Hornby’s cantankerous protagonist Rob Fleming is that he’s just like us - with every break-up we take a walk down memory lane rehashing relationships of the past hoping that some pattern will stand out and tell us exactly what we’re doing wrong. But no relationship is just like the last. Maybe we deserved to be left. Perhaps we dodged a bullet. And maybe we’re just not even remembering the past accurately. It poses a question we’re all faced with: Is the way back the way forward?

• Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Novel by Helen Fielding. Imperfect, genuine, funny, and absolutely human Bridget Jones has thought, said, ruined, and looked for solace in everything we can imagine. She is a mess of perspective that, frankly, makes most bad days seem like child’s play.

• Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No, it’s not the happiest read. Marquez takes the term “lovesick” seriously. The love that and Florentino Ariza feels for the untouchable Fermina Daza is an enduring, incurable, and relentless plague. A lifetime passes and he’s still obsessed, bringing to mind a very important distinction between love and infatuation. Read this one and you also get to be the fancy pants of your book club.

• Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song At A Time by Rob Sheffield. The memoir shows us how tightly music can tie us to our memories. Sheffield tells the story of meeting his wife, whom he spent eight years with before her sudden death in 1997, by using the mix tapes he made for her as milestones.

• Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell. Nonfiction doesn’t have to be dry, pedantic, and humorless. Vowell has a way of entertaining the reader so they have no idea they’re learning. You get a chance to experience Hawaii and feel like an expert when it’s all over. Q: What did Hawaiians discover was always missing from hamburger meat? A: Egg.

Surely there are a couple books you’ve been meaning to read, but maybe you haven’t cracked Middlemarch for a reason. Right now you need a book that will challenge you emotionally, but isn’t a literary marathon. Many of the classics fall into this category and require considerable commitment. Look for something more along the lines of a quintessential fantasy book, something out of this world, whether it’s funny like Hitcthhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or epic like Game of Thrones. If everything seems too serious lately, pick up something by David Sedaris. Reread an old favorite and see how your experience has changed your perspective.

If anything else, remember that book your ex told you not to read because you wouldn’t like it? Maybe you should find out for yourself.

Sarah Rae is a freelance writer and fiction editor for Prick of the Spindle. She lives and writes in Brooklyn. www.sarahrae.net