What to Read to Wake Up Your Brain

Summer is the ideal season for fun, frothy reads.

On languorous weekends or hard-earned vacations, many people skew their literary diet toward lighter fare—fast-paced thrillers, steamy rom-coms—rather than, say, an in-depth history or an experimental novel.

But fall is fast approaching.

For some, that means a return to school; for many others, it represents the end of the most leisurely time of the year.

Whether or not you’re heading back to the classroom, you may soon be tasked with, or else seek out, a more vigorous reading regimen; generally, the autumn months tend to require more from our brain.

But it’s useful, as Labor Day approaches, to have an on-ramp—a way of easing into that more intense intellectual mode.

These six books can help reacquaint the fall reader with the pleasures and demands of paying serious attention.

Although none of them is especially strenuous—most are either brisk, bite-size, or divided into digestible parts—they are undeniably stimulating.

Each will give your mind a much-needed burst of energy.

The Age of Innocence , by Edith Wharton I came late to Wharton’s 1920 novel about a high-society love triangle in Gilded Age New York City—in fact, I read it only two months ago.

I had gotten into my head that the writing would be too ornate for my liking, the settings and dialogue too stuffy.

But classics tend to be classics for a reason, and The Age of Innocence snapped me out of my heat-induced inertia.

Wharton’s witty, sophisticated sentences require and then amply reward sustained attention.

Narrating the follies and frivolities of the city’s elite, she’s sarcastic and allusive, winking even as she dazzles with dialogue that verges on poetry. (The novelist Roxana Robinson once compared Wharton’s diction to a “sword wrapped in satin.”) Yet the universality of the novel makes it a perfect gateway for reengaging with foundational literature: Its core subjects are the timeless tensions between desire and obligation, and between self and society, expressed through a smoldering romance between forbidden lovers.