Holidays are not only a good opportunity to relax and go out to play, but also a time to "recharge" yourself and prepare for the future. This article will introduce you to 5 good books. There are intense detective crime genres, novels that revisit history, and memoirs that explore life and death.

Hopefully you can read a few books while you have time, wander in the world of words, and experience different stories.

1. When Breath Becomes Air

This book is Paul Kalanithi's autobiography. You can see from the cover that this is a memoir about life and death. The author himself is a terminally ill lung cancer patient, but he is also a doctor and a father.

In the book, he tells readers how he went from a young medical student to a neuroscientist who can take charge of his own side, from a teenager to an elderly father, and then to a cancer patient in a hospital bed.

This kind of book that discusses life and death can shock the heart, whether it is a doctor who has seen life in all its forms or an ordinary person who has experienced the same experience and can empathize with it, when the breath is as thin as air, when life is coming to an end.

Everyone will feel differently after reading this book.

2. The Trespasser

Tana French's novel has been named one of the hottest crime detective novels on Amazon this year. The novel's two protagonists, Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran, are two young detectives tasked with investigating the murder of a woman in Dublin.

The woman's boyfriend became the main suspect, but after investigation it was found that this was not a domestic murder case, and the suspect was another person, but the sheriff ordered them to arrest the woman's boyfriend.

What secrets are hidden here, what kind of shady transactions have the police done behind the scenes, and what is the truth behind the complicated case?

3. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

This is a story about poverty and interest in American cities through housing. Author Matthew Desmond, who lived in rental housing on Chicago's impoverished North Side, as a sociology graduate student, chronicles the lives of families and individuals trapped in the city's bottom rungs.

Between delicate texts, Desmond analyzes the psychological and economic consequences of housing and reintroduces "exploitation" into the discussion of poverty. Those who live in slums have to endure oppression by landlords, while high rents restrict their lives and development, and "evict" them from society.

This book allows readers to understand the plight of poor people in the United States through vivid examples.

4. Swing Time

This fictional novel is Zadie Smith's fifth novel. The story opens with Fred Astaire's classic tune "Swing Time," but there's a more intricate story buried in this upbeat tune. The novel has two story lines.

The first one takes the reader back to when the protagonist was a child, in London in 1982, when he met a girl named Tracey in a dance class for the first time. Tracey dreamed of becoming a big star.

However, fate did not favor these two girls, and estrangement gradually developed between the former sweet friends; slowly the story came to the present, after not seeing each other for many years, the two girls met in Africa.

The story is full of class and character conflicts, and each story line is subtly interspersed, which is a story of growth and a microcosm of society.

5. The Vegetarian

This book is a novel by Han Kang, a Korean female writer. The story is about the heroine, Yeong-hye, who was originally an ordinary housewife who, in a terrible nightmare, experienced human atrocities and bloodshed, and became a vegetarian after waking up.

Over time, the hostess completely indulged in vegetarianism, not only threw away all the meat in the house, but also refused all food intake, and self-restraint became more and more severe and even absurd.

The story is divided into three parts, the narrators are the hostess' husband, brother-in-law and sister, The Vegetarian is the first one. The novel was published in South Korea in 2007, and went on sale in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

The English translation retains the author's keen discussion and makes the style of the article sharper and more vivid.