Oyster is the best way to read books digitally. For just $9.95 a month, you can read as many books in the Oyster Unlimited library (over a million in total, far more than what Kindle Unlimited offers), all within the most beautiful reading app ever designed. It works across your devices—iPhone, iPad, Android, the Kindle Fire, and the web—and it’s the only digital browsing experience that comes anywhere close to the feel of your local bookstore. And since all Millions readers are smart, discerning people of impeccable literary taste, you can try it for free for a month here.
But with a million books at your fingertips, where should you start? Why not start with a few favorites from The Millions.
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: “H is for Hawk is not a mystical book, but it is one of those rare works of non-fiction that stand up to a metaphorical reading. The echoes of myth in Macdonald’s writing, however subtle and unobtrusive, lend her book an emotional weight usually reserved only for literature, and a grace only for poetry.” — Madeleine Larue
Speedboat by Renata Adler: “Adler’s brief, punchy wit reads, perhaps, better today than it did 35 years ago. Scrolling through news bits and status updates between passages of Speedboat, I’m floored by how the novel reads as a somewhat verbose Twitter feed. That is, verbose for Twitter. Succinct for anything else.” — Eric Dean Wilson
Young Skins by Colin Barrett: “This collection, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, wastes no motion in its unsparing look at youth and masculinity in the small towns of the west.” — Garth Risk Hallberg
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay: “[M]oral complexity, its denial of easy schematics, turns An Untamed State into something more than good fiction, which it is, and arrives at something approximating, in a larger sense, truth.” — Aboubacar Ndiaye
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner: “Kushner’s fiction is so stuffed with characters, events, stories, history, information — it is so alive in its own specific imagined worlds — that it seems to want to burst. But it never does. And that may be the main reason why Rachel Kushner is well on her way to huge.” — Bill Morris
And if you’re interested in books outside of the subscription library, the Oyster Store has got you covered too. Purchase new releases—like say titles off the Millions Top 10, like My Brilliant Friend, All the Light We Cannot See, or The Girl on the Train—and they’ll automatically sync to all your devices. It’s just as convenient and budget-friendly as shopping on Amazon, except it doesn’t feel like you’re shopping deep within a desolate warehouse.
This post was created in partnership with The Millions and supports the The Millions’ efforts to be the premier independent online magazine covering books, arts, and culture.
