The 8 books you want to curl up with on the couch

Give me an engaging book and my friend will complain. Rightly so, or if I might want to talk to him while eating. I was like little Adeline, I had chronic sleep deprivation because I was reading with a flashlight under the covers. Every Wednesday I went to the library for about six books, which I would finish the following week. And yes, I still had a social life.

Read books, listen to books, devour books. It brings peace to your mind, you almost always learn something from it, and you step into a parallel world for a moment. These are the eight that will be on my reading list this fall, and they also do well on wish lists. Just saying.

1. The Testaments – Margaret Atwood

Suppose you can't wait for the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, then you can start on Atwood's latest work. And it's so much nicer to create the story in your head than to see it on a screen. You still have to keep your mouth shut for a hundred years against all the companions who are also watching Handmaid’s.

2. All the new work by Karin Slaughter

Because she herself wrote ‘Last Widow’, but also came out with ‘Clean Gold’, together with Lee Child. Karin Slaughter is my guilty pleasure, no vacation goes by without a page-turner from her hand. So apparently I have to again, because suddenly there are two (!) new books.

3. The Best Time of Our Lives – Claire Lombardo

661 pages of pure enjoyment. The book spans half a century and tells the lives of the four Sorenson sisters. One secret turns everything upside down, unraveling the family dynamics delicately. Sounds like a family drama in my alley.

4. P.S. From love letters to hate mail: the 150 most remarkable Dutch letters

The application of Appie Baantjer to the police, a plea from P.C. Hooft signed in blood, the letter that Mohammed B. left on the body of Theo van Gogh: P.S. contains letters you want to have read.

5. What We Didn't Tell – Lara Prescott

‘In a man's world, women are the best spies,’ says the book about the novel Doctor Zhivago. It tells the story of how the CIA ensured that the Russian people got to read Boris Pasternak's book, thereby shaping world history. ‘Sometimes they didn't call us by name, but used our hair color or physical characteristics: Blondie, Red, Tits. We also had secret names for them: Clipper, Coffee Breath, Teeth. They called us girls, but we weren't.’ You want to read this in one go, right?

6. Most People Are Good – Rutger Bregman

What if humanity isn't as corrupt as we've thought for thousands of years? That's the question Bregman poses, giving history quite a twist. And if Jan Terlouw and Geert Mak say we should read a book, who are we then? Exactly, just read.

7. Everything I Can't Say – Emilie Pine

If you get the advice not to read a book in public because it might make you cry, then you have me. Pine has published many articles, but now a book about the taboos in life that women can relate to.

8. The new one from Japke-d. Bouma

For this book, I will lie on the doorstep of the bookstore on October 17. I find her epistles for NRC about the office garden brilliant. ‘Can I just hold this against you?’ I read while laughing, so I can't wait for her Guide to the Office Garden. Let's see if I can apply a few things here and there.

Finished everything? Then also read Let It Be and I will never see the world again.