Monsoon calls for a lot of things. Umbrellas that flip inside out, your best shoes tragically sacrificed to the puddles, and the slow, squelchy wade through potholes that blossom like the true flora of the season- craters that bloom overnight like wildflowers.
And of course, like that one episode from The Office (US) when Michael Scott drives the car into a lake. Thanks to the Google maps that fail him. Sounds familiar, I suppose. The way Google Maps fail you, so will your patience amid the soggy chaos and chai-moong dal pakora cravings.
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But then there is another side to the monsoon in the urban desert that calls for stillness. No, nothing is meditative about monsoon. Not when you need to travel miles to reach your workplace without getting soaked by a flash of car passing through a giant pothole. It is something that requires some serious observational stills and intact attention span, of course.
Like when was the last time, you saw a rainbow appear. But I bet, you remember how the monsoon is an invitation to mosquitoes, mould, and moral dilemmas about laundry. But, it is brings time, slowness and a perfect excuse to stop scrolling and look outside the window. All-natural background sound whilst you're flipping through the pages of a novel that transplants you to a world of fiction.
Books to Read This Monsoon
Here are 7 reads perfect for monsoon that you may already have on your bookshelves if not on the wishlist cart online.
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
A quietly powerful tale of rural life and human connection, Plainsong by Kent Haruf dissects the masculine in its emotional restraint through a tone of simple, lumionous writing. Perfect for those who love reading stories of dignity in hardship.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
If ever a book understood the violence and romance of rain, it’s this one. Wuthering Heights is all wind-blown moors, brooding stares, and emotional storms that make actual thunder feel redundant. Brontë’s only novel is messy, gothic, and utterly absorbing.
Think of it as the literary equivalent of listening to Lana Del Rey in a thunderstorm—dramatic, destructive, delicious, if we may say so. Read it while lightning flashes outside and pretend you, too, are haunted by the ghost of a lost love.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Melancholy wears a raincoat in Haruki Murakami’s coming-of-age classic. Set in 1960s Tokyo, this story of love, loss, and mental illness unfurls gently, like fog on a hill. The protagonist, Toru Watanabe, finds himself caught between the memories of a lost friend and the slow, quiet pull of adulthood. It’s moody in the best possible way—perfect for rainy days when your playlist leans acoustic and introspective. Want a bonus? It pairs alarmingly well with black coffee and emotional unavailability.
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The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
A small, quiet novel with a big, warm heart. It’s about a brilliant mathematician with only 80 minutes of short-term memory, the woman who takes care of him, and her son. That’s it. No plot twists, no explosions, no sexy psychopaths. Just a gentle drizzle of memory, equations, and human kindness. Reading it feels like watching rain bead gently on a windowpane while someone hums softly in the kitchen.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Short stories are perfect for the monsoon attention span, as unfortunate as it sounds, Lahiri’s writing is full of quiet longing, diaspora melancholy, little gaps between people that never quite close and yet a breath of freshness. These are tales to be read slowly, with tea in hand and maybe a record spinning something moody in the background. It's ideal for when the sky is grey and your soul kind of is too but that's not mandatory.
Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar (translated by Jerry Pinto)
Why have we narrowed our visual memory of Monsoon to just scenery; it’s also about inner weather. This novel, originally written in Marathi and set in Pune, is soaked in the ache of unspoken things. A brother and sister fall in love with the same mysterious man. As tragic as it sounds, that isn't how the novel ends.
There's more. Secrets bubble up, hearts crack open, and rain becomes more than atmosphere—it’s a mirror. Short, intense, and written with a kind of quiet fury. If longing had a temperature, this book would be just above room temperature on a rainy night.
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Dubliners by James Joyce
Now, hear me out. the Irish novelist and playwright James Joyce might conjure thoughts of impenetrable sentence structures and academic trauma, but Dubliners is his most accessible work—a collection of short stories about ordinary people with extraordinary depth.
Set in early 20th-century Dublin, these stories are often emotionally stormy even if meteorologically dry. And yes, the rain shows up, not as a gimmick, but as mood—damp cobblestones, misted windows, and the general drizzle of discontent. You'll finish one and stare out the window like a tragic protagonist from his books. Guaranteed.