Reading is a great way to de-stress and as long as you don’t use it too hide from college work all the time, it can be a worthy distractor.
Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney
Written by a Trinity graduate when she was only 26, “Conversations with Friends” is such 
an easy book to get lost in. I read it in about five hours, in the middle of the night, with a pot of coffee. The story follows Frances and Bobbi, who’ve recently graduated from Trinity. Former partners, now friends who perform spoken word poetry as a double act, they embark on a complicated friendship, with a sophisticated older couple. The book follows the relationship between each character and the aftermath of finishing college. Her highly anticipated new book, Normal People, will be released in September.
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
This novel, written in 1983, still holds an eerie dystopian reality relevant to today. In a world with falling birth rates and high infertility, a religious regime takes hold of America, forcing the remaining fertile women to surrogate wealthy powerful families, as powerless “handmaids”. Read the book and then binge-watch the tv adaptation, which goes further than the book’s plot.
The Gospel According to Blindboy – Blindboy
This is perfect for dipping in and out of, as it comprises of 15 short stories, written by theone half of the Rubberbandits duo. Certainly dark at times and speckled with humour, the unique stories differ hugely from topics about anxiety to Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera mixing cocktails.
Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown – Sophie White
When Sophie White was at Electric Picnic in 2007, she took a dodgy pill that had lasting effects on her mental health for years to come. White talks about her recovery in her early twenties as well as her life up to thirty, in her light-hearted tone. This isn’t a recipe book per se, “part-memoir, part-rant” in her words, but includes very student-friendly recipes at the end of each chapter such as, Van Pizza – made while traveling around France in a van with her boyfriend, which involved cooking the dough on the hob and melting the toppings under the grill, due to the lack of an oven. AnoSther recipe includes a chocolate biscuit cake for when one is stoned and in need of munchies but cannot be arsed to properly bake. Obviously, DIT students would never partake in such a recreational activity, ahem.
