Cocooned in a comfy little reading rut? Intrigued by the glimmer of reading more adventurously?

Here are three guides straight from my own bookshelves that I love.

"Read slowly," she says. "Just as a fine meal should be savored, so, too, good books are to be luxuriated in, not rushed through."

“Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” by Francine Prose, published in 2006, is undaunted by time. Prose believes pleasure not duty should be your guide as a reader and she breaks down scenes and dialogue and writerly techniques that work. By the way, she includes 117 books that must be read immediately.

Finally, I’ve included “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books” by Wendy Lesser. Lesser is open-minded and openly delighted with the experience of reading and she had me when she wrote that she wished Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was twice as long as it was.

“A Guardian and a Thief” is a tightly written and absolutely devastating book. I couldn’t read it at night, so I got up early to finish it the day author Megha Majumdar spoke in Hopkins for the Friends of the Hennepin County Library Pen Pals series.

Part thriller with unexpected humor, the book grapples with a question: Who are we in times of crisis?

Her novel centers on two parallel stories unfolding in a near-future Kolkata, India during a food shortage. There’s a middle-class woman, her father and 2-year-old daughter, who are trying to leave the country on newly obtained visas. And there’s a young man, seeking provision for his parents and little brother, who steals those visas.

Majumdar writes about the intense desire to protect our loved ones, and how that desire can come into conflict with our morality. The way she describes this love is sometimes breathtaking, and often painful.

There’s a line that will stay with me about Ma, the mother, feeding her young infant with formula. “She leaned over Mishti like a river-fed tree to its river, though who was river and who was tree?”

Majumdar said in her lecture that she wanted to explore the nature of hope, especially when hope does not look soft or gentle. Perhaps, she said, as readers might find at the ending of her book, sometimes that hope is nearly “unrecognizable.”