As the vibrant colors of spring begin to bloom outside, there’s no better time to cultivate a cozy haven within your home. Imagine turning your newfound study space into a personal library oasis, where the fragrance of fresh flowers mingles with the scent of new books. At UnionMain, we believe that a home is not just a structure; it’s a canvas for creating lasting memories and indulging in the pleasures of life. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the process of transforming your space into a tranquil library and offer a curated list of must-read books that will add a touch of literary charm to your springtime retreat. So, grab a cup of tea, find a comfortable reading nook, and let’s embark on a journey to build not only your dream home but also your ideal reading sanctuary.

Consider the layout of your space when crafting your home library. Our floorplans, like the spacious Belton, often feature a designated study room perfect for transforming into a cozy library haven. For those who prefer a more integrated approach, explore the possibility of creating a charming reading nook within an existing room. Whether it’s a dedicated space or a tucked-away corner, the key is to blend functionality with comfort, allowing your love for literature to seamlessly become part of your home’s design.

Crafting an inviting library space is not just about style; it’s about choosing furniture and lighting that cater to prolonged comfort while reading. Whether in a dedicated room or just a corner, prioritize reading chairs and sofas designed for long hours of relaxation. Soft cushions, warm throws, and thoughtfully placed lighting create an inviting ambiance that not only complements the aesthetic but also ensures you can delve into your favorite books without straining your body or eyes. Find the perfect blend of comfort and illumination, making your reading nook a well-lit retreat where you can lose yourself in literature for hours on end.

Infuse your library with personality by incorporating decor choices that resonate with your unique style. Consider adding personal mementos, artwork, or cherished collectibles to make the space uniquely yours. Showcase your favorite books with creative shelving arrangements, and adorn the area with distinctive bookends or decorative items that reflect your interests. The key is to strike a balance between functionality and personal style, transforming your reading space into a haven that not only inspires literary adventures but also tells the story of who you are. Explore a mix of elements that bring warmth and individuality to your library, ensuring that every visit is a delightful journey into your own world of literature.

The Giver

by Lois Lowry

Description: In Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal–winning classic, twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a seemingly ideal world. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind his fragile community.

Life in the community where Jonas lives is idyllic. Designated birthmothers produce newchildren, who are assigned to appropriate family units. Citizens are assigned their partners and their jobs. No one thinks to ask questions. Everyone obeys. Everyone is the same. Except Jonas.

Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community. Gradually Jonas learns that power lies in feelings. But when his own power is put to the test—when he must try to save someone he loves—he may not be ready. Is it too soon? Or too late?

Told with deceptive simplicity, this is the provocative story of a boy who experiences something incredible and undertakes something impossible. In the telling it questions every value we have taken for granted and reexamines our most deeply held beliefs.

Cleopatra: A Life

by Stacy Schiff

Description: The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.

Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and — after his murder — three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Throne of Glass

by Sarah J. Maas

Description: Lethal. Loyal. Legendary.

Enter the world of Throne of Glass with the first book in the #1 bestselling series by Sarah J. Maas.

In a land without magic, an assassin is summoned to the castle. She has no love for the vicious king who rules from his throne of glass, but she has not come to kill him. She has come to win her freedom. If she defeats twenty-three murderers, thieves, and warriors in a competition, she will be released from prison to serve as the King’s Champion.

Her name is Celaena Sardothien.

The Crown Prince will provoke her. The Captain of the Guard will protect her. And a princess from a faraway country will befriend her. But something rotten dwells in the castle, and it’s there to kill. When her competitors start dying mysteriously, one by one, Celaena’s fight for freedom becomes a fight for survival-and a desperate quest to root out the evil before it destroys her world.

Thrilling and fierce, Throne of Glass is the first book in the #1 New York Times bestselling series that has captivated readers worldwide.

Dune

by Frank Herbert

Description: Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad’Dib—and of a great family’s ambition to bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

Vespertine

by Margaret Rogerson

Description: From the New York Times bestselling author of Sorcery of Thorns and An Enchantment of Ravens comes a thrilling, “dark coming-of-age adventure” (Culturess) about a teen girl with mythic abilities who must defend her world against restless spirits of the dead.

The spirits of the dead do not rest.

Artemisia is training to be a Gray Sister, a nun who cleanses the bodies of the deceased so that their souls can pass on; otherwise, they will rise as ravenous, hungry spirits. She would rather deal with the dead than the living, who whisper about her scarred hands and troubled past.

When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends it by awakening an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic. It is a revenant, a malevolent being whose extraordinary power almost consumes her—but death has come, and only a vespertine, a priestess trained to wield a high relic, has any chance of stopping it. With all knowledge of vespertines lost to time, Artemisia turns to the last remaining expert for help: the revenant itself.

As she unravels a sinister mystery of saints, secrets, and dark magic, Artemisia discovers that facing this hidden evil might require her to betray everything she believes—if the revenant doesn’t betray her first.

The Diamond Eye

by Kate Quinn

Description: The bestselling author of The Rose Code returns with an unforgettable World War II tale of a quiet bookworm who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper. Based on a true story.

In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kyiv, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.

Still reeling from war wounds and devastated by loss, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC—until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness.

But when an old enemy from Mila’s past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.

Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye is a haunting novel of heroism born of desperation, of a mother who became a soldier, of a woman who found her place in the world and changed the course of history forever.

Things We Never Got Over

by Lucy Score

Description: Knox Morgan doesn’t tolerate drama, especially in the form of a stranded runaway bride.

Naomi Witt is on the run. Not just from her fiancé and a church full of well-wishers, but from her entire life. Although if you ask her, Naomi’s riding to the rescue of her estranged hot mess of a twin, Tina, to Knockemout, a rough-around-the-edges town where disputes are settled the old-fashioned way…with fists and beer. Usually in that order.

Too bad for Naomi, her evil twin hasn’t changed at all. After helping herself to Naomi’s car and cash, Tina leaves behind something unexpected: the niece Naomi didn’t know she had. Now she’s a guardian to an eleven-year-old-going-on-thirty with no car, no money, and no plan.

There’s a reason this bearded, bad-boy barber doesn’t get involved with high-maintenance women, especially not Type-A romantic ones. But since Naomi’s life imploded right in front of him, the least Knox can do is help her out of her jam. And just as soon as she stops getting into new trouble, he can leave her alone and get back to his quiet, solitary life.

At least, that’s the plan.

Everybody Knows

by Jordan Harper

Description: Welcome to Mae Pruett’s Los Angeles, where “Nobody talks. But everybody whispers.” As a “black-bag” publicist tasked not with letting the good news out but keeping the bad news in, Mae works for one of LA’s most powerful and sought-after crisis PR firms, at the center of a sprawling web of lawyers, PR flaks, and private security firms she calls “The Beast.” They protect the rich and powerful and depraved by any means necessary.

After her boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel in a random attack, Mae takes it upon herself to investigate and runs headfirst into The Beast’s lawless machinations and the twisted systems it exists to perpetuate. It takes her on a roving neon joyride through a Los Angeles full of influencers pumped full of pills and fillers; sprawling mansions footsteps away from sprawling homeless encampments; crooked cops and mysterious wrecking crews in the middle of the night.

Edgar Award-winner Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is addicting and alarming, a “juggernaut of a novel” and “an absolute tour de force.” It is what the crime novel can achieve in the modern age: portray the human lives at the center of vast American landscapes, and make us thrill at their attempts to face impossible odds.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

by Holly Jackson

Description:Everyone in Fairview knows the story.

Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town.

But she can’t shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer?

Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn’t want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger.

Scythe

by Neal Shusterman

Description: Two teens must learn the “art of killing” in this Printz Honor–winning book, the first in a chilling new series from Neal Shusterman, author of the New York Times bestselling Unwind dystology.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

Scythe is the first novel of a thrilling new series by National Book Award–winning author Neal Shusterman in which Citra and Rowan learn that a perfect world comes only with a heavy price.

Disclaimer: The book recommendations provided on this blog are for informational purposes only and do not imply any endorsement or affiliation with UnionMain Homes. The opinions and views expressed in the book recommendations are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official stance of UnionMain. UnionMain Homes is not responsible for the content, accuracy, or reliability of the recommended books. Any references to authors, publishers, or specific literary works are made without endorsement or sponsorship from UnionMain Homes.