School starts up in just about two weeks! This short period is a good time to wind down and read one last book before you’re sucked back into fast-paced, time-consuming work. Having trouble choosing the right book? Here are two short reads that can accompany you during the final days of summer:

1.) "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Did you like "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" in high school? If so, this may be the right book for you. "The Sorrows of Young Werther" is a short, 18th century epistolary novel (a novel in the guise of a series of letters) following an ecstatically emotional man whose doomed love for an engaged woman destroys his spirit of wonder and sends him into a deep depression.

Werther begins as a nature-loving, Homer-reading romantic who loves children and cherishes the comforts of idyllic domesticity. But upon meeting the sweet, charming and, unfortunately, taken Lotte, his ecstatic love for life and nature (one side of the romantic temperament) disappears and is replaced with a sense of alienation from the ideas he cherishes most: home, nature, friendship, etc.

While the novel is not entirely uplifting, "The Sorrows of Young Werther"points out how impossible love can turn even our most dear passions against us and destroy our sense of harmony with the world. And, perhaps most importantly, Werther’s letters are simply some of the most entertaining pieces of literature. His nearly ridiculous, very 18th-century outpourings of romantic rapture expose the reader, I think, to feelings that often go unexpressed in contemporary life.

2.) "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick

"Ubik" is a masterful science fiction novel written in the sixties about death, decay, and psychic powers, to put it in the vaguest of terms. Set in 1992, the novel follows employees of an anti-psychic company hired to counteract the efforts of dangerous telepaths to infiltrate big corporations.

When they are hired by a mysterious corporation to carry out their task, they go, only to get ambushed by the leader of the most notorious telepath company. When the head of the anti-psychic business, Glen Runciter, is killed, the employees fail to preserve him quickly enough into a half-life (a state in which a dead person can still communicate with the living—yeah, we had that in 1992).

But has Glen Runciter actually perished? Or is it the other way around, that the employees were killed and preserved while Glen Runciter goes on living? We follow one of the employees, Joe Chip, as he observes the strange tendency towards decay that the world has taken on; cigarettes crumble at the touch, coffee is moldy, and soon enough, the buildings begin to appear in older, mid-20th century forms.

Joe Chip is forced to investigate the cause of this decay, not to mention the mysterious “manifestations” of Runciter in this world. His face appears on coins and, most inexplicably, on television advertising a product called Ubik, a spray can that can renew the decaying objects back to their contemporary state.

With all of these mysterious premises, "Ubik" is a wildly suspenseful novel that forces the reader to join Joe Chip’s frantic search for the meaning of all these phenomena. By the end, no questions seem fully answered, and we can’t quite be sure of our own reality anymore. For anyone who loves a fast-paced, mind-bending read, this book is the perfect choice!