If you're looking for something to spend time with this Spring, don't want that stingy sunlight to ruin your complexion and just want to stay home, sit back and relax, then a good book is a great company.
Here are five books you need in your shelves and to-read-list this Spring.
"Eye on the Struggle" (James McGrath Morris)
The novel is about Ethel Payne, who was born in Chicago's South Side in 1911. She came from a family of slaves, a daughter of a Pullman porter, became a reporter for the influential black newspaper the Chicago Defender after leaving her job as a library clerk. Hoping for change, Payne covered news about the views of woman on racial injustice. Payne worked for four decades and has observed, wrote and spoke about truth.
"In James McGrath Morris's compelling biography, Eye on the Struggle (Amistad), this 'first lady of the black press' finally gets her due. Morris lovingly chronicles Payne's dedication and her rise to become one of the few black members of the White House press corps and the first African American television commentator on a national network. Payne was in the room when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act," Huffington Post quotes Claudia Rankine.
"Funny Girl" (Nick Hornby)
Considering the power of beauty, this novel tackles Sophie (protagonist) as an ambitious comedian with a face and body of a supermodel. She is willing to sacrifice everything, even the death of his father, over the chance of fame. Hornby said Sophie had "always suspected that she was the sort of girl who wouldn't go home to see a sick father if she had a shot at a television series."
"If beauty is a gilded cage, it's one it is possible to escape and thrive outside of, if you have the heart and guts of this heroine," Leigh Haber said in the Huffington Post report.
"Jam on the Vine" (La Shonda Katrice Barnett)
The novel revolves around the story of Ivoe Williams, and her escape from poverty using her passion in journalism and intelligence, after earning a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson College in Austin. She flees her hometown and moved to Kansas with her family and a lover, Ona, where they found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine.
"Single, Carefree, Mellow" (Katherine Heiny)
"Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way," says Lena Dunham.
Heiny's new novel tackles the life of women in eleven inspiring stories they are dealing with - love, friendship, secrets and betrayal.
"The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty" (Amanda Filipacchi)
This novel evolves on Barb and Lily, both artists, at the opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, who are both fearing they'll never find love because of their looks. Barb is a costume designer who is beautiful but transforms herself to an ugly one in order to find love, while Lily, a plain-looking musician, goes beyond the limits to attract the man who rejected her.
A twist in a story complicates the matters at hand, when they learned that they have a murderer in their midst.