Books I Love
My favorite books tend to have strong first-person voices with characters who are brutally honest and who do questionable things, often to themselves. I love intense novels and breathless short stories. The books below made lasting impressions at significant moments in my life. There are some I have read, and will read, multiple times. Others I have read just once, and that once was enough, and I won’t ruin the memory by reading them again.
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YA/middle-grade novels:
The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison
Boy Heaven by Laura Kasischke
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Good Girls by Laura Ruby
Feathered by Laura Kasischke
Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia
Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin
Paper Towns by John Green
Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers
Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr
Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
Waiting for Normal by Leslie Connor
What I Was by Meg Rosoff
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
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Adult novels:
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Cracks by Sheila Kohler
Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
The End of Alice by A.M. Homes
Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
The Last Life by Claire Messud
Live Girls by Beth Nugent
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
That Night by Alice McDermott
Thicker Than Water by Kathryn Harrison
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
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Short story collections:
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
Drown by Junot Diaz
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Milhauser
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
Runaway by Alice Munro
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Unsettling by Peter Rock
Use Me by Elissa Schappell
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I absolutely love Wide Sargasso Sea! I preferred it to Jane Eyre (someone was horrified with me once for saying that but it’s true!) My copy was pinched while I was at university, so I bought another one from a secondhand shop. But that copy is now living with my parents in another country. I’m hoping to be reunited with it this July… if it hasn’t been reunited with the secondhand shop.
I will be checking out some of the other books on this list, I love a good book recommendation.
Isn’t Wide Sargasso Sea incredible? I also preferred it to Jane Eyre. I read Jane Eyre as a kid and it made a big impression on me, and then I read Wide Sargasso Sea in college. It was a surprise and expanded on what I’d imagined of Jane Eyre when I was young. I love Jean Rhys. Here’s to hoping you are reunited with your book in July!
Drown changed my world and what I thought of short fiction. Great list.
Have you read (surely, you must have!) The Plague by Albert Camus?
That, along with Joanne Harris’s Coastliners is my current favourite!
Narziss: Eek, I haven’t. I haven’t read Coastliners either. Thank you!
Wow, those are great choices. I see you are a Euginedes fan–I haven’t read his stuff yet.