65 books you need to read
in your 20s – part 2
Housekeeping
Marilynne
Robinson
An important book to read to learn about
being lonely.
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of
Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow
up haphazardly, first under the care of their
competent grandmother, then of two
comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of
Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The
family house is in the small Far West town of
Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake
where their grandfather died in a spectacular
train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an
outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the
whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood
beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of
transience.
I Love Dick
Chris
Kraus
Readers will be rewarded with most
psychologically astute sex scene ever written,
plus a thorough, impassioned and wholly unique
analysis of the power dynamics of heterosexual
sex and love, how heterosexuality works to
keep women unrepresented and unable to fully
represent themselves, and how that affects the
world.
The story is gripping enough:
in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known
theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist
refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other
instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless
pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband ;and far beyond her
original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love
Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own
narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world ;and it's
a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and
transformation.
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
So that you’ll realize the way you felt about
this book in high school has totally changed.
IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack
Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the
Road—typed as a single-spaced paragraph
on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which
he later taped together to form a 120-foot
scroll. A major literary event when it was
published in Viking hardcover in 2007, this is
the uncut version of an American classic—
rougher, wilder, and more
provocative than the official work that appeared, heavily edited, in 1957. This version,
capturing a moment in creative history, represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s
revolutionary aesthetic.
Even Cowgirls Get the
Blues
Tom Robbins
It is kind of a primer on absurdist literature
and speaks volumes to self-doubt and
discovery and body image and feminine
identity reclamation. Plus, it has that sense
of humor that you have in your twenties
when you think you are SO FUCKING CLEVER,
and sometimes you actually are.
The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting
with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their
rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary
Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them
all.
Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric
adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along
on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the
frontiers of the mind.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Two complicated, brilliant, and intertwined
yet distinct narratives (Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and The End of the World) about
a surreal dystopia.
Japan's most widely-read and controversial
writer, author of A Wild Sheep Chase, hurtles
into the consciousness of the West with this
narrative about a split-brained data processor,
a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure
granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians,
and
subterranean monsters--not to mention Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall.
Bossypants
Tina Fey
This whole book is filled with brilliance —
about work, about being a woman, about
being a mom, about being a boss.
Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update,"
before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a
young girl with a dream: a recurring stress
dream that she was being chased through a
local airport by her middle-school gym
teacher. She also had a dream that one day
she would be a comedian on TV.
She has seen both these dreams
come true.
At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty
on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life
as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal
honeymoon -- from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.
Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you
bossy.
Kitchen
Confidential
Anthony
Bourdain
Will immediately quash your fantasies of
opening your own restaurant unless you are
a masochist, in which case this book will be
your how-to.
A New York City chef who is also a novelist
recounts his experiences in the restaurant
business, and exposes abuses of power,
sexual promiscuity, drug use, and other
secrets of life behind kitchen doors.
How to Lose Friends and
Alienate People
Toby Young
Young’s memoir about his (mis)adventures
in the New York media scene can seem a bit
petulant, but he does manage to capture
pretty perfectly that world’s bizarre rituals
and petty status obsessions.
The Dirt
Mötley Crüe and
Neil Strauss
You think your twenties were wild?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Lunar Park
Bret Easton
Ellis
Technically
a novel, but more of a
fictionalized memoir: “It’s about what
happens when you reach your career goals
yet you still find yourself haunted by ghosts,”
says my colleague Michael. Also, it’s
important to read Bret Easton Ellis before
you get too old.
In this chilling tale reality, memoir,
and fantasy combine to create not only a fascinating
version of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss,
parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness.
Just Kids
Patti Smith
One of my favorite books of the last few
years, maybe ever. Smith’s memoir is about
falling in love — with a man, with New York,
with her adult self — and will make you long
for a New York that you never knew.
In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book
of prose, the legendary American
artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her
remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New
York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of
youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the
rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art
and poetry.
Another Bullshit Night
in Suck City
Nick Flynn
For learning that trauma is traumatic.
Nick Flynn met his father when he was
working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter
in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters
from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed
poet and con man doing time in federal prison
for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in
Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that
led Nick and his father onto the streets, into
that shelter, and finally to each other.
Oh the Glory of it
All
Sean Wilsey
It’s just a fab memoir about growing up in San
Francisco, but mostly the dude had a TERRIBLE
childhood. And I think terrible childhood books
are best for people in their twenties.
When Sean turns nine years old, his father
divorces his mother and marries her best friend.
Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him
to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of
salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton
luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of
multiracial children
in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl,
Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his
father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five
high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy.
With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters,
seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide,
skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas,
global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged
list)—Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.
I Don’t Care About
Your Band
Julie Klausner
These hilarious interconnected essays about
finding and losing (mostly losing) love as a
twentysomething in New York City take place
in the recent past, but something tells me
they are timeless.
I Don't Care About Your Band charts a
distinctly human journey of a strong-willed
but vulnerable
protagonist who loves men like it's her job, but who's done with guys who know more about
love songs than love. Klausner's is a new outlook on dating in a time of pop culture obsession,
and she spent her 20's doing personal field research to back up her philosophies. This is the
girl's version of High Fidelity. By turns explicit, funny and moving, Klausner's debut shows the
evolution of a young woman who endured myriad encounters with the wrong guys, to emerge
with real- world wisdom on matters of the heart. I Don't Care About Your Band is Julie
Klausner's manifesto, and every one of us can relate.
Wild
Cheryl Strayed
For how, and why, to be brave. And also how
to hike for over 1,000 miles alone after your
mother’s death, your divorce, and your
recovery from a bit of a heroin addiction.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she
had lost everything. In the wake of her
mother’s death, her family scattered and her
own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years
later, with nothing more to lose, she made the
most impulsive decision of her life. With no
experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of
the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington
State—and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and
humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead
against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
Lit
Mary Karr
Karr’s memoir about her alcoholism is like a
punch in the gut, in the best possible way.
And as my friend Jess says, this book “will
teach you to be honest with yourself.”
Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt
sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism
and madness--and to her astonishing
resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family
seems secure when her marriage to a
handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood
poet produces a son they adore. But she can't
outrun her
apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her
charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in 'The
Mental Marriott,' with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of
joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, 'Give me chastity, Lordbut not yet!' has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and
getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live.
Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating
humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up--as only Mary Karr can tell it.
I’m with the Band
Pamela Des
Barres
Des Barres spent much of the ’60s as a rock
‘n’ roll groupie, and this classic memoir is a
good reminder that a narcissist by any other
name (aka rock star) is still a narcissist.
As soon as she graduated from high school,
Pamela Des Barres headed for the Sunset
Strip, where she knocked on rock stars'
backstage doors and immersed herself in the
drugs, danger, and
ecstasy of the freewheeling 1960s. Over the next 10 years she had affairs with Mick Jagger,
Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings, Chris Hillman, Noel Redding, and Jim Morrison,
among others. She traveled with Led Zeppelin; lived in sin with Don Johnson; turned down a
date with Elvis Presley; and was close friends with Robert Plant, Gram Parsons, Ray Davies, and
Frank Zappa. As a member of the GTO's, a girl group masterminded by Frank Zappa, she was in
the thick of the most revolutionary renaissance in the history of modern popular music. Warm,
witty, and sexy, this kiss-and-tell–all stands out as the perfect chronicle of one of rock 'n' roll's
most thrilling eras.
Dear Diary
Lesley Arfin
Arfin revisits her funny, dark diary entries
from the ages of 12 through 25. There’s lots
to relate to here, and also some deeply
cautionary tales.
A collection of a girl's funniest diary entries
from 12 to 25 years old. She updates each
entry by tracking down the people involved
and asking awkward questions like, "Do you
remember when I tried to beat you up?" Sometimes old friends apologize. Sometimes they
become new enemies. No matter who she talks to about the days we all discovered sex, drugs,
and rock 'n roll, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Boys are totally immature.
"Here's your chance to have all the benefits of a tortured adolescence without the shitty
childhood. Congradulations!"
—Sarah Silverman
The Complete Poems of
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Sexton was a revolutionary: She wrote
frankly and breathtakingly about incredibly
personal and controversial topics —
including her mental illness, drug addiction,
and abortion — until her suicide in 1973 at
age 45.
From the joy and anguish of her own
experience, Sexton fashioned poems that told
truths about the inner lives of men and
women. This
book comprises Sexton's ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die,
as well as seven poems form her last years.
Actual Air
David Berman
You may know Berman best as the lead
singer of the Silver Jews, but in 1999 he
published a slyly sweet book of poetry that
takes on everything from Abraham Lincoln to
his ex-girlfriend.
David Berman reinvents the
overlooked and seemingly ordinary
details of everyday life--from the
suitcase of a departing girlfriend to
a baseboard electrical outlet. His poems chart a
course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh,
accessible, and remarkably precise. This debut collection has received extraordinary acclaim
from readers and reviewers alike and is quickly becoming a cult classic. As Pulitzer Prizewinning poet James Tate said, "These poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. . . . It's
a book for everyone."
A Collection of Poems of
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch
For fans of Frank O’Hara who are ready for
something a little more exuberant.
Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art,
and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has
been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter
member–along with Frank O’Hara, John
Ashbery, and James Schuyler–of the New
York School of poets, avant-garde playwright
and fiction writer, pioneer teacher of writing
to children, Koch gave us some of
the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his generation.
These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the heart, often at the same time:
“O what a physical effect it has on me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your
acquaintance!” (“In Love with You”).
Alien vs. Predator
Michael Robbins
A great contemporary poet, below is a verse
from a poem he published on the Awl last year:
Maybe it’s Maybelline. Why can’t you be true?
You re-gifted the VD I wrapped up just for you.
My penis and my brain team up to penis-brain
you.
It is now my duty to completely drain you.
Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has
been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts
hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are
strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive
as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the
virtuous.
The Collected Poems of
Audre Lord
Audre Lord
Audre Lorde called herself a “black, lesbian,
mother, warrior, and poet,” and her poems
— about race, sexuality, love, loss,
parenthood, politics, and death — are
emotional and angry and warm all at once.
"These are poems which blaze and
pulse on the page."—Adrienne Rich
"The first declaration of a black,
lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems,
and set the terms—beautifully, forcefully—for contemporary multicultural and pluralist
debate."—Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best
contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly
moving."—Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's
most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this
volume."—Out Magazine
Me Talk Pretty One
Day
David Sedaris
Because it’s sometimes instructive to
realize that your awkward, quirky upbringing
can become the stuff of best-selling essays.
A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David
Sedaris, bestselling author of "Naked",
presents a collection of his strongest work yet,
including the title story about his hilarious
attempt to learn French. A number one
national bestseller now in paperback.
How to Be a Woman
Caitlin Moran
Moran’s book is a sharp, wise, and, most of
all, hilarious exploration of modern-day
womanhood, feminism, and being generally
kick-ass.
Caitlin Moran puts a new face on feminism,
cutting to the heart of women’s issues today
with her irreverent, transcendent, and
hilarious How to Be a Woman. “Half memoir,
half polemic, and entirely necessary,” (Elle
UK), Moran’s debut
was an instant runaway bestseller in England as well as an Amazon UK Top Ten book of the
year; still riding high on bestseller lists months after publication, it is a bona fide cultural
phenomenon. Now poised to take American womanhood by storm, here is a book that Vanity
Fair calls “the U.K. version of Tina Fey’s Bossypants….You will laugh out loud, wince, and—in
my case—feel proud to be the same gender as the author.”
My Misspent Youth
Meghan Daum
The titular essay in this collection was
published in 1999 in The New Yorker, when the
29-year-old Daum realized that she was totally,
utterly broke and needed to leave New York,
and her lament is the timeless one of the
upper-middle-class liberal arts college
graduate who cannot live in the New York of
their fantasies: “I spend money on Martinis and
expensive dinners because, as is typical among
my species of debtor, I tell myself that Martinis
and expensive dinners are the entire point —
the point of being young, the point of living in
New York City, the point of living.”
She speaks to questions at the root
of the contemporary experience,
from the search for authenticity and
interpersonal connection in a society
defined by consumerism and media;
to the disenchantment of working in
a "glamour profession"; to the
catastrophic effects of living among New York City's terminal hipsters. With precision and wellbalanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and
horrify her.
Slouching Towards
Bethlehem
Joan Didion
The Bible for anyone who’s fancied
themselves a writer, ever. Didion has
probably said what you wanted to say, and
earlier and better.
The first nonfiction work by one of the most
distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching
Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after
its first publication, the essential portrait of
America— particularly California—in the
sixties. It focuses on such subjects as
John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of
good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
Up in the Old
Hotel
Joseph Mitchell
Mitchell was a New Yorker writer whose
essays about the city in the 1930s to the
1960s are each gems of keenly observed
daily life. Wherever you live, these will make
you look at your everyday surroundings a
little differently.
Saloon-keepers and street
preachers, gypsies and steel-walking
Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old
“seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades.
These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New
Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the
Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful
observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.
These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one
volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its
odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.
How to Cook
EverythingMark
Bittman
No task — whether making pasta or
scrambling an egg — is too basic for this
book of basics, and sometimes you really
need to start with the basics.
Mark Bittman's award-winning How
to Cook Everything has helped countless home
cooks discover the rewards of simple cooking. Now the ultimate cookbook has been revised
and expanded (almost half the material is new), making it absolutely indispensable for anyone
who cooks—or wants to. With Bittman's straightforward instructions and advice, you'll make
crowd-pleasing food using fresh, natural ingredients; simple techniques; and basic equipment.
Even better, you'll discover how to relax and enjoy yourself in the kitchen as you prepare
delicious meals for every occasion.
How’s Your Drink
Eric Felten
As my colleague Ray says, “You gotta learn
how to drink like a person sooner or later.”
Based on the popular feature in the Saturday
Wall Street Journal, How's Your Drink
illuminates the culture of the cocktail. John F.
Kennedy played nuclear brinksmanship with
a gin and tonic in his hand. Teddy Roosevelt
took the witness stand to testify that six mint
juleps over the
course of his presidency did not make him a drunk. Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler
both did their part to promote the gimlet. Eric Felten tells all of these stories and many more,
and also offers exhaustively researched cocktail recipes.
The Elements of
Style
Strunk & White
To know how to write.
You know the authors' names. You recognize
the title. You've probably used this book
yourself. This is The Elements of Style, the
classic style manual, now in a fourth edition. A
new Foreword by Roger Angell reminds
readers that the advice of Strunk & White is as
valuable today as when it was first
offered.This book's unique tone, wit and
charm have conveyed the principles of English
style to millions of readers. Use the fourth
edition of "the little
book" to make a big impact with writing.
Letters to a Young
Contrarian Christopher
Hitchens
However you feel about Hitchens’ work, this
little volume is incredibly instructive in
teaching you how to write things without
giving a shit about what other people think. Or
to learn how to just not give a shit about what
other people think, generally.
Christopher Hitchens inspires
future generations of radicals, gadflies, mavericks,
rebels, angry young (wo)men, and dissidents. Who better to speak to that person who finds him
or herself in a contrarian position than Hitchens, who has made a career of disagreeing in
profound and entertaining ways.This book explores the entire range of "contrary positions"from noble dissident to gratuitous pain in the butt. In an age of overly polite debate bending
over backward to reach a happy consensus within an increasingly centrist political dialogue,
Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast. He bemoans the loss of the skills of dialectical
thinking evident in contemporary society. He understands the importance of disagreement-to
personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress-heck, to democracy itself.
Epigrammatic, spunky, witty, in your face, timeless and timely, this book is everything you
would expect from a mentoring contrarian.
Drawing on the Right
Side of the Brain
Betty Edwards
So great for creativity in general and
encouraging everyone to draw like they did
as children. (And not just for lefties!)
Whether you are drawing as a professional
artist, as an artist in training, or as a hobby,
this book will give you greater confidence in
your ability and deepen your artistic
perception, as well as foster a new
appreciation of the world around you.
He’s Just Not That
Into You
Greg Behrendt
and Liz
Because sometimes clichés are true, and it’s
Tuccillo
important to figure out when.
For ages women have come together over
coffee, cocktails, or late-night phone chats to
analyze and obsess over the puzzling behavior
of men. Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo are
here to say that—despite good intentions—
it’s an utter waste of time. Men are not
complicated, although they’d like women to
think
they are. And there are no mixed messages. The truth may be: He’s just not that into you.
Straightforward and sensible, He’s Just Not That Into You educates otherwise smart women on
how to tell when a guy just doesn’t like them enough, so they can stop wasting time making
excuses for a dead-end relationship.