65 Books You Need to
Read in Your 20’s
The Emperor’s
Children
Claire Messud
The best 9/11 novel that’s much more than a
9/11 novel. Weirdly relatable, even though
the characters are all pretty much upperclass pseudo-intellectuals.
The Emperor’s Children is a richly drawn,
brilliantly observed novel of fate and
fortune—about the intersections in the lives
of three friends, now on the cusp of their
thirties, making their way--and not-- in New
York City. In this tour de force, the celebrated
author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a
generation, and the way we live in this
moment.
What She Saw…
Lucinda
Rosenfeld
Important twenties life lesson: Dating losers
is not a life sentence. (Thank god.)
A fresh (in more than one sense) and honest
new voice in fiction is extravagantly displayed
in this first novel that candidly dissects
modern romance.
Plagued with weird parents, an
underdeveloped body, and a mind on the
verge of self-deconstruction, Phoebe Fine
feels ill-equipped for a journey through the
hardening chambers of the late twentiethcentury heart. But from fifth grade and Roger
Mancuso, equal parts baby Brando and court
jester, through her early adult life with New
Media executive Neil Schmertz, a babytalker
who prefers spooning to sex, Phoebe trudges
defiantly through guyland, armed with a tart
tongue, and propelled by an insatiable desire
to be loved.
The Deptford
Trilogy
Robertson
Davies
A wondrously insane and magical (in that it
is actually about a magician) three-book
series.
Around a mysterious death is woven a
glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived
trilogy of novels: "Fifth Business", often
described as Robertson Davies' finest novel;
"The Manticore", and "World of Wonders".
Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels
of myth, history and magic, "The Deptford
Trilogy" provides an exhilarating antidote to a
world from where 'the fear and dread and
splendour of wonder have been banished.
'His books will be recognized with the very
best works of this century' - "The New York
Times" Book Review.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
The best time to read The Secret History is
probably while you’re still in college,
because it is about a secret society at a
small liberal arts college gone horribly awry,
but it is also worth picking up a few years
later to be reminded about the intensity of
college friendships, and also Ancient Greek.
The first novel by Donna Tartt,
author of the National Bestseller
The Goldfinch, The Secret History is a contemporary classic.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at
an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from
the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of
normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it
can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
A timeless story of masculinity, desire, and
heartbreak that has become particularly
resonant for young gay men.
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates,
liaisons, and violence, a young man finds
himself caught between desire and
conventional morality. With a sharp, probing
imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic
narrative delves into the mystery of loving and
creates a moving, highly controversial story of
death and passion that reveals the unspoken
complexities of the human heart.
A Visit from the Goon
Squad
Jennifer Egan
These interwoven narratives (some of which
were published as stand-alone stories in
magazines such as the New Yorker) are
brilliantly crafted, wryly tender portraits of
life and love and the small tragedies of
everyday modern life.
Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and
record executive. Sasha is the passionate,
troubled young woman he employs. Here
Jennifer
Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose
paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is
a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
A book about the search for meaning even
when life might be meaningless. (Also, my
colleague Ariane says: “Yunior is also the
dopest narrator you will ever encounter.”)
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight
ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey
home he shares with his old world mother
and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming
the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien
and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse
that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from
Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American
experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the
name of love.
Lucy
Jamaica Kincaid
A powerful coming-of-age story of an
introspective 19-year-old girl from the West
Indies who becomes an au pair in the U.S.
The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica
Kincaid's most admired creations--newly
available in paperback
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies,
comes to North America to work as an au pair
for Lewis and Mariah and their four children.
Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple-handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet,
almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in
their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions
and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native
place. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived
about where she presently is.
At the same time that Lucy is coming to terms with Lewis's
and Mariah's lives, she is also unravelling the mysteries of her own sexuality. Gradually a new
person unfolds: passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has
created a startling new character possessed with adamantine clearsightedness and ferocious
integrity--a captivating heroine for our time.
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
The story of Binx Bolling is kind of like what
might have happened if Dick Whitman never
became Don Draper, and instead started
wandering around first New Orleans, and
then the country, on a neverending spiritual
and existential quest.
The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New
Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world
with the detached
gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring
himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his
secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent
from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that
outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos
of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The
Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
Zadie
White Teeth
Smith
In addition to White Teeth being perhaps the
ultimate 20th century British immigrant novel, it
will also, inspire you to greatness: Smith finished
it during her final year at Cambridge and was only
24 when it was published.
At the center of this invigorating
novel are two unlikely friends,
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal.
Hapless veterans of World War II,
Archie and Samad and their
families become agents of
England’s irrevocable
transformation. A second
marriage to Clara Bowden, a
beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally
gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child
whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no
problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for
his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths
confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if
selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and
cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past
as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic
hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding
expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
Jews, New York, World War II, superheroes,
comics, Nazis, love: It’s all here, in spades. One of
the leading contenders for Great American Novel
status.
A young escape artist and budding magician
named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of
his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long
shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America
is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic
books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn,
Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the
craze. He finds the ideal
partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes
them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition.
From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of
the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly
mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State
Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink.
Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one
of the defining novels of our modern American age.
Infinite Jest
David Foster
Wallace
Because you’ll never have time to read it
later.
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about
the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an
addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy,
and featuring the most endearingly screwedup family to come along in recent fiction,
Infinite Jest explores essential questions about
what entertainment is and why it has come to
so dominate our lives; about how our desire
for entertainment affects our need to connect
with other people; and about what the
pleasures we choose say about who we are.
Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction
without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely
American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that
renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Bright Lights, Big
City
Jay McInerney
You read this book because even though they
used typewriters and did way more cocaine
than is even remotely healthy, it’s still a
perfectly told story about being young and
thinking you’re way too smart for what
you’re doing. Also it’s possibly the only book
ever written in the second person that
actually works.
The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs,
fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the
recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to
sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to
acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts. This remarkable novel of
youth and New York remains one of the most beloved, imitated, and iconic novels in America.
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
A beautifully told coming-of-age story that is
also about how to reconcile in-betweenness:
of culture, of place, of time.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from
their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through
their fraught transformation into Americans. On
the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and
Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke
adapts far less warily than his wife,
who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming
him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by
his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers
the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he
stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and
wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the
names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly,
sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of
uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of
identity.
Call Me by Your
Name
André Aciman
Says my friend Chris: “Super-duper gay sexy
but also gorgeous.”
Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden
and powerful romance that blossoms
between an adolescent boy and a summer
guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the
Italian Riviera. During the restless summer
weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of
obsession, fascination, and desire intensify
their passion as they test the charged ground
between them and
verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
André Aciman's critically acclaimed debut novel is a frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to
human passion.
The Rachel Papers
Martin Amis
The Rachel Papers is “a fairly essential
‘leaving adolescence and discovering that
everything is still confusing and awful’ kind
of novel,” says my colleague Jack, which
seems like a pretty decent recommendation.
In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis,
author of the bestselling London Fields, gave
us one of the most noxiously believable -- and
curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of
contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford,
cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a
girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.
The Song of
Solomon
Toni morrison
You almost definitely read this in high school
English class, but you will almost definitely
also have a much different perspective on
Milkman and his family and their struggles a
few years later.
Milkman Dead was born shortly
after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a
rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this
brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously
as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the
place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars
and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest
Another
English syllabus special,
Hemingway
Hemingway’s tight prose and peerless
storytelling are somehow more resonant
when you are reading it on your own. Or as
my colleague Matt put it: “I couldn’t keep my
eyes open for more than five pages of
Hemingway growing up, but for some reason
I picked this up in my post-graduation haze
and was mesmerized.”
A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel
introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett
Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the
wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of
expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and
vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway
as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
The ultimate dystopian love story. If it
doesn’t make you cry, your heart may be
made of stone.
As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were
students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding
school secluded in the English countryside. It
was a place of mercurial cliques and
mysterious rules where teachers were
constantly reminding their charges of how
special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young
woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look
back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that
gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric,
Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day.
A Home at the End of the
World
Michael
Cunningham
A classic “queer Bildungsroman,” as my
colleague Kevin says.
Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of
himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate.
In New York after college, Bobby moves in
with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a
veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and
Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of
Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child.
Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the
three move to a small house upstate to raise
"their" child together and, with an odd friend,
Alice, create a
new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile
relationships of urban life today.
The Sandman Series
Neil Gaiman
Gaiman’s dark, tragic comic series originally
ran as a 10-book series from 1989 to 1996
but has now entered the graphic-novel
pantheon.
New York Times best-selling author Neil
Gaiman's transcendent series The Sandman is
often hailed as the definitive Vertigo title and
one of the finest achievements in graphic
storytelling. Gaiman created an unforgettable
tale of the forces
that exist beyond life and death by weaving ancient mythology, folklore and fairy tales with his
own distinct narrative vision.
The Group Mary
McCarthy
How is it possible that a novel written in 1963
about a group of post-collegiate friends in
New York City IN THE 1930S could still be so
relevant? Probably because the struggles of
being in your twenties — particularly, how
much do you care about the opinions of other
people, and what does success mean? — have
been the same since the dawn of time.
Mary McCarthy’s most celebrated
novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates,
known simply to their classmates as “the group.” An eclectic mix of personalities and
upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. After the
ceremony, the women begin their adult lives—traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of
nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City.
Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other's
affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them
passes away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante,
and most importantly, a member of the group.
Quicksand
Passing
and
NellaLarsen
These two novellas written by a half-black,
half-Danish woman in the 1920s capture the
complications of that time — sexism and
racism chief among them — while also being
the beautifully told (and timeless) stories of
deeply flawed young women.
Nella Larsen's subject is the
struggle of sensitive, spirited heroines to find a place
for themselves in a hostile world. Passing is the story of a light-skinned beauty who, after
spending years passing for white, finds herself dangerously drawn to an old friend's Harlem
neighborhood. In Quicksand, a restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable
place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. Race and marriage offer few
securities here or in the other stories in a collection that is compellingly readable, rich in
psychological complexity, and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.
PastoraliaGeorge
Saunders
I’ll let my colleague Aylin’s boyfriend explain
this pick: “It just illustrates in such a
breathtakingly beautiful, memorable way
how easy it is for people to inflict pain on
each other and how terrible it is to fall
between the cracks in America, which it’s
easier than ever to do now. I don’t know, I
feel like reading it made me feel more
compassionate toward people.” Aw!
"Artful and sophisicated... truly unusual. Imagine Lewis's Babbitt thrown into the backseat of a
car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar, or
Spike Jonze." -- The New York Times
"Saunders is a provocateur, a moralist, a zealot, a lefty, and a funny, funny writer, and the
stories in Pastoralia delight. We're very luck to have them." -- Esquire
Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
Says my colleague Krutika: “It’s the perfect
mix of childhood nostalgia for anyone who’s
in their twenties right now, and futuristic
dystopian action/adventure where
everyone’s unwittingly more earnest and
sincere than they mean to be.”
In the year 2044, reality is an ugly
place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels
alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to
studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines—puzzles that are based on
their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power
and fortune to whoever can unlock them.
But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to
take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win—and
confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.
A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
The title is astonishingly accurate, but also,
Eggers’ work is a terrific window into what
one of my friends calls “MTV lit.” (This is not
pejorative.)
The literary sensation of the year, a
book that redefines both family and
narrative for the twenty-first
century. A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius is the moving
memoir of a college senior who, in
the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to
cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be
simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that
holds a family together.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback
for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
What the protagonist Esther Greenwood goes
through pretty much speaks to my whole
generation and the next. College graduates
who don’t know what they want to do as a
career, are not excited about things their
parents say they should be, want to have sex
but not babies… all of it. It also encourages
young people to be unafraid to voice their
feelings and opinions. Makes me wish Sylvia
Plath could have read her own book without
prejudice — it might have helped.
Esther Greenwood is brilliant,
beautiful, enormously talented, and
successful, but slowly going under—
maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly
draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes
palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep
penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an
extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis
A book about an ambitious, difficult woman
who is forced by circumstance (like being
born in the wrong decade, in Minnesota) to
keep settling for less than what she wants.
But she doesn’t stop trying her hand at
finding utopia.
Carol Milford is a young, liberated
woman from Saint Paul, Minnesota,
who marries a small-town doctor
named Will Kennicott. Persuaded to
move to Gopher Prairie, her husband’s home-town,
Carol is horrified to find herself living in an ugly, back-water community. A satiric depiction of
Carol’s attempt to raise the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie to her own smug level, “Main Street”
is one of Sinclair Lewis’s most significant works.
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman
The classic fantasy series — if you’ve only
seen The Golden Compass, the film based on
the first book in the series, you owe it to
yourself to read the books (which are so
much better).
Philip Pullman's trilogy is a masterpiece that
transcends genre and appeals to readers of all
ages. His heroine, Lyra, is an orphan living in a
parallel universe in which
science, theology, and magic are entwined. The epic story that takes us through the three novels
is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armored polar bears, magical devices, witches,
and daemons, it is also an audacious and profound reimagining of Milton's Paradise Lost that
has already inspired a number of serious books of literary criticism. Like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S.
Lewis before him, Pullman has invented a richly detailed and marvelously imagined world,
complex and thought-provoking enough to enthrall adults as well as younger readers. An
utterly entrancing blend of metaphysical speculation and bravura storytelling, His Dark
Materials is a monumental and enduring achievement.
Generation X
Douglas
To
understand where everyone a little older
Coupland
than you is coming from.
Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties,
have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to
little applause" in their respective hometowns
and cut themselves adrift on the California
desert. In search of the drastic changes that
will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired
themselves
in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an
ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs--"low-pay, low-prestige, lowbenefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death
among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales
of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.
A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges--landscapes peopled
with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these
landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals,
pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for
permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed,
overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have
nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.
The Fortress of
Solitude Jonathan
Lethem
About comics and superheroes and coming
of age in a nearly unrecognizable Brooklyn.
The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan
Ebdus growing up white and motherless in
downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It’s a
neighborhood where the entertainments
include muggings along with games of
stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend,
a black teenager, also motherless, named
Mingus Rude. As Lethem
follows the knitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates an overwhelmingly rich and
emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti
tagging, loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude is the first great urban coming of age
novel to appear in years.