what does it matter when in your life you read a book? Possibly very much on unfinished business, Vivian Gornick describes the process of revising beloved texts as akin to “lying on the analyst’s couch”. a story she thought he understood “is suddenly being alarmingly questioned.” And yet, whatever misunderstandings a youthful read may cement, absorbing a certain book at a certain point in your life can have an undeniable impact. If you don’t meet Ramona in your elementary years, will the unruly spirit summoned by Beverly Cleary ever manifest in its fullest form? Will Holden Caulfield ever find his way into your heart if you don’t meet the Catcher in the Rye as a teenager?
And what about those books you read in those sparkly, messy years known as your 20s, a decade when your adult life draws ever closer, and yet you may still be wandering in joyous ramblings? what literary works should inform that decade-long journey? There’s no answer, of course (nor is there anything special about turning 29), but we do have some opinions nonetheless. In the spirit of celebrating the life-changing impact of literature, we offer 30 Book Suggestions to Read Before You Turn 30.
You are reading: Books to read before 30
wuthering heights by emily brontë (1847)
Like most people, I first met the Brontë sisters in a high school classroom. The spell that Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847) has cast on me has grown stronger with each passing year. The book’s famous romance (the almost incestuous bond between the violent Heathcliff and the vain Catherine Earnshaw) actually makes up less than half of the novel. The biggest and most difficult story, the one that brings me back to the text again and again, is a meditation on generations: a study of how human failings are passed from father to son and how we can survive the sins of the past. Shortly after the book’s publication, Emily Brontë died at the age of 30. at 25, I’m closer to that age than teenage lovers, or who she was when she first heard of them. the author’s wisdom, to quote her doomed heroine, has run “through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.” —ian malone
house of joy by edith wharton (1905)
Admittedly, I was in my 30s when I arrived at the house of joy, but it’s actually essential reading for twenty-somethings. After all, Edith Wharton’s novel revolves around an “aging” 29-year-old beauty named Lily Bart (to be clear, this book was written in 1905) who seeks an advantageous marriage to secure her place in New York. . society. The House of Joy traces our heroine’s two-year descent from the prettiest girl in the room to social outcast. the prose is as splendid as the story chilling: “she was so obviously the victim of the civilization that had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like shackles chaining her to her fate.” I find myself thinking about this exquisite story, and the tragedy of Lily Bart, over and over again. —jessie heyman
maurice by e.m. forster (1913)
not perfect, but e.m. Maurice de Forster is about to affect a depiction of desire, betrayal, inner conflict, disappointment, and the possibility of rousing happiness against all odds. (I am being too reductive, but there is a certain uniqueness to this strange love story, established in part by its Edwardian setting. As Forster wrote in 1950, more than 30 years after he finished it, Maurice “belongs to an England, where he was still possible to get lost. belongs to the last moment of the green forest.”) i came to the book after the merchant’s sublime adaptation of ivory, and still forster’s tale of occasionally tortured self-discovery: the seed of any future a worthwhile age story , I was touched. take an early exposition: “there was still much to learn, and it was years before I explored certain abysses in his being, horrible enough that they were. but he discovers the method and did not look at the scratches in the sand again. he had woken too late for happiness but not for strength, and he could feel an austere joy, like that of a warrior who is homeless but fully armed.” As allergic as I am to sentimentality, something about this book, and those lines, quickly cut me off when I was in my early 20s. —marley marius
mrs. dalloway by virginia woolf (1925)
I think it’s a good idea to read woolf before the age of 30 simply because of his beautiful and fluent language. But if I had to pick the most potent distillation of his perspective on love, life, and time, it would be Mrs. Dalloway, the book that became, in a strange literary twist, a kind of pandemic meme for the comfort of his family lines. (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would do the mask herself,” was a memorable example.) this, of course, had to do with the fact, in 2020 and just after the first world war, when the novel was published, that the world was entering a new and confusing age of anxiety. In Woolf’s novel, that anxiety, expressed by the shaken veteran Septimus Smith, is juxtaposed to the serene hostess Clarissa Dalloway. But even Clarissa, a character everyone should be exposed to for the sheer ecstasy she brings to the mundane act of running errands, can’t escape the jitters that bothersome memories can trigger. woolf is the master at showing how our past is often just as powerful as our present and that we are never really living fully in one time and place. —chloe schama
I capture the castle dodie smith (1948)
File this one into books that feel like you should have read as a child, and yet are best consumed with a more nuanced appreciation of the wisdom and style they contain. Smith is best known as the author of 101 Dalmatians, but it is this earlier novel that is her masterpiece and far transcends any menacing shadow Disney’s magical castle has cast over her work. Narrated by a precocious girl named Cassandra, I capture that Castle is nominally the story of an eccentric family: “We’re a pitiful bunch,” Cassandra writes, “Father rotting at the front door, Rosa furious at life, Thomas, well, he’s a jolly boy, but one can’t help but know he’s perpetually malnourished.” this see-saw rhythm, comic detail juxtaposed against cosmic injustice, drives the book. smith wrote the book with the intention of making every word uttered by her characters was “as carefully balanced as every speech in a play,” and Cassandra’s voice here has a truthfulness and wit that transcends most theater. —c.s.
giovanni’s room by james baldwin (1956)
Giovanni’s room opens with a tragedy: the execution of its main character, an Italian bartender, with whom the book’s American narrator, David, had a romantic affair in Paris while his fiancée was traveling in Spain. Inspired in part by James Baldwin’s own experiences living as a gay black American in Paris (that the title character being white was very intentional), the book’s explicit references to queer sexuality caused Baldwin’s previous editor, Knopf , would reject it. it was finally released in 1956 to a conflicting critical response. Aside from the novel’s groundbreaking treatment of sexuality, however, what makes Giovanni’s Room a book to read before 30 is its forensic examination of David’s inner conflict of narcissism and self-loathing, which he expresses through spontaneous moments of cruelty, long before. the notion of toxic masculinity found a name. David is uncomfortable with the model of dominance and submission that he sees in traditional heterosexual relationships; at the same time, he expresses disgust at his relationships with men, described in language that barely conceals his embarrassment. David’s volatility makes Giovanni’s Room an important lesson in how not to love, even as his heady, lyrical depictions of infatuation and intimacy mark Baldwin as a true master of the written word. —liam hess
the group by mary mccarthy (1963)
parts of mary mccarthy’s mid-century novel may seem strangely old-fashioned and parts startlingly familiar. I remember, when I read it in my late 20s, feeling uneasy at how little it had changed in some ways, how I still had similar conversations with my friends about careers, love affairs, motherhood. McCarthy shied away from the idea that she or her novel, which followed a group of college friends from the 1930s to the start of World War II, were feminists, but the book presents such a straightforward depiction of inner life of their women that it is difficult to see it in any other way. Released just a few months after Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, the group developed “the unnamed problem” that Friedan identified: the persistent dissatisfaction felt by many women, despite the material comforts of their lives. McCarthy’s novel is not a story of triumph, but it is crucial in heightening awareness of the obstacles to fulfillment that persist for many women even today. —c.s.
the millstone by margaret drabble (1965)
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what a weighty title for such a simple book, and yet it’s appropriate since it’s a novel about single parenthood and all the weight that comes with the experience. the millstone is, at first glance, a child, born out of wedlock in a time and society that did not favor such arrangements. however, this is not a novel about a modern fallen woman; rather it is about the redemptive power of maternal love. the sex that results in the unexpected pregnancy of the main character is almost an afterthought, the man who gets her pregnant is hardly a character. the central love story, instead, is between the mother (an ambitious, academic, upper-middle-class woman) and her son, not so much a burden as a blessing, both a tie to the practical and demanding world and a vessel for enlightenment that transcends it. What struck me about this book when I first read it was its description of the impact of parenthood, but also how the experience can sharpen and clarify the mind; yes, the needs of a small creature are overwhelming and disorienting, but they can also bring about something like a spiritual transformation. mommy wars rage through every generation; This book has always been one of my constant clarifying lights when it comes to issues of parenting and individuality. —c.s.
a book of common prayer by joan didion (1977)
everyone finds their way to joan didion’s unforgettable essays (“slouching within bethlehem”, “goodbye to all that”, “the white album”). but will you read his novels? Start with this thin, dank, hugely clever novel of political intrigue and tragic motherhood set in the fictional Big Mouth Central American country. a book of common prayer is a novel about two women: one romantically naive, the other decidedly not. Like all of Didion’s fiction, it is lit up with social details (the smell of Nivea lotion, the sight of a Nieman Marcus Christmas catalogue) and suffused with a kind of hyper-modern sardonic bewilderment that never seems to lose its hold on our present. didion transmits vibrations like no living writer. —taylor antrim
the transit of venus by shirley hazzard (1980)
Do I love this book because a guy who was leaving wrote it for me? A child who wrote, “here, take my copy” as an inscription before disappearing, leaving the kind of imprint that’s hard to duplicate in later decades? Or do I love it because it’s really one of the most amazing stories about becoming a woman, about love and power, that I’ve ever seen? in an essay published earlier this year, parul seghal pointed out that transit of venus is a book that people seem to think you need to be a certain age to appreciate, as if you can’t understand the misunderstandings that stain youth characters. experiences when you yourself are of a similar age. but shame about that: the writing here is heady, lavish, the kind of sentences that make you think about the way you perceive the world while maintaining razor-sharp clarity. (Hazzard, it is said, checked each page 20 times.) When Alice Gregory wrote about the book in the New Yorker in 2020, he compared it to “sex, drugs, or physical pain,” something that’s hard to talk about with other people. unless they have been through a similar experience. What are you waiting for? —c.s.
money: a suicide note by martin amis (1984)
I must have read this when I was 23, in those post-college years when I read all kinds of books I’d never forget: american shepherd, infinite joke, birds of america. but money was the most indelible of all. what a novel unforgettable light show. it was not my first friend; he had read the rachel articles and, i think, dead babies, so he knew she wrote hilarious and irresistibly performative sentences; that style mattered to him above all else; and that he wasn’t ashamed the way I wanted to be. but the money got under my skin: an unholy, madcap, headlong plunge into a filthy amoral world of hyper-capitalism. Not the plot I remember: Amis’s chaotic narrator, John Self, gets tangled up in a seedy Hollywood movie production; There are femmes fatales, gangsters, a postmodern flourish or two (Martin Amis himself is a character). it is rather the atmosphere, like the oxygen-rich air of a casino, that has not left me. I was dizzy with ambition. not just to write novels myself, but to read every word I wrote to my friends. —t.a.
self-help by lorrie moore (1985)
pick up any lorrie moore book from the 1980s or 1990s, they’re all great, and if you’ve never read birds in america’s “people like that are the only people here” for crying out loud, start there. But I will always have a special place in my heart for Moore’s debut collection, self-help, from 1985, which, if you read it as a college student like I did, dreamed of writing short stories (…for a living?! could I have thought that?!) is like a lit match that lights up. Moore’s prose is deceptively simple, full of puns, hilariously biting. his sensitivity is both self-deprecating and emotionally bulletproof. she has self-help jokes, she has lines like this from “how to be another woman”: “in public toilets you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange meat ice cream of despair and euphoria, muttering into your bluish thighs: ‘ Hi, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.'” She has a story called “How to Become a Writer” that is both a warning and an irresistible encouragement. Moore is one of our greatest American writers and needs no introduction, but this little volume it still exudes an air of discovery. —t.a.
beloved by toni morrison (1987)
there is no wrong place to start with morrison, but the book that had the biggest impact on me, the one that I remember when and where I was, was when I first read it, as if I was living through a historical event. is loved morrison’s story is about a formerly enslaved woman named sethe, who lives near cincinnati with her teenage daughter, but also lives with the ghost of her dead little daughter, loved by her. In one of the first reviews of the novel, the New Yorker wrote that Morrison described the past as “the scene of a disaster” and, indeed, there is something impressionistic about this horrific interpretation of the iniquities of American history, but it leaves a sort of of impression. that had perhaps a greater impact on me than any number of history books. —c.s.
the pool library by alan hollinghurst (1988)
When Pool Library was launched in 1988, it became a sensation: both for its unique fusion of a vernacular and historical literary tradition and for how it delved into the sex lives of a loosely connected milieu of gay men in London. . (It was a topic that felt particularly timely given Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of Section 28, which prohibited any “promotion of homosexuality,” that same year.) The book’s protagonist, William Beckwith, is young and privileged; Recently graduated from Oxford, he squanders his inheritance on a series of anonymous sexual encounters. after a chance encounter with an older gay aristocrat, he begins digging into his diaries with plans to write an autobiography. The secrets he uncovers along the way, however, end up coming closer to home than William initially thought. At its most powerful moments, the book poignantly highlights how those who cannot express their sexuality or gender have done so powerfully through art, even when carefully codified. As a reminder of oppressive forces around the world still seeking to silence lgbtq+ voices, it still feels depressingly relevant. Most of all, though, it offers a seldom-seen window into a lost world of grim life and nightly erotic adventures, written with a piercing clarity that still conveys illicit thrills more than three decades later. —left
the secret story of donna tartt (1992)
Donna Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret Story, follows a group of cult college friends who, after a barbaric act of bacchanal, come apart spectacularly. is a book best read when you’re young, when your own college relationships are fresh in your mind in all their intense, immature, dysfunctional, and all too often destructive glory. They almost certainly won’t measure up to Tartt’s epic adventures, but that doesn’t diminish the power of her story. Embedded in this sensational story are hidden nuggets of insight: “Love does not conquer all,” Tartt writes. “and anyone who thinks he does is a fool.” —elise taylor
the patrick melrose novels: never mind (1992), bad news (1992), some hope (1994), breast milk (2005), and finally (2012)
Little can prepare you for the panoply of gothic horrors and vicious pleasures that color Edward St. Aubyn’s best-selling series of five novels, written over 20 years. Charting the life of its (highly autobiographical) protagonist, Patrick Melrose, described by The Guardian as a “Heroine Hamlet,” each book revisits Melrose at various points from childhood to middle age. It begins with Nevermind, chronicling a long, sweltering summer in the South of France, culminating in a truly chilling scene of sexual abuse at the hands of his father that sets five-year-old Melrose on his inevitable path to himself. same. -destruction. The second novel, Bad News, sees Melrose arrive in New York to collect his father’s ashes, injecting heroin, popping pills, and spiraling into nightmarish hallucinations. Later books find Melrose sober and attending his mother’s funeral or, in the series’ final entry, running out of money with two young and precocious Melrose children to care for, still damaged but at least alive. my personal jewel in patrick melrose’s crown, however, and the point at which st. Aubyn’s dark wit shines brightest: It’s Something of Hope, documenting a weekend at a high-society party in the British countryside, with one of the funniest portrayals of a haughty Princess Margaret ever written on paper. Despite the extraordinary privilege of its protagonist and the rarefied circles he enters and leaves throughout the five books, st. Aubyn’s crisp, crystal-clear prose makes Melrose’s struggles with addiction, abuse, and self-loathing, as well as the sense of hope he eventually finds, feel strangely universal. consider it the ultimate parable of how money certainly doesn’t bring you happiness. —left
operating instructions by anne lamott (1993)
never mind the fact that it’s a mother’s account of her son’s first year of life; Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions had a huge impact when I read it at age 21. here was a book about doing something difficult, like raising a child alone, at a time when she was figuring out who exactly she was. and what, exactly, I had made of myself felt a bit like that. (Frankly, he often still does.) Two passages in particular have stuck to my ribs: the one in which Lamott describes his “many variations on the theme of low self-esteem” (c’est moi!), and this one. , about the strange magic of just getting by: “no one ever tells you about boredom… and no one ever tells you how crazy you will be, how overwhelmingly lost you will be all the time… but just like when my brothers and I We were trying to take care of our dad, turns out you already did it before you realized you couldn’t do it, not in a million years.” —m.m.
open secrets by alice munro (1994)
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The thing about Alice Munro is that there is no wrong place to start. Take your pick from any of her 14 short story collections, and this Nobel Prize-winning writer’s capacity for deep empathy, rigorously complex storytelling, and subtly drawn characters, typically women in small Canadian towns, making their way in a sometimes hostile world . Dazzle You I will always remember finding Open Secrets, a mid-term collection of eight long but exciting stories, because I bought it when I was a college student and convinced myself that contemporary fiction was well and truly where it was. Munro is often characterized as a domestic fiction writer, and that may be true, but what open secrets taught me is that she understands the threat: how to raise the stakes, how to make a 30-40 page short story seems like a whole world of high-stakes mysteries and horrible reversals. —t.a.
never let me go by kazuo ishiguro (2005)
never let me go is a book that intentionally evades definition: as much a slow-burning, elegiac study of love and loss as it is a meticulously plotted sci-fi mystery; intensely focused on the daily minutiae of its protagonists’ lives, while also painting a picture of what it means to be human in the broadest, broadest of strokes. Tracing the lives of three young men at a mysterious boarding school where health is at a premium, the trio slowly discover that they are clones commissioned by wealthy people to exist as organ donors when they get old or sick. There are plenty of other twists, all executed with Kazuo Ishiguro’s trademark elegance and restraint, but the main focus becomes the sparks of romance flickering between them and the devastating realization that this won’t be enough to delay their inevitable fate. The painful feeling of missed opportunities and wasted time can seem almost unbearable, but the beauty of Never Let Me Go lies in its heartfelt reminder of how little time you have on this earth, a message that resonates no matter your age. —left
joan didion’s year of magical thinking (2005)
“mourning turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” didion writes in the most famous passage of the year of magical thinking. “We might expect us to be prostrate, inconsolable, mad with loss,” he continues. “We’re not expecting to be literally crazy cool customers who think her husband is about to come back and needs his shoes.” I lost two people close to me at the end of high school, my mentor and my grandfather, in quick succession, but only when I decided to read The Year of Magical Thinking four years later did I feel like their deaths made sense. didion’s writing is wonderfully devoid of the “it gets better” and “they are in better places” that you hear when grieving. but even if you haven’t suffered a loss, I would still tell you to read the year of magical thinking in your 20’s because it’s about making sense of new realities, pushing and accepting that you may not really be able to heal. and also, not to be too morbid, we all suffer someday, and it’s a comfort to know which book to take off the shelf when you are. —sarah’s spelling
about the beauty of zadie smith (2005)
while white-toothed zadie smith began her stratospheric rise to fame at just 25 years old with her beautiful window into relations between diaspora communities in britain, her third novel, about beauty, is arguably the most universal. loosely inspired by e.m. forster’s howards end (a book that could also easily be on a list of novels to read before 30), tells the story of two families with academic parents on different sides of the atlantic, who come together and are separated by professional rivalries, entanglements romantics and a shared love for an obscure Haitian artist. Yet just as absorbing as the tensions that wax and wane between the two sets of parents is tracing the very different paths their children choose to take and how they reconcile their thoughts about wealth, ethnicity, and religion with the reality of the world around them. surrounds them. —and, given the title of the book, form their own personal definitions of beauty. is a story about the tough decisions you have to make on your way to becoming the person you want to see in the world, and more importantly, how making those decisions never really ends, no matter your age. —left
exit to the west by mohsin hamid (2017)
“I didn’t know I needed a novel to understand the refugee crisis,” a friend told me after we had both read this incredible otherworldly book, “but I guess I did.” exit west is one of those somewhat beloved novels, actually, that can put an entire sociopolitical universe into context, but also help you understand the most important truth of all about any overwhelming geopolitical issue: that there are humans at the center of all. it’s. in this book, a kind of fast-paced magical-realistic page-turner, the act of migration is presented as a gate: the characters leave an unnamed country in which militants are taking control through a gate and end up in Greece. as different and original as this device is, it does not overshadow the rooted humanity of this book, the way it illustrates that suffering and everyday life are always side by side and that the distances and borders that prevent us from realizing that they are maybe not as waterproof as we would like to think. —c.s.
conversations with friends (2017) and <normal people (2018) by sally rooney
sally rooney goes down like a glass of rosé: deceptively easy and totally intoxicating. His novels don’t reinvent the wheel, it’s hard to be young and in love, but they are so enthusiastic, so honest that these novels somehow feel unique. I’ve never been in an illicit love triangle like the one in conversations with friends nor have I ever had a heartbreak like normal people characters. (never been to dublin!) but somehow i see myself in these stories. His work reminds me of that famous line by Didion: “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, despite all evidence to the contrary, has ever happened to anyone before. ” By which I mean, these books capture the extraordinary feeling of being young; it’s wonderful and horrible and it’s over too fast.—j.h.
pleasure activism by adrienne maree brown (2019)
If I had stumbled across this vast collection of essays, poems, and interviews in my early 20s instead of recently, I think I could have saved myself a lot of heartache. In Pleasure Activism, writer, editor, and activist Adrienne Maree Brown poses a central question: What would life be like if we allowed ourselves to unabashedly indulge in the things that sustain us? This isn’t a self-help manual, it’s a weighty text that discusses everything from enthusiastic consent to us. drug policy, but it is also a real pleasure to read. the book’s identity-affirming open view of sex is very empowering, especially for young people who may not have had the ingrained idea in them that intimate contact with another person must always be initiated by a desire for pleasure. —emma specter
everything about love: new visions of bell hooks (2000)
all about the love of bell hooks had been on my to-read list for eons when a friend of mine suggested it to me last summer. In the book, Hooks offers a penetrating emotional survey of American society, examining larger philosophical questions about love through the prism of his own experiences of love. personal details draw you in almost immediately. hooks speaks candidly about the realities of her “mixed career” and how it makes her life as a cultural critic and feminist easier by working as a chef. she opens up about past relationships, exposing her soul.
As a Brit, I’ve always approached the notion of self-love and self-discovery with a healthy dose of cynicism; and yet the hooks conquered me. As someone who had just come out of a difficult breakup, the book resonated with me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. after downloading it to my phone, I devoured it in a matter of days, taking multiple screenshots of passages along the way. “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love more if we used it as a verb,” Hooks writes in the opening chapter. is easily one of the most quoted lines in the book, one of many I wish I could recite to my younger self. — chioma nnadi
undocumented americans by karla cornejo villavicencio (2020)
“this book is for young immigrants and children of immigrants,” writes villavicencio, one of the first dreamers to graduate from harvard, in the introduction to her unflinching blend of narrative and reporting. “I want you to read this book and feel what I imagine young people must have felt when they heard Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the first time.” mission accomplished. Villavicencio is that striking, unique, generational voice that is not precious at all. “Honestly, I’d rather swallow a razor blade than hope it changes a xenophobe’s mind,” she writes. I didn’t read Undocumented Americans until my late 30s, but there’s a lot in it that readers should know as soon as possible: primarily how instrumental undocumented people are to America, and yet how hostile the country can be to them. “People have the human right to move, to change their location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their countries of origin is created by the United States, as is the case with most From the third world. countries from which people emigrate,” she writes. “isn’t that a bitch?”—michelle ruiz
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