When your Facebook friends only recommend startup books…
Dear fellow techies,
We’re in an echo chamber of life-hacks and how to be more efficient in reaching success. I’m sure your friends have recommended The 4-Hour Workweek or The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Don’t let that be the limit of your literary endeavors. Try out these reads to find beauty, perspective, and something surprising.
Yours truly,
A reader that’s been doing a book a week for the past 2 years
1. LOSE YOURSELF IN BEAUTIFUL PROSE
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson’s prose is what you wish your diary sounded like — deeply personal and realistic, yet achingly poetic.
Fates and Furies
by Lauren Groff
Groff writes sentences like this (!!!):
Between his skin and hers, there was the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for this slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in.
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen takes the mundane, an average suburban household, and spins empathy and beauty from the flaws that make us human.
2. CHALLENGE YOUR ASSUMPTIONS
A Small Place
by Jamaica Kincaid
In this essay, Kincaid offers a critical look at how external influences shape her native Antigua and who bears responsibility in the struggle for power and resources.
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
Diaz tells the story of a boy who doesn’t fit cultural norms, as a Dominican or an American, and how identity isn’t innate at birth.
Fist Stick Knife Gun
by Geoffrey Canada
Canada recreates his childhood environment to provide reasoning for tragedies that seem to have none— black incarceration and street violence.
Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie
Shamsie enfolds us into a Muslim family struggling through internal and external tragedies, a new perspective on the fear and stereotypes playing out in communities and news outlets today.
3. TRY A NEW GENRE (poetry!)
Beauty
by B.H. Fairchild
Read here.
An exploration of the relationship men have with the word beauty.
From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee
Read here.
The sweetest, loveliest poem to have in your back pocket and recite.
Give claps & share if you found this curated list useful. Comment what pieces of literature you’d like sharing with the world.
