books that made me
42 books from a lifetime of reading
I don’t have much going on.
For my whole life, it’s really just been the one thing. Ask me how I read so much, or why I have such an immense color-coded bookshelf as my background on Zoom calls, or the cause of my single disciplinary action in elementary school, and it’s all the same answer: reading is kind of my one hobby.
Well, reading and writing about reading. And, these days, gathering Smiskis and building them a palace out of those startlingly detailed miniature rooms. But that’s nascent.
Even when I couldn’t read, I still wanted to be reading. So these are all the books that hit me the hardest, over a whole lifetime of one passion.
Ages 1-5
Daisy and the Beastie
This one has to be the all time top placeholder, because I memorized it at age 3 and my grandparents thought I was a prodigy. To be honest, no one has had as much faith in me ever as they did in that moment. What did they think was going on with me? We have to restrict the elderly’s Big Bang Theory consumption.
Where the Wild Things Are
A classic for a reason. I was about the least wild thing a child can be — I didn’t speak for all of second grade — but I still enjoyed the immersion.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
This is equal parts yummy and disgusting, and I’d like its charming illustrations to wipe out all of my memories of the CGI adaptation.
Eloise
This whole collection is so cute and great readaloud material. Also recommend: the Christmas movie (very corny) and the branded pink hot chocolate (probably undrinkable for an adult).
Madeline
Who didn’t want to be Madeline? There’s nothing more glamorous than a Parisian orphan at any age.
Junie B. Jones is a Party Animal
My little sister had the Junie B. Jones fandom on lock, but the whole family got in on it. We were in agreement on the supremacy of this installment.
Ages 6-12
A Series of Unfortunate Events
This is probably my favorite series to this day, which has as much to do with its sheer mysterious and addictive doom as the fact that I’m not really a series person.
Matilda
I loved all of Roald Dahl’s books, but there was no question which was making the cut here. Every dorky bookish child was repeatedly gifted copies of Matilda.
The Royal Diaries: Marie Antoinette
This is mostly just to prove I really did love all of these books and I’m not choosing performative aesthetic selections. I read this like 11 times and for a long era it was my peak feminism.
The Penderwicks
I’ve been a siblings girl all of my life, and this was one of the many rewards it’s given me. I love this charming sisterly summery adventure, and I have been saying I’ll read its sequels for over a decade to prove it.
The Phantom Tollbooth
This is so clever and only makes me slightly depressed every time I read or think about it. I was always resisting old stuff as a kid, and this shut me up for a while.
The Mysterious Benedict Society
If you were a kid who quietly suspected you might be one of the world’s smartest people, this was both a fun read and enough to make you stop thinking that.
Ages 13-16
The Little Prince
I read this for high school French class and you would’ve thought I invented the language. Look at me – I’ m still not over it. I didn’t experience it in childhood but it’s a lovely and memorable book at any age.
I’ll Give You the Sun
This puts all other young adult romances to shame. I’m not even a hater of the genre — it just does. It’s beautifully written and filled with not one but two love stories, and family dynamics, and grief and art and love. It’s incredible.
Coraline
What I will say is that I did not know certain things at age 15 that we know now. And also the movie is better.
No further comment at this time.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
This is still my answer when anyone asks what my single favorite book is, both because I’m cheating by including its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and because it’s every kind of read in one: simple and layered, fun and erudite, for children and for adults, silly and serious.
East of Eden
I do not know why this was required summer reading for incoming sophomores at my high school, but I’m glad it was. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get to this of my own volition — why would I love a huge biblical retelling a white guy wrote a million years ago? — but I really do adore it.
The Great Gatsby
This is one of the most commonly hated on universally required school reads, and it is my burden to love it and think it’s cool. It’s such a great introduction to theme and motif analysis, and I find the characters and plot to be pretty solid too. (Even this is me trying not to be lame. I love Daisy so much I wrote my magnum opus about her.)
Ages 17-19
Jane Eyre
A combination of the cold heart of my AP Lit teacher and procrastination on my own part led me to read this in its entirety on Valentine’s Day of my senior year of high school. I actually really enjoyed myself. If that doesn’t prove this to be a marvel I don’t know what does.
Just Mercy
As part of my college’s orientation program, every incoming freshman had to read the same book. My year, it was this. I ultimately hated it there and transferred as soon as possible, but I will always be grateful they helped me gain some of my most strongly held ethics at 18.
Persuasion
All of Jane Austen’s books have a superlative for me. Of the many genre-defining romances she wrote, I think this is the best of any of the love stories she ever wrote. That letter…!
A Million Junes
In 2017, I requested a YA magical realism novel from Book of the Month. That would go on to become one of my favorite books, and its author would go on to exit the genre altogether and become one of the world’s most successful romance writers. Hard to say which of us changed more.
Northanger Abbey
I really hate satire, but apparently not when Jane Austen does it. This is funny and charming and aged well, somehow, after centuries. When I read satire from last year I don’t feel that way.
Six of Crows
I spent a lot of time in my teens reading and hating all the YA fantasy I could get my hands on, and then I would read something like Six of Crows and love it so much it’d trick me into 9 more disappointing duologies. This is just that good.
Ages 20-23
In the Dream House
For anyone who has ever been in a horrible relationship, I recommend reading this followed by All about Love. This will fill you with anger and vindication and memories and begin to build you back up, and then bell hooks will finish the job.
Conversations with Friends
I’ve called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland my favorite book for over a decade, but if I retire it, it’ll be for this one. There are no characters I relate to more, no stories I find more immersive, no writing more in line with the kind I love to read. She is perfect to me.
Her Body and Other Parties
Two Carmen Maria Machado books in one list. No, she hasn’t published anything in seven years. This is a perfect collection of dark, fairytale-y stories and there’s been nothing like it since. Imagine how tired we are.
The Starless Sea
I will never understand why this book didn’t get what The Night Circus has. Where that has instalove and magic tents, this is a beautiful and fading underground world for readers. It’s lush!
Franny and Zooey
If I could time travel — and if I’d already done all my moral homework in terms of taking down bad guys, changing history for the better, teaching valuable lessons, etc. — I’d pack my bags and head to JD Salinger to hold him hostage until he finished his book about the Glass family. These perfect stories are not enough.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
This is one of those books that just strips down your walls and makes you Feel. And it has that coveted prose-by-a-poet style, each word carefully chosen and perfectly placed, to boot.
Ages 24-26
Beautiful World, Where Are You
I love all Sally Rooney books, but this is the only one I took a page from to hang on the wall next to my desk. (Not a literal page, by the way. It’s a page-long quote PDF I bought on Etsy.)
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I read this collection of stories from a long forgotten and recently passed writer and became truly obsessed. I channeled that feeling into procuring and completing every single story she’d ever written, only to find this to be that truly rare thing: the greatest hits of an author without misses.
Little Weirds
I used to count my only other hobby, besides reading, as “consuming comedy,” and the two came together in the sheer number of comedians’ memoirs I was reading. This is the only one I’ve taken with me into the rest of my reading life. It’s the Jenny Slate-i-est a book could possibly be.
Emma
I read nearly all of Jane Austen’s books in high school, but I delayed on this one for whatever reason. It was worth the wait and became by far my favorite, as I would hope for my literary name twin. Our protagonist is flawed and complicated but not infallible or above growth. It makes for a really fun and fresh read for a 19th century tome.
The Idiot
Sometimes books hit you at the right time, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they do both. I didn’t care much for this when I first read it, but when I reread a few years later, I adored it — I just think this is the very best book ever written about being a particular kind of quiet, bookish, earnest, striving young woman.
Severance
This pandemic fiction has been knocked out of the canon by a) SEO destruction thanks to a much more famous and unrelated show and b) the real pandemic that happened two years after its publication, so allow me to defend it. It’s much more plotty than your typical lit fic, and it leverages all of it into increasingly complex and consuming themes.
Ages 27-28
Heart the Lover
I might be done talking about this book soon, but I’m definitely not yet. I haven’t had a breathless, addictive, frog-in-your-throat heart-skipping-a-beat read like it in longer than I care to think about. I’m still in a light reading slump, like a hangover, from the pure bliss of it — all these months later.
Happy All the Time
I read this so quickly I broke the sound barrier when it was recommended to me as “eighties Sally Rooney.” Truthfully Laurie Colwin’s books are a lot cozier and kinder, but they’re preoccupied with the same questions — and they usually come to the same answers.
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Imagine having a title this brilliant and then managing to continue to be as searingly true on every page. This is that. It blew me away.
Minor Detail
You know how every day for the last year, and arguably the last two years and the last five years and the last decade and since the advent of smartphones, we wake up and immediately see the new worst thing we can conceptualize, and then we just have to go on to a day of notifications? I don’t know how to live like that, but this book helped.
Sula and The Bluest Eye
I always struggle to choose between the wide array of Toni Morrison books I’ve five starred, and this time I couldn’t narrow it down to one. Each of her works is just stunning, managing to impactfully and truthfully convey intricate themes of race, beauty, society, the will of people to love in spite of pain and trauma. The motifs of The Bluest Eye and the fantastical elements of Sula are out of this world.
Perfect list!! Completely agree with the books I've already read and excited to add the other ones to my reading list
Finally had a chance to come back to this post. Very neat concept here!
I too read Jane Eyre in High School and loved it. It was the first classic I really loved, and it proved to me that classics are worth loving. It has always stuck with me. So much so that I named my dog Charlotte.
I've had The Idiot on my shelf for a while. Let me scoot that one on up the list.