18 Books You Need To Read In Your Teens
1. American Primitive: Mary Oliver is arguably one of America’s most important poets, and her collectionAmerican Primitive proves why: Illuminating and stunningly lyrical, Oliver’s poems perfectly capture the wilderness that exists both inside of and around us. Lines that flow in and out of each other transport the reader into the very heart of the natural world and the divinity that lies there. Powerful, tender, and deeply wise, American Primitive celebrates the quiet beauty of humanity’s symbiosis with nature and showcases Oliver as a master of language.
2. The Argonauts: Unlike any book you’ve ever read, this is Nelson’s memoir — on the surface, about her life with her partner, Harry Dodge, who decides to start taking testosterone and have top surgery; the birth of her son Iggy; and being stepmother to Harry’s son Lenny. But in an unerringly sharp and thoughtful way, it’s also about what queerness means, what gender means, what family means, what motherhood means. A book that will leave you thinking differently about everything you ever took as the truth.
3. Americanah: This is the story of Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who immigrates to the U.S. and finds life there to be complicated in ways she never anticipated. After years of struggle, she eventually becomes a widely read blogger (“Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black”) and wins a fellowship to Princeton; her tale is paralleled by the experience of her high school boyfriend, Obinze, who immigrates to the U.K. and subsequently returns to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. Americanah is a funny, heartbreaking, and keenly observed social critique of both Nigeria and the U.S.
4. The Sellout: The Sellout is a hilarious, wildly smart satire about race and politics in contemporary America. But like every great satire, it’s also deadly serious and thoughtful, not only with regard to race but also growing up, losing a parent, and dealing with the complexities of adulthood. A truly relatable book for everyone who has tried to find their place in a world full of bewildering realities and competing signals.
5. Dept. Of Speculation: A book about marriage that’s unlike any other, Offill tells the story through a series of deceptively simple dispatches from “the wife” (she never gets named further). We watch as she and her husband go through the highs and lows of a life together, including the birth of a child and infidelity. But it’s Offill’s spare, beautiful prose that thrusts this book into the realm of the exceptional.
6. Didion’s elliptical 1970 novel (one of her few works of fiction) is about a 31-year-old woman named Maria who is in a psychiatric hospital and takes us through the traumas that got her there. It’s much darker than her essays and deeply, deeply weird.
7. In the book that has set the standard for transgender memoirs, Janet Mock plunges into the recesses of a traumatic childhood, to emerge as an empowered trans leader and advocate. Redefining Realness not only serves as inspiration for all trans people, especially trans women of color, but allows readers to understand aspects of trans experience in ways that have not been previously explored. Mock’s willingness to leave herself so open and vulnerable — as a child sexual abuse survivor, a former sex worker, a trans woman afraid of losing love because of that revelation — allows us to more fully understand what it means for many trans women to be alive today, and gives us hope that we can forge a path toward greater freedom and acceptance.
8. This is a collection of beautifully written nonfiction essays that all relate to the topic of empathy — why it matters, how it happens, and whether we’re capable of extending it even further than comes naturally. The opening essay, on the author’s experience as a “medical actor,” is particularly heart-expanding — Jamison reveals a lot of herself, writing vulnerably about her own heart surgeries and abortion, but also questions traditional wisdom about empathy and how we all relate to each other. As she writes in that piece, “I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.” Read it, and be better.
9. When you’re a teenager, the tiniest moments in life are the ones that hold the most meaning. I’ll Give You the Sun is made up of such moments — ones that pierce the hearts of twin artists Noah and Jude, others that send them soaring. Figuratively and literally, Jandy Nelson’s writing is alive, drenched in magical realism that ponders love, betrayal, and the aching need to create art. I almost didn’t even tell you that I’ll Give You The Sun is YA, because the emotions in it, and those you’ll feel when reading it, are distinctly ageless.
10. This book is a collection of Strayed’s best and rawest columns, which is like…why would I pay for stuff I can read for free on the internet? Trust me, sugar: YOU NEED THIS BOOK. Bring Kleenex.
11. In a time when we find ourselves debating the importance of black lives more than ever, Another Country is an essential read. Beginning with the suicide of its black male protagonist, Rufus, the rest of the book goes on to debate just how much his life mattered, as his presence remains the central protagonist in the lives of his sister/aspiring singer Ida, his best friend/struggling author Vivaldo, his first male lover/actor Eric, and his other friends all attempting to survive in New York’s Lower East Side. It’s a perfect book to read once your twenties have lapsed, because it’s all about the unfulfilled dreams of your youth and how to reconcile that with the less ideal future that is being laid before you.
12. The titular (and agoraphobic) Bernadette vanishes right before a family trip to Antarctica, leaving her 15-year-old daughter to sift through her mother’s correspondence to try to piece together what may have led to her disappearance. Like a grown-up Westing Game, Where’d You Go Bernadette is an insanely clever mystery that also manages to be a meditation on motherhood, marriage, and the idiosyncrasies and pettiness of upper-middle-class Seattle.
13. Sum is 40 fascinating and mind-bending explorations of what might lie beyond this life, most of them a deep dive into what exists within our own brains — like the book version of the most profound psychedelic trip you’ll ever take.
14. If your idea of American poetry is Frost and Poe, then Cathy Park Hong’s linguistic tour de force may make your heart race so fast you’d think you’re playing a video game. Set in a Las Vegas-like city in the future where many languages have merged, it features an enigmatic tour guide who, in giving tours of the desert city, raps flashes of a dissident life in South Korea as an important figure in the Gwangju Uprising. In its combination of amalgamized language and rebel themes, Dance Dance Revolutionunfurls the teeming possibility of a contemporary poetry that is at once deeply innovative and staunchly political.
15. You know that old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its premise”? That holds true for Life After Life, which I resisted reading for a while because I thought it sounded cheesy: a British woman named Ursula Todd dies, over and over again, and we read different versions of her life for 560 pages. But I shouldn’t have doubted Atkinson’s genius; Life After Life is one of the most emotional, incredible books I’ve ever read, and hammers home the idea that it’s often the most inconsequential-seeming choices that have the most monumental outcomes — and that sometimes things are completely out of our control.
16. Before Dept. of Speculation, there was Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, a book about the cracks and fissures of a Brooklyn literary marriage that was published in 1970 but — save for a few technological advances — could just as easily take place today. A devastating exploration of the ways in which we’re all really just hanging on by a thread.
17. Few people better capture the personal pain of living under tyranny than Anna Akhmatova, whose lyric poem “Requiem” begins with her waiting in line with hundreds of other women as they wait to see the loved ones imprisoned under Stalin’s terror. When most people hear “Russian literature” they think of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov; Akhmatova is one of the strongest women writers to come out of the country.
18. This book is the ultimate history of the CIA, from inception through the aftermath of 9/11. Weiner basically destroys the myth of the CIA as an all-powerful agency pulling the strings of world events, and shows a deeply flawed organization that has made blunder after blunder. Ashes reads like a thriller, and it’s backed up with incredible documents and interviews.
