the first book i read essay

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About the first book I read

IELTS essay About the first book I read

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Essays About Reading: 5 Examples And Topic Ideas

As a writer, you love to read and talk to others about reading books. Check out some examples of essays about reading and topic ideas for your essay.

Many people fall in love with good books at an early age, as experiencing the joy of reading can help transport a child’s imagination to new places. Reading isn’t just for fun, of course—the importance of reading has been shown time and again in educational research studies.

If you love to sit down with a good book, you likely want to share your love of reading with others. Reading can offer a new perspective and transport readers to different worlds, whether you’re into autobiographies, books about positive thinking, or stories that share life lessons.

When explaining your love of reading to others, it’s important to let your passion shine through in your writing. Try not to take a negative view of people who don’t enjoy reading, as reading and writing skills are tougher for some people than others.

Talk about the positive effects of reading and how it’s positively benefitted your life. Offer helpful tips on how people can learn to enjoy reading, even if it’s something that they’ve struggled with for a long time. Remember, your goal when writing essays about reading is to make others interested in exploring the world of books as a source of knowledge and entertainment.

Now, let’s explore some popular essays on reading to help get you inspired and some topics that you can use as a starting point for your essay about how books have positively impacted your life.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers

Examples Of Essays About Reading

• 1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times
• 2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan
• 3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

4. How ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ Saved Me By Isaac Fitzgerald

5. catcher in the rye: that time a banned book changed my life by pat kelly, topic ideas for essays about reading, 1. how can a high school student improve their reading skills, 2. what’s the best piece of literature ever written, 3. how reading books from authors of varied backgrounds can provide a different perspective, 4. challenging your point of view: how reading essays you disagree with can provide a new perspective.

1.  The Book That Changed My Life  By  The New York Times

“My error the first time around was to read “Middlemarch” as one would a typical novel. But “Middlemarch” isn’t really about plot and dialogue. It’s all about character, as mediated through the wise and compassionate (but sharply astute) voice of the omniscient narrator. The book shows us that we cannot live without other people and that we cannot live with other people unless we recognize their flaws and foibles in ourselves.”  The New York Times

In this collection of reader essays, people share the books that have shaped how they see the world and live their lives. Talking about a life-changing piece of literature can offer a new perspective to people who tend to shy away from reading and can encourage others to pick up your favorite book.

2.  I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life  By Anangsha Alammyan

“Consistent reading helps you develop your  analytical thinking skills  over time. It stimulates your brain and allows you to think in new ways. When you are  actively engaged  in what you’re reading, you would be able to ask better questions, look at things from a different perspective, identify patterns and make connections.” Anangsha Alammyan

Alammyan shares how she got away from habits that weren’t serving her life (such as scrolling on social media) and instead turned her attention to focus on reading. She shares how she changed her schedule and time management processes to allow herself to devote more time to reading, and she also shares the many ways that she benefited from spending more time on her Kindle and less time on her phone.

3.  How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience  By Blair Kenney

“When my learning specialist convinced me that I was an intelligent person with a reading disorder, I gradually stopped hiding from what I was most afraid of—the belief that I was a person of mediocre intelligence with overambitious goals for herself. As I slowly let go of this fear, I became much more aware of my learning issues. For the first time, I felt that I could dig below the surface of my unhappiness in school without being ashamed of what I might find.” Blair Kenney

Reading does not come easily to everyone, and dyslexia can make it especially difficult for a person to process words. In this essay, Kenney shares her experience of being diagnosed with dyslexia during her sophomore year of college at Yale. She gave herself more patience, grew in her confidence, and developed techniques that worked to improve her reading and processing skills.

“I took that book home to finish reading it. I’d sit somewhat uncomfortably in a tree or against a stone wall or, more often than not, in my sparsely decorated bedroom with the door closed as my mother had hushed arguments with my father on the phone. There were many things in the book that went over my head during my first time reading it. But a land left with neither Rhyme nor Reason, as I listened to my parents fight, that I understood.” Isaac Fitzgerald

Books can transport a reader to another world. In this essay, Fitzgerald explains how Norton Juster’s novel allowed him to escape a difficult time in his childhood through the magic of his imagination. Writing about a book that had a significant impact on your childhood can help you form an instant connection with your reader, as many people hold a childhood literature favorite near and dear to their hearts.

“From the first paragraph my mind was blown wide open. It not only changed my whole perspective on what literature could be, it changed the way I looked at myself in relation to the world. This was heavy stuff. Of the countless books I had read up to this point, even the ones written in first person, none of them felt like they were speaking directly to me. Not really anyway.” Pat Kelly

Many readers have had the experience of feeling like a book was written specifically for them, and in this essay, Kelly shares that experience with J.D. Salinger’s classic American novel. Writing about a book that felt like it was written specifically for you can give you the chance to share what was happening in your life when you read the book and the lasting impact that the book had on you as a person.

There are several topic options to choose from when you’re writing about reading. You may want to write about how literature you love has changed your life or how others can develop their reading skills to derive similar pleasure from reading.

Middle and high school students who struggle with reading can feel discouraged when, despite their best efforts, their skills do not improve. Research the latest educational techniques for boosting reading skills in high school students (the research often changes) and offer concrete tips (such as using active reading skills) to help students grow.

It’s an excellent persuasive essay topic; it’s fun to write about the piece of literature you believe to be the greatest of all time. Of course, much of this topic is a matter of opinion, and it’s impossible to prove that one piece of literature is “better” than another. Write your essay about how the piece of literature you consider the best positive affected your life and discuss how it’s impacted the world of literature in general.

The world is full of many perspectives and points of view, and it can be hard to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes. Reading books by authors of different gender, race, or socioeconomic status can help open your eyes to the challenges and issues others face. Explain how reading books by authors with different backgrounds has changed your worldview in your essay.

It’s fun to read the information that reinforces viewpoints that you already have, but doing so doesn’t contribute to expanding your mind and helping you see the world from a different perspective. Explain how pushing oneself to see a different point of view can help you better understand your perspective and help open your eyes to ideas you may not have considered.

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

Why Fiction Matters

First fiction.

Alexander Chee

There is an exercise I have my students do, one I invented. Think of a story your family tells about you to any newcomer, usually from your early childhood. If you don’t have one, think of a story your best friend tells to any new friend you introduce to them. Write it down.

Think of the memory you have of it. Is that memory in the third person?

It always is.

This memory, I say to them, is not a memory. It’s a fiction you made, to have a relationship to something you don’t remember but that is supposedly you.

That’s your first fiction, I tell them. Everyone does it. I do this because sometimes my students have doubts about what it is we are doing there. What I try to explain is that we do what everyone does. We just take it a lot further, and we write it down.

The first story I ever invented for public consumption was in a book report back in grade school. I had made a vow to read every book in my grade school library, and at some point, as I made my way through them, I remember very clearly understanding that there was simply no way my teacher would know about every book ever published—this was before the Internet—and so I decided I would make one up and see if she noticed.

She did not.

This little counterfeit was, in a sense, my first story. It seems fitting to me, given how morally questionable it was, that I don’t remember the invented story per se. But the victory was so thrilling, I would say it required more. I think of it now as the seed for all that came after. And it is why, if I was asked why I write fiction, I would say I write fiction because I have always enjoyed lying to people.

No one ever says that, I think. It seems if not implausible, at least offensive. I’m known for being a very truthful person, and I am. But if I am, it is because I learned to get out all my love for lying in fiction—to lie here, on the page.

For years after that book report, I was not a fiction writer. I was a child, and something of a liar in the way many are. You lie to test your power, I think. You also do it to make room for what is a secret in yourself that you are unsure about—you don’t know if there is room for it yet. Or at least, that was why I did it then. I worked hard to be the good boy, who mostly got good grades and was never in trouble. Or mostly not in trouble. I used that ideal of myself as something of a shield whenever I did get caught. Hey, I am not a bad boy, right? This was a fluke. But to a large extent, reading got me into trouble, or taught me trouble, before it taught me how to get out of trouble.

I’m known for being a very truthful person, and I am. But if I am, it is because I learned to get out all my love for lying in fiction—to lie here, on the page.

I was so obsessed with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House novels, for example, I would read them in my lap below my desk in the 5th grade, certain I looked like I was looking at my notebook. My teacher in that grade had a temper, and threw chalkboard erasers at you if you weren’t paying attention. One came at me, and I simply raised the book, deflecting it, causing the class to burst into laughter as a chalk dust cloud rose around me.

The teacher also laughed but clearly resented me more than ever.

I was in the grip of a spell by then, a spell cast by fiction. I taught myself to walk and read so I wouldn’t miss out. I stayed up late with lights hidden under my covers, I would hide in the closet with a flashlight so I wouldn’t be found. I was busy, following a rope through a blizzard outside of a settler’s house, or walking Mars, or sledding my way out of Nazi-occupied Norway, flying on the backs of dragons, following the magical light of a glowing orb through dangerous caves and tunnels.

I found my love for telling stories through Dungeons and Dragons, though. I was a Dungeon Master early, at age 13. There I developed a love for people hanging on my every word, being surprised with either good news or bad news. Yes, dice rolls determined outcomes, but narration made it interesting, and there are few lessons in narrative—and the way ability and chance meet each other—quite like the way a sheet of character attributes and a dice roll meet up inside of a story.

In high school I tried my hand at being a columnist—I was a suburban Michael Musto, up in southern Maine, telling my classmates to burn their parachute pants in a column called “What’s New” that was about fashion trends at the high school. I quickly developed enemies among my fellow students and fans among my teachers. It was around this time everyone began to say to me, “You should be a writer.”

And I would go off to college and try, after first trying for a few years to not be a writer—to be a visual artist instead. But then I was barred from the art major by a studio art professor who didn’t want me in the major, and after a summer spent feeling like I was up against the wall—that wall that allows you no other choice in life—the way forward appeared when a friend from school called up and asked if he could borrow my typewriter. He needed to type up a story for a fiction writing class he was applying to.

Sure, I said.

Before he arrived, I sat down, composed a story at the typewriter, and after he left, put it in the mail to apply for the class also. That first story, I remember: a young man is haunted by a bicycle accident that has taken the use of his legs, and he dreams of it again and again. He’s visited by a priest who is afraid he’ll lose his faith, and he ultimately rejects the priest’s efforts.

I got into the class—Phyllis Rose’s class at Wesleyan.

My efforts at art the years previous were not in vain. In the drawing class that had ultimately barred me from the major there was an exercise we did, where we had to combine three of our figure drawings into a single landscape to create an original, imagined composition. Mine was okay but I was better at life drawing. But that is essentially what I did to make my story—I had spent the summer relentlessly cycling. I was still grieving my father, who had died four years earlier from complications after a car accident that had left him paralyzed down the left side of his body, and dreaming constantly, at night, of the accident. A priest really had visited me to speak to me about my faith after my father died, more or less turning me against organized Christianity forever. Somehow, as I sat and typed, I had done this without really questioning what I was doing, turning it all into something about someone like me but not me, in situations I knew, all from something like direct experience. I had often watched my father sleep, lost in his nightmares, wishing I could help him the way I once had when he was in a coma in the first months after his accident. The doctors had told us to read to him and speak to him. “He can follow your voice back to consciousness,” they said. But waking him from his nightmare wasn’t going to help him—with his brain damage, it would only have needlessly frightened him. And I suspect, even in the nightmare, at least in the first part of it, he had a memory of himself before his trauma that was perhaps the slightest consolation, though I’ll never know.

I felt obscurely better though after writing the story. Imagination and empathy as well as intentional invention—also catharsis. That’s what fiction is, or, if it is not, those are the walls to what is inside it.

In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty’s Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser Intimates were unhappier still. The way she waited on him day after day only stirred up feeling against her, and perhaps this growing burden of resentment was what affected her health and obliged her often to withdraw in misery to her home, but his Majesty, who could less and less do without her, ignored his critics until his behavior seemed bound to be the talk of all.

—Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

As I thought about why we write fiction, I became curious. What was the first novel? And why—what would make you make something that had never existed before? The world’s first novel is thought to be The Tale of Genji , written in 11th Century Japan by a woman known to us only as Murasaki Shikibu. The short biography of her that accompanies the novel’s Modern Penguin edition translation says, “After the death of her husband, she cloistered herself to study Buddhism, raise her daughter, and write the world’s first novel, Genji Monogatari , the tale of the shining Prince Genji.”

What do we know of this woman who wrote the first novel? We know her only as Murasaki Shikibu, Shikibu translating as “Bureau of the Ceremonial,” and Murasaki, the name of a plant, the source of purple dye. This name she gave to her heroine. She was recently widowed and had been married only two years when her husband died. She was a talented poet and kept diaries also. And from her diaries we know she was a woman who taught herself Chinese by listening outside the door as her father taught her brother. She was married long enough to have borne a child, a daughter who would go on to become a great poet. If she had not written the first novel, and at such length, I might even be tempted to write a novel about her.

The Tale of Genji , at six volumes, is a behemoth. Beyond its enduring value as a novel—the prose is still as alive as ever—it also offers some of the closest observation historians have to this day of court life during this era. The power of fiction as a social document remains that it provides contexts historians might not otherwise have access to. Context may seem abstract or flimsy, but it remains the way we are able to understand what is of value and what is not in our culture or any other. And this is also said of the West’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Clèves , published in 1678, by Madame de Lafayette in France.

But that is not of course why Shikibu wrote Genji —she did not think, ‘Years from now, perhaps historians will value this.’ Why do it? Why do something no one has ever done before?

The Tale of Genji ’s first line, that brief parenthetical—( whose can it have been? )—charms. A sly wink as the author proceeds into her novel of court jealousies and intrigues. Whose reign can it have been? Yes, who indeed? It is a shield thrown up against consequences, the consequences one imagines she knew might result from what she wrote. We can only wonder what she hoped for, as she wrote it.

Royall Tyler, the British poet and translator to the Penguin edition, described the legend surrounding the writing of it in an essay for Harvard Magazine : “A book-length, fourteenth-century commentary on the tale relates that a certain princess once asked the empress whether she had any new stories. Having none to offer, the empress asked Murasaki Shikibu to write one. The lady therefore went on pilgrimage to Ishiyama-dera, a temple near the southern end of Lake Biwa, a day’s journey by ox carriage east of Kyoto, in search of inspiration. According to legend, Murasaki had been close since childhood to a gifted courtier unjustly exiled to Kyushu. That night at the temple, the full moon of the eighth lunar month shone up from the lake’s waters, and while she lost herself in its beauty a vision of the tale rose before her. She saw her hero, Genji, languishing in unjust exile on the shore of a moonlit sea, and the image was so compelling that, lest she forget it, she immediately wrote down what became chapters 11 and 12. After that, the legend says, she simply added the others until she had 54 in all.”

Novelists are people who, in my experience, hang on, well past when others would keep hanging on.

I find myself equal parts credulous and skeptical, reading this. That the first pages became chapters 11 and 12 is part of what convinces me this could be true—I know from experience that the first chapter you write is not necessarily the first chapter of the final version of the novel. What rings false is the part about the childhood friend. If true, though, she meant to dramatize the injustice done to him without also naming him.

Novelists are people who, in my experience, hang on, well past when others would keep hanging on. A dogged pursuit of sentences and story usually indicates other tenacities. I can admire a six volume pursuit of justice for a childhood friend. But if I did write a novel about her, I would probably have her tell someone this, to cover the role her grief might have played. In my imagination, she loved her husband, and he loved her, and it is easier to imagine the poet summoned back from her mourning to write a story for the court, writing Genji as a way to spend time with the man she’d lost, away from the court intrigues around her, which would be perhaps unendurable for a new widow. I could imagine the novel as something like a grave for him, and a monument to her love of him. But then I am probably more of a romantic than she was. What I do know, from remembering my own first short story, is that what I did helped me grieve—that afterward, I felt like I knew myself better and my father also. I experienced this as a gift—I didn’t expect it to happen—a gift that came out of what I was driven to do. I wonder if she did too. If that happens to us all—if that is even why we do it. A way of learning who we are by inventing the lives of others.

I also know that novelists are lightning rods, too—and that our ideas find us this way, sometimes, coming to us, all in a single vision, without explanation. Moonstruck but all of it falling on a page.

If this hasn’t yet happened to you, just wait.

My first novel was something I discovered I was writing, catching myself in the act.

For years friends would say of my stories, “These feel like they want to be novels,” and this was frustrating, as if I were some sort of neglectful father who wasn’t listening to them closely enough.

This could also be true.

In the summer of 1994, under the guidance of such comments, I tried to assemble most of my MFA thesis into a single novel. The result, The Descendants of a Movie-Going Republic , was the attempt to tell the stories of two AIDS activist couples, on the East and West coast, during the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A section I sent to a friend at The New Yorker was not quite enough to get me published there but she was impressed enough to pass it along to a friend of hers at William Morrow, and that in turn got me an agent. William Morrow passed on the novel, deciding it would be too massive—600 pages or more—and the agent said, “Write it and it will be as long as it is.”

I went home and sat down with my pages, and frustrated, I turned to unpacking—I had just moved to New York from Iowa—and discovered a folder of work I had created in Iowa, partials all, but that felt somehow related to one another. “When we get to New York, tell me what you are,” I had said over the folder as I’d packed up. Here we were.

We’re a novel , was that eventual reply.

As I read through the sections again I could feel what was missing, a shadowy sense of what else was there. It was as if they were made by a visitor who had hidden them variously in front of me as a prose poem, a partial draft of an essay, and sections from an earlier abandoned novel, written before graduate school. And now I knew what they were.

I called the agent. “I’m not going to write that other book,” I said. “I’ve decided I’m going to write a loosely autobiographical first novel just like everyone else.” I said it like I’d chosen it, but it had come for me.

Six years later, in 2000, when I had finished that novel, Edinburgh, what I had was a story based on my own experiences, invented to fit the shape of what I knew was true about something I had seen firsthand. They were figures from different landscapes combined into a fictional tableau, much like that first short story. The plot was that of a contemporary Greek tragedy, structured according to Aristotle’s rules for tragedy in the Poetics , and together it reinvents a myth about the Japanese fox demon.

Why fiction? Maybe the question is the problem. Why do we ask the question? What I know: I make it up but it feels like truth.

My second novel, The Queen of the Night , was no fugitive. It woke me up instead, a few days after sending the first one. A woman’s voice, speaking to me as I lay partly asleep in bed. I got up, put coffee on and threw my computer open, and began writing what she said to me.

Why fiction? Maybe the question is the problem. Why do we ask the question? What I know: I make it up but it feels like truth. I don’t feel like it belongs to me and yet I know it does. Novels come for you in the dark or the light, in the sea by moonlight, or in your half-unpacked apartment. They may or may not involve grief, love, or the pursuit of justice. They are to me more like visitors, and the sentences of the novel are something built to speak with them. And we do this because to not do it feels like death.

People often say a favorite novel haunts them—I’ve always found that sweet but maybe inexact, a way of saying something else. Are novels like ghosts afterward? Or are they like those invented memories? That word, “haunt,” seems a way to say you don’t forget them. The novels I love stay with me. The novels you love leave something with you that becomes a part of you, like a memory but not a memory, and a way to know the world and yourself at the same time. Let me tell you what I know in a way like no other, Murasaki Shikibu might have said, as she invented the novel. Let me show you yourself and others in a way you won’t ever forget.

About this series

These essays on the subject of Why Fiction Matters were written by a panel of distinguished authors. We hope you'll find these essays both illuminating and inspiring, and that they'll lead you to think about why fiction matters to you.

Discover Our Fiction, Essays & More

Chris Jackson on the Privilege of Being an Editor, and Publishing’s Systemic Problems

Inua Ellams on Writing The Half-God of Rainfall

Family Histories

A Tribute to Edith Grossman

Our Other Futures

Moby-Dick and In the Heart of the Sea

Stronger by Way of Breaking or How to Handle the Failed Election

The Science of Magical Thinking

Supermarket Mittelschmerz

The Invention of the Self Is Another Kind of Fiction

Appreciating Tillie Olsen

On alice munro.

Four Surprising Influences on We Love You, Charlie Freeman

Ha Jin on Literature and Evil

That's My Story and I'm (Probabilistically) Sticking to It

What Was It You Wanted?

On Mind & Meaning

Remembering John Updike

A Week After 11/9

• Collections
• Infographic
• Book vs Movie

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The First Book You Fell In Love With

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Consider Me Booked!

Parinita Shetty likes books, board games, blanket forts, and cake. She dislikes procrastinating but not enough to actually stop doing it. She works with children's books in different ways and has managed to write a few too. She should currently be writing but is probably watching Doctor Who. You can reach her on Instagram .

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Essay Examples on Reading Books

What makes a good reading books essay topics.

When it comes to writing an essay about reading books, choosing the right topic is essential. A good essay topic is one that is interesting, relevant, and allows for in-depth analysis and discussion. To brainstorm and choose a good essay topic, start by considering your own interests and passions. What books have you read recently that have made a lasting impression on you? What themes or ideas from those books could be explored further in an essay? Additionally, consider the potential impact of the topic on the reader. A good essay topic is one that will engage and captivate the reader, sparking their interest in the subject matter. Finally, a good essay topic is one that allows for a variety of perspectives and interpretations, encouraging critical thinking and analysis.

Best Reading Books Essay Topics

• The role of symbolism in "To Kill a Mockingbird"
• The impact of censorship in "Fahrenheit 451"
• The portrayal of mental illness in "The Bell Jar"
• The theme of identity in "Beloved"
• The use of magical realism in "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
• The representation of race and gender in "The Color Purple"
• The significance of the green light in "The Great Gatsby"
• The portrayal of war in "All Quiet on the Western Front"
• The theme of power and corruption in "Animal Farm"
• The use of allegory in "Lord of the Flies"
• The impact of colonialism in "Things Fall Apart"
• The role of family in "Pride and Prejudice"
• The portrayal of love and loss in "The Fault in Our Stars"
• The theme of survival in "Life of Pi"
• The representation of heroism in "The Odyssey"
• The impact of technology in "Brave New World"
• The portrayal of social class in "The House of Mirth"
• The role of nature in "Walden"
• The theme of innocence in "The Catcher in the Rye"
• The significance of memory in "The Remains of the Day"

Reading Books essay topics Prompts

• Imagine you are a character from your favorite book. Write a letter to the author expressing your thoughts and feelings about the story and its impact on your life.
• Choose a book that you believe should be included in the school curriculum. Write an essay arguing for its inclusion, providing evidence to support your argument.
• Create a playlist of songs that you believe represents the themes and emotions of a particular book. Write an essay explaining your song choices and how they relate to the story.
• Choose a classic novel and write an essay exploring how its themes and messages are still relevant in today's society.
• Imagine you are a literary critic. Write a review of a book you recently read, discussing its strengths and weaknesses and whether you would recommend it to others.

The Benefits of Growing Up and Reading Books

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The Power of Language to Affect Our Behavior and Mind

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Why Reading and Writing Are Important

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The Decline in Reading in Modern Society

The crazy types of readers, the importance of reading as a productive activity for young children, why should you read the book before you watch the movie, "tottochan - the little girl at the window" book review, review of raven’s peak by lincoln cole, reading, comprehension and listening skills, learning and development in children through specific reading techniques, a reflection on the improvement in my reading, writing, and learning, the purpose of fantasy in children’s literature, the theories of preferred reading & oppositional reading, racism, redemption, forgiveness and hope in minor miracle, a poem by marilyn nelson, the analysis of the book "winning balance" by shawn johnson, teacher belief toward audiobook, ray bradbury and the main themes addressed in his books, the analysis of the philip larkin’s poem "this be the verse", a personal account of struggling with reading books but enjoying writing, pedagogy of the oppressed: analysis, shift towards an increase in female readership, human computer interaction to strategize reading disability, relevant topics.

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Describe a Book You Have Read Recently

Posted by David S. Wills | Jan 6, 2018 | IELTS Tips , Speaking , YouTube | 0

Today we’re going to look at a question from IELTS speaking part two, also known as the “long answer” question. In this part of the exam, as you probably know, you are expected to speak for about two minutes on a given topic . The topic will be presented to you on a “cue card” and you will then have a minute to make notes before you speak. Today, the topic is books and we will explore how to describe a book you have read recently .

There are lots of different ways that this question could be phrased, and so, as always, you can’t just memorise an answer. In fact, in IELTS it’s always a bad idea to memorize answers. You have questions like “describe your favourite book” or “describe a book that you read in your childhood,” but today I’m going to give you a more general question.

In this lesson, we will learn several things:

• How to read the cue card
• Note-making skills
• Some useful vocabulary
• How to answer this cue card fully

The Cue Card: Describe a book you have read recently

As I said, there are many IELTS cue cards about books. You could be asked about your favorite book or a book you really love, but in this case we will just look at a book you have read recently:

Describe a book you have read recently. You should say: what kind of book it is who wrote the book what the story of the book is and explain if it is a good book or not.

Once you have read the cue card, you must think about it quickly. Analyse the topic and ask yourself what exactly you should talk about. In this case, you may ask:

• Can I talk about any book? – no, only one you’ve read recently
• Could it be a book that I dislike? – yes, that is possible
• Must it be a book that I enjoyed? – no, the final part of the question makes it clear that you don’t have to have liked it
• Should I talk about the plot? – yes, that is fulfilling the third bullet point

You should quickly choose a book, think about how to explain it, and then try to talk about the ideas on the cue card.

Making Notes

So the first thing you should do is make a few notes on the topic. Of course, as we’ve discussed before, you really shouldn’t write too much. Remember – you just have one minute! Don’t write down sentences or else you’ll only have enough to speak for ten or twenty seconds. Instead, write the ideas you want to discuss or the vocabulary you may need.

In this case, of course we first have to think about the book itself. What was its name, and who was the author? It doesn’t have to be an English book, but you do need to be able to give the English title and – if it was written by an English-speaking author, you also must be able to say their name. Here in China, many famous foreigners have Chinese names, or at least their names are adapted to make it easier for Chinese speakers to pronounce, and so they sound weird to an English speaker. For example, my students always talk about “Jobs” when they mean “Steve Jobs.” So make sure you know the name.

Then you need to think about the tasks outlined in the cue card and make notes on them so that you don’t forget any part of it. This is where you need to make useful notes.

So the first thing we need to talk about, according to the cue card, is the “kind of” book. Another way of saying that is “ genre .” This means, is it a mystery novel or a romance? Is it a horror novel or a coming-of-age story? There are so many kinds of novels. Of course, you don’t need to know them all, but being able to talk about the ones that you actually like is important. Go beyond that and consider being able to discuss the book further in terms of adjectives – is it thrilling? Hilarious? Shocking? Provocative? These are some good vocabulary items to note down during your one minute.

When it comes to genre, you can borrow many words from your movie vocabulary . Here is a video about describing movies. Most of those words can be re-used for describing books:

Next you should really think about the plot of the novel. You don’t need to say everything. Instead, summarize it. Think about the main action and key scenes. Talk briefly about the beginning and ending, or any important moments.

When talking about the plot of a film or book, you can use the present simple or past simple. This is because these events exist outside of time as they are immortalized in a text. They are, in a sense, always happening.

For example, you could equally say:

Romeo kissed Juliet

Romeo kisses Juliet.

A great way of learning how to do this effectively is to go on Wikipedia or IMDB and then find descriptions of movies. Obviously, you should not try to memorize these, but you can definitely borrow some language or even structure.

Structuring your Answer

The important things about IELTS speaking part 2 are that you actually answer all parts of the question, and that you do it in between 1 and 2 minutes. The order in which you give the details is not important. Therefore, you can talk about any of the cue card suggestions first or last. However, be sensible and think of a logical order in your head. Make sure these are in your notes so that you don’t forget anything.

Sample Answer – Describe a Book

Here’s my answer to the above question.

Recently, I read a novel called Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, who is the writer of some popular TV shows. It’s hard to give the genre because it’s a quite unusual book; however, it is both a drama and a mystery to some degree. The story is about a plane crash. This happens at the beginning of the book, and after that we get the back story of the people who were on the plane. We don’t know why the plane crashed although it seems like an accident. However, the mystery element comes into the book as the story develops because we are shown too many coincidences. The book also details the relationship between a man and a boy who survive the crash, and this gives the story its heart. I really enjoyed this book. Normally I prefer to read non-fiction books but in this case I was attracted to Before the Fall because I really liked the writer’s TV work and I was curious about how he would handle a novel. Ultimately, I was not disappointed. His ability to tell a good story made him an excellent novelist.

Here’s my recording of the sample answer. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel for more IELTS videos. I try to post about once every 1-2 weeks.

I answered the “who wrote it” and “what kind of book” parts very quickly at the beginning and spent more time on the plot and my reaction to the book. It’s important you take into consideration while planning that some parts of the question simply aren’t possible to talk about that much.

Note also the verb “detail” in that second paragraph. It’s a reporting verb used in slightly formal speech meaning roughly the same as “tells”.

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)

This list is updated monthly with new “best of the year” worthy titles.

We’re only halfway through 2024, but we’re already having trouble keeping up with the pace of exciting new releases. It’s been a particularly strong year for sophomore novels, with several emerging writers using the buzz around their debuts to launch worthy follow-ups. We’ve read multiple collections of poetry that speak to our current moment, while the varied world of nonfiction has given us plenty to linger on, from essays about the climate crisis to a vibrant oral history of The Village Voice . And we’d be remiss not to mention a brilliant debut novel that deftly brings humanity and humor to existential dread. Here’s the best of what Vulture’s contributors have read.

Titles are listed by U.S. release date, with the newest books up top.

Creation Lake , by Rachel Kushner

Fresh off a botched assignment for the U.S. government, a newly freelance spy makes her way to a small town in France to meet the charismatic figurehead of an anarchist commune. The group may have plans to disrupt a government project, and Sadie Smith has been hired by an unknown client to figure out its intentions — or, perhaps, to stir up trouble from within. Compared to scheming, keen-eyed Sadie, everyone she meets seems hopelessly naïve: the bickering anarchists, the comically resentful commune dropout, the man Sadie married to gain access to the group. Her only true equal seems to be Bruno Lacombe, a much older intellectual who has chosen to live an isolated life in a network of caves nearby. Kushner’s new novel, after 2018’s The Mars Room , is the kind of highly satisfying literary thriller that always seems in short supply. —Emma Alpern

Bear , by Julia Phillips

Off the coast of Seattle exists an archipelago where Sam and her elder sister Elena have spent their entire lives. Their days on San Juan consist mainly of catering to wealthy tourists in order to make ends meet and caring for their terminally ill mother, and Sam copes by dreaming of the day she and Elena can finally leave the island and start anew. So passes the first two-thirds of Bear : an unhurried, intimate portrait of sisterhood, inherited trauma, and the monotony of poverty in a society emerging from a pandemic. But a glimpse of a new life (and a not-so-subtle representation of the threats that lie beyond the islands) arrives on San Juan in an unexpected form: a wild grizzly bear in transit. Elena, captivated, and Sam, terrified, must now contend with the new presence. A rapid escalation of events ensues as the sisters’ drastically different yet equally ill-advised approaches to the unexpected visitor lead to devastating consequences. Bear may be a slow burn, but by the final chapter, Sam’s whole world is engulfed in flames. — Anusha Praturu

Parade , by Rachel Cusk

In an interview with The New Yorker , Rachel Cusk said she believes character no longer exists. That a person — an author or their fictional creation — should be constrained by their name, their past, and their habits is an old conception that’s wearing away, and good riddance. This view governed her Outline trilogy, which shows its narrator in relief, standing apart from the people she talks with, both peers and strangers. In her latest novel, Parade , Cusk takes her belief in the death of character even further as a cast of voices, many of them named G, wax philosophical about their spouses, avant-garde painting, and a random act of violence. Formally frenetic and sharp line by line, Parade doesn’t mimic decades-old experimental modes. (Renata Adler’s Speedboat comes to mind at times, though.) Instead, Cusk has written something genuinely new — again. And whether Parade is a character-driven story in spite of itself is an open question as exciting as its mutable storyline. — Maddie Crum

➽ Read Andrea Long Chu’s review of Parade.

Sex Goblin , Lauren Cook

When Lauren Cook publishes a new book, it is like a minor holiday to me. Cook is a trans naturalist and writer who came up on the Tumblr-era internet; his previous book, I Love Shopping (2019), is sold out and impossible to find — if you have my copy, please give it back. His latest, Sex Goblin , is a collection of poetry and short prose that read like posts on a porn sub-Reddit until you realize your guts are on the floor. In a sparse, direct, half-naïve first-person idiom, there’s an emotional acuity that sneaks up on you, making the mundane (waiting in a drive-through at Starbucks) and the surreal (a witch who turns an offending man into underwear) feel unpredictable and immediate, like the rumbling before an earthquake, when the ground might crack open. — Erin Schwartz

Wait , by Gabriella Burnham

After the success of her debut novel, It Is Wood, It Is Stone , Gabriella Burnham returns with an emotionally grounded political novel. When out dancing with friends, Elise learns from her younger sister that their mother has disappeared. Elise returns home to Nantucket Island, where she soon discovers that her mother was arrested and deported to São Paulo, after more than two decades away from Brazil. As Elise struggles to bring her mother back, she falls in with her wealthy best friend, who has recently inherited her grandfather’s mansion. No matter how close the two friends may have been, there remains an unbridgeable class divide. Burnham is a skilled observer of the hypocrisies coursing beneath our desire to do good and be good. This is especially clear when she writes about wealth. Wait is an empathetic and clear-eyed exploration of the everyday injustices that slowly erode friendships, families, and lives in America. — Isle McElroy

All Fours , by Miranda July

An artist of niche celebrity plans to celebrate her 45th birthday by driving alone across the country, from L.A., where she lives with her husband and child, to New York. But when it comes time to hit the road, she finds herself stopping in a nearby suburb, meeting a younger man who works for Hertz, and spending the entirety of her vacation in a motel, which she renovates to Paris-inspired perfection for the cool sum of $20,000. It’s not just that Miranda July’s latest novel is so propulsive you might have to cancel plans or set aside PTO just to scarf it down. It’s that her dazzlingly horny intelligence wrestles with marriage, queerness, and desire in ways sweet and hilarious, making even the smallest sizzle. — Jasmine Vojdani

➽ Read Christine Smallwood’s review of All Fours .

Ghostroots , ’Pemi Aguda

The 12 stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s mesmerizing and unsettling debut collection, Ghostroots , revolve around life in Lagos, the author’s home city. Aguda is a precise and exciting prose stylist, and her stories offer vivid insights into tradition, family, and trauma. Throughout the collection, the past invades the present, in the form of unwanted lineages and regretted decisions. A woman who cannot produce milk for her newborn blames herself for this ailment. The child was conceived the evening she forgave her husband for having an affair — she believes she’s being punished for being so forgiving. In “Manifest,” a young woman who resembles her grandmother — an evil woman, she is told — begins to adopt her grandmother’s most terrible traits, leading to an act of violence she cannot take back. The horror in Aguda’s stories are borne out of a sense of inevitability. Her characters, unable to change the past, are forced to confront futures they find terrifying and dangerous. This is a smart, playful, and compassionate collection worthy of repeated reads. — I.M.

The Husbands , by Holly Gramazio

Holly Gramazio’s debut novel has a killer hook: What if you had a magic attic supplying you with an endless cycle of husbands? It’s the best kind of high-concept question, one that opens up plenty of space for a writer to play in. And Gramazio (whose background is in game design), has lots of fun exploring every corner of her husband-filled world. The protagonist, Lauren — single and loving it, until she comes home to find a husband she doesn’t remember, who keeps turning into a different spouse whenever he goes into the attic — has the unique opportunity to examine the little ways we all soften at the edges to fit the people in our lives. Lauren, it turns out, learns a lot more about herself and what she values (or doesn’t!) than she does about any individual husband. — Emily Heller

James , by Percival Everett

A re-imagining of a classic work of art has become a time-honored — if sometimes spotty — pursuit, and with James Percival Everett creates an original masterpiece that both complements and rivals one of the most iconic American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Written from the perspective of Huck’s loyal companion, the runaway slave Jim (James), the titular adventures of Mark Twain’s book are instead experienced here as the life-or-death trials James faces while he evades capture and strategizes a way to free his enslaved family. There are plenty of references to the earlier novel — and there’s still humor to be found despite the constant danger — but Everett grounds the narrative in James’s rich interior life and a larger historical context that brings a new depth to the familiar characters. This book will linger with you. — Tolly Wright

➽ Read James Yeh’s review of James.

Headshot , by Rita Bullwinkel

In a shabby gym in Reno, Nevada, teenage girls face off in a youth boxing tournament under a shifting ray of daylight that “fills the whole space with a dull, dusty brightness” and surrounded by a sparse crowd of mostly uninterested coaches and parents. The novel enters deep into the girls’ minds as they assess one another’s weaknesses and coax themselves through the rounds, which are described in brutal, bloody detail. Each fighter has her own source of competitive energy, but they’re all realistically ambivalent, too — unsure about why, exactly, they’re drawn to a sport that gives them so little for their trouble. Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel is as tense and disciplined as its characters, and she has a gift for capturing the way their minds wander far from the ring and back again: One girl counts off the digits of pi, while another obsesses over a death she witnessed as a lifeguard. There’s a mesmerizing sense of limitlessness to the narrative, which roams far into the future of these fighters even as they’re absorbing hits in the ring. — E.A.

Lessons for Survival , by Emily Raboteau

Raboteau emerged on the scene some two decades ago as a writer of sharp, incisive fiction that mapped the contours of identity and race. In recent years, she has become a literary voice of consciousness about the ongoing climate crisis. Across a series of essays, book reviews, and conversations, Raboteau has charted the progression of the crisis, our shared culpability, and our responsibility to develop practical solutions. Lessons for Survival is, in many ways, a culmination and continuation of this work. Raboteau travels locally and abroad to capture stories about the impact of the environmental crisis, and the resilience of communities that find themselves on the front lines. She also writes authentically — her prose seamlessly melds slang and heightened language — about her own experiences as a Black mother, whose identity has shaped her understanding of these issues. This is scintillating work, an essential primer for our times. — Tope Folarin

The grand irony of this juncture in history is that at the very moment when the problems we’re facing — climate change, economic inequality, cross-border violence — require global solutions, our societies have become more atomized than ever. This is the case both within various societies, in which individual concerns increasingly trump collective interests, and between societies, whereby individual countries pursue their objectives at the expense of global cooperation. In their new book, Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea , Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor offer an essential antidote: a renewed commitment to solidarity. Their book is ambitious and comprehensive. It traces the evolving meaning of solidarity from ancient Rome through the Black Lives Matter movement and identifies different kinds of solidarity, how they arise, and how effective they are in forming and maintaining social bonds. They persuasively argue that in order to create a more “egalitarian world,” we must learn to cultivate and practice the kind of solidarity that “chang[es] the social order toward one that is both freer and more just.” — T.F.

Help Wanted , by Adelle Waldman

Set at a big-box store in upstate New York, Help Wanted recalls Mike White’s Enlightened in its textured portrayal of how small humiliations and injustices at work inevitably boil over into righteous rage. It’s a novel that lingers in the imagination, by which I mean, after you read it you’ll think of it every time you shop at Target, forever. — Emily Gould

➽ Read Emily Gould’s interview with Help Wanted author Adelle Waldman on The Cut .

Stranger , by Emily Hunt

Emily Hunt’s second book of poems considers real intimacy mediated by apps. In “Company,” a long poem originally published as a chapbook, the speaker works for a flower delivery startup, gently pulling roots from soil, culling, clipping, and handing off arrangements. These moments are sensorily rich, slotted into 15-minute assembly-line shifts, and short lines. In “Emily,” Hunt uses messages from Tinder as her source material, not to mock (or not only to mock) the senders or the stilted situation of meeting online, but to construct a self in relief, as seen and spoken to by strangers. A funny and surprising interaction with dailiness, including our phones — the hardware and the relationships maintained through them — and whatever else is still tactile. — M.C.

Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, by Emmeline Clein

Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight seems destined to fundamentally reshape how we think and write about the subject of eating disorders. What separates Clein’s book from others on the topic is her commitment to treating the sufferers of eating disorders with the kind of dignity that clinicians tend to withhold. She writes as an insider, telling both her personal story and sharing the stories of her “sisters,” which range from Tumblr accounts to clinical studies co-authored by their subjects. Throughout, she refrains from including the graphic details that have historically plagued books about the subject. “Too many people I love have misread a memoir as a manual,” she writes. The book she writes instead confronts the complicated entanglement between eating disorders, race, capitalism, and the ongoing erosion of social safety nets. Stereotypes about eating disorders commonly portray the illness as one rooted in control. Dead Weight not only exposes how little control patients have had over their own narratives and bodies, it returns the narrative to those who have suffered from the disease. This is a moving, brilliant, and important book. — Isle McElroy

The Freaks Came Out to Write , by Tricia Romano

If you were reading The Village Voice in the 1990s, as I was, it wasn’t as good as it used to be. That was also true ten years later, and 20 years before, and frankly it was probably what people started saying upon reading issue No. 2 in 1955. What the Voice was, inarguably, was shaggy, sometimes under-edited, alternately vigorous and undisciplined and brilliant and exhausting and fun. The infighting in its pages and in its newsroom was relentless, amped up by the very aggressiveness that made its reporters and editors able to do what they did. You’ll encounter more than one office fistfight in The Freaks Came Out to Write , this oral history by Tricia Romano, who worked there at the very end of its life. She got a huge number of Voice survivors to talk, including almost every living person who played a major role in this beloved, irritating paper’s life, and good archival interviews fill in the gaps. If you read the Voice in its glory days (whenever those were!) you’ll miss it terribly by the end of this book; if you weren’t there, you will be amazed that such a thing not only existed but, for a while, flourished. — Christopher Bonanos

Wandering Stars , by Tommy Orange

Orange’s Pulitzer-finalist debut, 2018’s There There , is a tightly constructed, polyphonic book that ends with a gunshot at a powwow. His follow-up, which shares the first one’s perspective-hopping structure (and several of its characters), is a different beast, an introspective novel about addiction and adolescence. The story begins in the 1860s, when a young Cheyenne man becomes an early subject in the U.S. government’s attempts to assimilate Native Americans. The consequences of this flurry of violence and imprisonment will reverberate through generations of his family, eventually landing in present-day Oakland, California, where three young brothers live with their grandmother and her sister. The oldest brother, Orvil, was shot at There There ’s powwow, and even though he survived, the heaviness of that day is weighing on him and his family. Prescribed opioids for the pain, he finds that — like several of his ancestors, though he has no way of knowing that — he likes the sense of removal they give him. Orange’s novel is unusually curious and gentle in its treatment of addiction; he lets his characters puzzle out why they’re drawn to intoxication, managing to balance a lack of judgment with an understanding of the danger they’re in. — E.A.

➽ Read Emma Alpern’s full review of Wandering Stars .

Come and Get It , by Kiley Reid

In Come and Get It , the second novel from the breakout author of Such a Fun Age , the University of Arkansas serves as the backdrop for Kylie Reid’s assessment of race, class, and social hierarchy on a college campus. Over the course of a semester that shifts between the perspectives of Millie, a meek yet dutiful R.A., Kennedy, a shy transfer student with a traumatic secret, and Agatha, a visiting professor out of her depths, the primary characters are forced to grapple with the heady concepts of desire, privilege, and the rules of social conduct in an environment where the the game is rigged and fairness is reserved for a select few. Light on plot and heavy on character development and social commentary, Come and Get It is the kind of book you put down and immediately want to discuss . But fair warning: If you ever lived in a college dorm in the U.S., this book might inflict a non-negligible amount of PTSD. — A.P.

Martyr! , by Kaveh Akbar

In Poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Cyrus Shams is a nexus of dissonant identities: He’s a 20-something Iranian-American, a straight-passing queer, a recovering addict, a depressive insomniac, and a writer who’s recently gotten some unflattering feedback. He’s also grieving his parents, who he considers to have died meaninglessly, his mother on a passenger flight out of Tehran that was accidentally shot down by the U.S. military (a real event that occurred in 1988), his father “anonymous[ly] after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm.” Martyr! traces Cyrus’s obsession with the idea of dying with a purpose, disrupting linear time and moving miraculously between worlds and perspectives. Sometimes, the dead speak for themselves; we hear from Cyrus’s mother and his uncle, who recounts his life as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq war. The book also shines with humor, including an imagined conversation between Cyrus’s mother and Lisa Simpson. Akbar’s prose courses with lyrical intelligence and offers an interrogation of whose pain matters — and what it means to live and die meaningfully — that is as politically urgent as it is deeply alive. — J.V.

The Rebel’s Clinic , by Adam Shatz

In these chaotic times, Franz Fanon’s work is constantly and enthusiastically referenced. A new generation of activists — as many before them — has repurposed Fanon’s words to describe our current travails, and to propose how we might move forward. Fanon persists in the activist imagination as a kind of radical soothsayer, an intellectual who can speak authoritatively about our moment because of his identity as a Black man and colonial subject who personally experienced the barbarity of a colonizing power. In The Rebel’s Clinic , Adam Shatz complicates our understanding of Fanon’s life and work, and persuasively conjures the human being who wrote the words that have inspired so many. Among Shatz’s most important interventions is to highlight Fanon’s vocation as a doctor who “treated the torturers by day and the tortured at night.” Shatz’s book is a chronicle of a man who, because of his identity and gifts, was obliged to constantly reconcile opposing ideas and ways of being. — T.F.

I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt , by Madeline Pendleton

Finally, a book about money that knows money is evil. TikTok’s favorite Marxist small-business owner wrote a book on financial literacy, and it delivers on its promise. Half memoir, half how-to, the book explores Pendleton’s journey to fiscal solvency while also including handy tutorials on things like buying a car and enduring financial stress. (Pendleton starts the book with the death by suicide of her partner, primarily motivated by looming bankruptcy, so that how-to hits especially hard.) Pendleton’s personal story brings pathos and relatability to her finance guidance. Every hardship someone of her generation could fall prey to, she does — predatory loans, for-profit college, go-nowhere internships, not realizing couch-surfing is the same as homelessness and therefore taking longer to embrace class solidarity. But for every setback, she notes a resource for resilience. Everything from the kindness of the punk scene to good grifts to pull on the phone company, this book gives you the tools to create a sustainable life in late capitalism. — Bethy Squires

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My Demoralizing but Not Surprising Cancellation

About an hour before my first book event, I heard from my publicist that the bookstore had “concerns” about my conversation partner, Rabbi Andy Bachman, because he was a “Zionist.”

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Last Tuesday, I was supposed to have launched my first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life , with an event at a bookstore in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo—a conversation between me and the well-known Reform rabbi Andy Bachman.

The event didn’t happen. About an hour before the intended start, I heard from my publicist that the bookstore had “concerns” about Rabbi Bachman because he was a “Zionist.” I received another call while in a car on the way to the store: The manager was now refusing to host the conversation with the rabbi. When I arrived, I asked her why she would not permit the event to go forward as planned. Her response: “We don’t want a Zionist onstage.”

I was taken aback. Rabbi Bachman is an outspoken social-justice advocate and a supporter of the establishment of a Palestinian state (and my former teacher). My book is a history of American Jewish life in the second half of the 20th century, and deals critically with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Because of my analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as my reporting about and public opposition to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, I had feared that synagogues would be reluctant (and surely some still are) to host events. I did not anticipate that the trouble would come from a bookstore in Brooklyn.

Adam Kirsch: The false narrative of settler colonialism

Then again, perhaps I should not have been surprised at all. Since October 7, the public discourse on Israel and Palestine has curdled. Some right-wing supporters of Israel have become cheerleaders for violence. In certain spaces that call themselves progressive, intolerance has become endemic and conspiratorial thinking is on the rise. The result across the board: Nuance has evaporated, and humanity is in short supply.

My would-be book launch also exemplified the bind that many progressive American Jews face. We are caught between parts of an activist left demanding that we disavow our communities, even our families, as an entrance ticket, and a mainstream Jewish institutional world that has long marginalized critics of Israeli policy. Indeed, Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.

On the one hand, we can no more renounce our families, friends, and communities than we can ourselves, and the demand that we do so is wrong. It is straightforwardly anti-Semitic to ask, as the bookstore manager did with her blanket ban on Zionists, that Jews support Israel’s dismantling as a criterion for participation in intellectual life. This is a condition that most Jews, who when surveyed describe strong attachment to Israel, could not meet. And it is a kind of litmus test that should not be asked (and generally is not) of any other group of people.

On the other hand, we cannot ignore Israel’s devastation of the Gaza Strip, and should be fearful of shifting attention away from the human catastrophe unfolding in the territory. Friends on the left have warned me that making too much of last week’s deplatforming has already had this effect. I worry about bolstering tribalist thinking, which is precisely the mentality that for decades has blinded so many in mainstream Jewish institutions to the grinding, daily injustices of the occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza—and, more recently, inured them to the horrific fact that this war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians .

But silence about the pitfalls of the left carries its own risks—including risks to the left itself. My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on U.S. military aid—as beyond the pale.

The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing U.S. policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.

Many on the right, not just the far left, scoff at the possibility of such a coalition. For the past several days, my inbox has been filled with hateful crowing that the cancellation of my book launch is the bitter fruit that I and other left-wing Jews deserve. What did I expect? Hadn’t I written more than 100 articles documenting Israeli human-rights abuses and the occupation’s quotidian cruelty? Didn’t I advocate for policies, including boycotts, that would pressure Israel to change its policies? So how could I now complain that similar tactics were being used against me? The ejection of Zionists and Israelis from polite society was on my hands.

To these critics I must insist on a difference between boycotts of entire groups of people based on their identity or the ideas they are assumed to hold, and boycotts of goods produced in unlawfully occupied territories. The former are antithetical to democratic public life—as the owner of the bookstore argued in his statement apologizing for the cancellation. The latter, by contrast, are a staple of nonviolent resistance, crucial tools for achieving genuine democracy.

Arash Azizi: Is a new Palestinian movement being born?

No doubt, I regret certain sentences and even articles I’ve written about Israel in the past, which today I would phrase differently. The October 7 attacks painfully resensitized me to the reality of Israeli Jewish vulnerability, which exists despite the massive power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians. I was too often willing to overlook this fact. Opening one’s eyes to the dehumanization of Palestinians does not require closing one’s eyes to the dehumanization of Israelis, and vice versa. If Rabbi Bachman and I had been able to have our conversation last week, we could have discussed what might be the one immutable truth about Israel and Palestine these days: Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and both peoples have the right to equality, dignity, and self-determination. No movement that ignores this reality has any hope of success.

About the Author

How to Read an Essay Collection

Get the most out of your essay reading or try an essay collection for the first time with these tips for how to read an essay collection.

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

How to read an essay collection? You may think no instructions are necessary. All you do is open the book, look over the table of contents, get going on the first essay, and proceed from there as usual. You can certainly read collections that way, and I sometimes do. But you might get more out of the experience if you keep a few things in mind before jumping in. And perhaps these suggestions will encourage you to pick up an essay collection if that’s not the kind of thing you usually read. Here are some points to consider:

Now that you know how to read an essay collection, you might want some recommendations. My top three picks are:

Want more? Check out 100 Must-Read Essay Collections to start and then suggestions for the 2018 Read Harder essay anthology task , great collections published in 2017 and more published in 2016 .

Then tell me what your favorite essay collection is!

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Essay on The Most Interesting book I read

Our school library is having books which I like very much. One of my friends showed me a certain book in the library and he said that is his favorite book. He also said that is was the second part of the most famous Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain.

I borrowed the book from the librarian on the advice of my friend. When I went home that day, I had an immediate lunch, when to my room and started reading the book.

Home interesting was it! It was a wonderful book. The book was full of adventures. The main character was Huckleberry Finn who was a poor English boy whose father was a third class drunkard. This father wanted to get his son’s fortune which he get previously in yet another adventure with Tom Sawyer, his friend. So Finn runs away from the custody of his father and meet another boy. This boy was Jim who had been running away from master. He had been a slave boy.

The two friends go to the sea and get on to a ship. They become friendly with the seamen and go on fishing. They also go to various island in the sea and engage themselves in many adventures. At last they come home. Finn finds that his father had died and hi was no more in danger. Jim also get his freedom with Finn’s help.

This interesting children’s novel had been written by well-known English Author Mark Twain who had previously written the famous book Tom Sawyer. Both these books are popular even today. So many millions of children throughout the English speaking world must have read these books. Much more than Tom Sawyer, it was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was the most interesting book I have ever read.

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Paul Robeson's many faces get new spotlight in recording premiere

Michel Martin

Olivia Hampton

PAUL ROBESON - VOICE OF FREEDOM

Lawrence Brown (left) and Paul Robeson perform at the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem, N.Y., in 1941. Sony Classical hide caption

Singing or acting on stage and film, playing football and advocating for civil rights made Paul Robeson a global star. He was one of the most famous Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, but McCarthyism saw him blacklisted and nearly relegated him to the ash heap of history. A new set of recordings , some released for the first time, aims to reinstate this one-time cultural icon to his rightful place.

Robeson's "multihyphenate" talent and charisma "drew hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to his attention and to interest of him over the course of his career," said Columbia University professor Shana Redmond.

She wrote essays in an accompanying illustrated book, Paul Robeson: Voice of Freedom , along with Robeson's granddaughter Susan. The 14-CD edition on Sony Classical is the first ever release of the singer's complete Columbia, HMV and Victor recordings from 1925 to 1947. All of his American recordings have been restored from the original master discs and tapes, and 25 studio recordings are available for the first time on CD, decades after Robeson died in 1976.

During a 1949 concert in Peekskill, N.Y., Paul Robeson was surrounded by veterans and union workers who stood as a human shield on stage to allow him to sing at a time when he was blacklisted for his political activism. Sony Classical hide caption

As the Cold War intensified, Robeson was blacklisted for political activism that saw him speak out against what he described as the U.S. government's racialized and imperialist policies. He lost concert engagements and recording contracts. His passport was revoked for eight years.

"There's a very material consideration, but then there's also the element of wanting to bury this person," Redmond told NPR's Michel Martin about that period. But Robeson was undeterred. Invited to perform in Canada, but stopped at the border due to his blacklisting, Robeson sang across the border from the bed of a pickup truck parked in Blaine, Wash. Thousands of people were gathered on the Canadian side.

"He does this twice at that location because of its successes, and uses it as an opportunity to publicly defy and call into question the State Department's assaults on radical thought and on people's ability to travel," Redmond recalls. He sang spirituals there, such as "Joe Hill" and "No More Auction Block for Me."

Robeson also sang "Ol' Man River," from the musical Show Boat , from one of his best known roles. He had initially declined the role — written for him by composer Jerome Kern — upset with the use of derogatory, racialized language by librettist Oscar Hammerstein.

"By the middle and late 1930s, he had completely revamped the language to match not only more contemporary and more urgent representations of Blackness, but also more contemporary concerns around the growing threat of war and around resilience and resistance," Redmond said. "And so the song is forever attached to him because he made it uniquely and powerfully his."

Robeson's activism likely had its roots in his childhood. He was born in 1898 to a father who, as a teen, was a fugitive from slavery. William Drew Robeson served as the pastor of a church in Princeton, N.J., until he was ousted for his outspokenness against social injustice. The younger Robeson's teacher mother died when he was 6 years old. Robeson attended Rutgers — a private college at the time — becoming its third Black student and its first Black football player.

Paul Robeson performed the title role in a production of Othello that ran for 296 performances in 1943 and 1944, a record for the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway. He was the first African American to be cast as Othello in a major production in the U.S. Library of Congress/Sony Classical hide caption

In the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, he turned to the stage. Robeson performed the title role in a production of Othello that ran for 296 performances in 1943 and 1944, breaking a record it still holds for the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway. He came to singing almost by accident. "It's for his inability to whistle during one of his roles on stage that he was encouraged by the play's director to sing, and that starts his career as a singer," Redmond said.

And what a voice it was, deeply resonant and at ease in a variety of spirituals, ballads and folk songs. "This is a voice that caused entire nations to tremble," Redmond said. "He is truly an underappreciated but nonetheless magnificent model for humanity."

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer . The digital version was edited by Majd al-Waheidi .

• Paul Robeson

Five Things I Learned in the Process of Writing a Book

Embarking on the journey of writing a book can be both exciting and daunting, as emma edwards discovered when authoring her personal finance book "good with money". whether you're looking to write for financial gain or just for the love of it, emma's lessons learned offer practical advice for anyone embarking on the challenging yet rewarding adventure of writing a book..

If you’ve ever considered writing a book, you’re not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that as many as 80% of people say they’d like to write a book one day. I was one of those people, and now, after 18 months of work, I published my first book, Good With Money (crowd cheers!)

Unsurprisingly, book writing isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It was actually a lot of tears and sour Skittles, if I’m honest. But it was one hell of an experience. If you’ve ever thought about putting pen to paper — or perhaps more appropriately, fingers to keys — here are five things I learned along the way that might help you.

1. You need to work with your brain

We all approach work differently — and writing a book will tell you a lot about how your brain works. Some people swear by the rule of writing for one hour every morning or holding themselves accountable to writing every single day for however long they feel able to. I, however, found that I needed at least an hour of procrastination time (read: Staring at the wall, unable to get started) before I had any hope of getting anything done. Needless to say, the hour-a-day rule didn’t work for me. Instead, I found I needed to carve out entire days dedicated to writing so that I had time to get distracted, go for a walk around the block, get in the headspace to write something and step away whenever I got too overwhelmed.

I would set Pomodoro timers for short 25-minute bursts of work, where I’d often smash out over 1,000 words at a time, before spending equally as long doing anything but writing. At first I felt guilty, like I wasn’t working hard enough. I’d get to the end of a writing day and have written 5,000 words, but done so in five intense time blocks of 25-45 minutes each. Letting go of how I thought an author ‘should’ work meant I could focus on just getting the words out, however that looked.

2. You will hate everything you’ve written at multiple points

This was the part I was most unprepared for. I really wanted to fall in love with my book, but for the most part, I hated it. You get to the point where you’re so familiar with what you’ve written, and you’ve gone through so many iterations of the content itself, that you lose all sense of rational thought, and you’ll truly believe that your book is awful. If you’re anything like me, you’ll take that even further and decide that you’re actually terrible at what you do and don’t know anything about your subject matter.

During one particularly emotionally charged writing day, I found myself deep in a Reddit discussion between authors. An author in that thread had said, “The only thing you’ll hate more than the words you’ve still got to write are the words you’ve already written,” and I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I wasn’t alone.

You will hate your book. It’s normal. It comes and goes, but you have to just accept it. I got into a good rhythm eventually. Any time I started to feel that panic coming on, I would shut my laptop, go outside and come back to it in half an hour, and work on a different section when I did so.

3. Choosing a title really, really helps

The real turning point for my book writing journey was when I settled on the title, Good With Money. For a long time I was working with an ‘untitled manuscript’, but it made it really difficult to settle on a direction or weave in thematic links to the overall direction of the book. It also helped me pull myself out of mental spirals by giving me an anchor point to bring everything back to. I think that’s especially important for non-fiction books.

I’d originally planned to just get words out and shape the title later, which probably does work for some people. But if you’re finding yourself going around in circles, spending some time brainstorming titles might really help. It can feel like you’re wasting time, but trust me. It needs to be done at some point.

4. Scaffolding out your structure needs to be a priority

When you’re writing a book, you’re pouring all your knowledge, passion, analogies, frameworks, and stories about your subject matter into one little container — and organizing that can be a bit of a stress sandwich.

You’re taking your reader through a transformation. They’re a different version of themselves after reading your book. And wanting to get that transformation right can make it hard to know when to introduce certain concepts, how to structure the information, and how to introduce and conclude different subsections of the book.

One of the most valuable conversations I had during my book writing experience was with a fellow non-fiction author who had finished her manuscript recently. She said to me, “Emma, just pick a structure and write to it.” And that’s when I realized: My quest for the one perfect structure was keeping me stuck. There’s no one right way to write your book or tell your story, but it serves as a great procrastination activity to keep tweaking your chapter list or scrapping the whole thing and starting a new one.

No structure is worth anything if you never write to it. So if you’re stuck on structure, take the advice I did: Just pick one. I didn’t personally make use of AI tools like ChatGPT during my book writing process, but if I did it again, I might consider trialling different prompts to get thought-starter ideas on structure.

5. Reading other people’s books is a bad idea

Yikes, did I wish someone had told me this. When I was feeling particularly uninspired on how to shape my brain dumped words into a book, I tried reading other non-fiction books in the hope it would help things click. Big mistake.

A published book has gone through multiple rounds of edits, usually with a team of people working on it. Comparing your messy manuscript to a completed and published product is a surefire way to double down on your self-doubt and make the end goal feel even more unreachable.

My advice? Don’t read other non-fiction books while writing yours. I devoured a lot of fiction, though. It helped me switch my brain off and renew my creativity.

Curious as to how this chaotic process turned into a book? Get your copy of Good With Money at all major retailers and many independents across Australia and New Zealand.

Emma Edwards is a finance copywriter and blogger, on a mission to humanize the financial services industry by creating meaningful content that’s accessible and empowering. You’ll find her penning money tips at her blog, The Broke Generation , sharing financial insights on Instagram , or injecting life into content for her business clients.

Money tips 10 minute read

Written by Emma Edwards August 26, 2024

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