book bucket list
Items in this hypelist
Books
the lost flowers of alice hart
Holly Ringland · 2018
we all want impossible things
Catherine Newman · 2022
white oleander
Janet Fitch · 2000
sunbathing
Isobel Beech · 2022
A powerful debut that explores life, death and the restorative power of friendship under the warm summer sun of Abruzzo. 'Sweet and deep, sad and funny - like life.' Peggy Frew, award-winning author 'Isobel Beech writes like a skipping heartbeat; loss carves out her love language.' Mahmood Fazal, Walkley Award-winning writer Summertime in Italy, fresh vegetables from the garden, taking turns washing dishes, reading to each other, learning about cherry worms. Strange how badly I could punish myself for abandoning you once, then go and do it again. After weeks of grieving, a woman books a plane ticket, bound for an old villa in the mountains of Abruzzo. Invited to stay with her friends Giulia and Fab - in the weeks before they marry in a village orchard - she lives for a summer in the house's Birthing Room, where generations of women once had their babies. More often, though, she lives in her head: in the past, trying to make sense of her grief and wondering how to go on, or if she can. As her inner and outer worlds spar and converge, she passes the time helping with the household chores, walking in the sunshine and plucking fruit from the nearby orchards, all while dwelling on the moments with her father that might have warned her something was wrong. This spare, stunning novel explores the workings of the self in the wake of devastation and deep regret, and reveals the infinite ways that the everyday offers solace and hope.
bodies of light
Jennifer Down · 2021
all the ugly and wonderful things
Bryn Greenwood · 2017
sunset
Jessie Cave
of woman born
Adrienne Rich · 2021
getting lost
Annie Ernaux · 2022
crush
Richard Siken · 2023
eve's hollywood
Eve Babitz · 2015
the plague
Albert Camus · 2012
before i go to sleep
S. J. Watson · 2012
diary of a madman and other stories
Nikolai Gogol · 1973
the unconsoled
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1996
notes from the underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2008
the tell-tale heart
Edgar Allan Poe · 1983
a certain hunger
Chelsea G. Summers · 2022
boy parts
Eliza Clark · 2020
drive your plow over the bones of the dead
Olga Tokarczuk · 2020
just kids
Patti Smith · 2010
<p> It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. </p> <p> Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. </p> <p> <i>Just Kids</i> begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. </p>
bonjour tristesse
Francoise Sagan · 2008
letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke · 2018
<p>Facsimile of 1943 Edition. Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, ten in all, remain a fresh source of inspiration and insight to the poetic sensibility to this day.</p>
upstream
Mary Oliver · 2019
black swans
Eve Babitz · 2018
the woman destroyed
Simone De Beauvoir · 1987
the year of magical thinking
Joan Didion · 2007
an apprenticeship or the book of pleasures
Clarice Lispector · 2022
intermezzo
Sally Rooney · 2024
lie with me
Philippe Besson · 2020
wuthering heights
Emily Bronte · 2009
'May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then' Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
If beale street could talk
James Baldwin · 2006
From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless" (The New York Times Book Review).<br/><br/>"One of the best books Baldwin has ever written—perhaps the best of all." —The Philadelphia Inquirer<br/><br/>Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions—affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.
the new york trilogy
Paul Auster · 1990
stoner
John Williams · 2012
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher.<br/><br/>He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.
tuesdays with morrie
Mitch Albom · 2002
the stranger
Albert Camus · 1989
nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1969
near to the wild heart
Clarice Lispector · 2012
we were liars
E. Lockhart · 2018
<b>NOW AVAILABLE AS THE ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES <i>WE WERE LIARS—</i>AND LOOK FOR E. LOCKHART’S NEW NOVEL IN THE WE WERE LIARS UNIVERSE, <i>WE FELL APART</i>, COMING NOVEMBER 4, 2025<br><br>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • A <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS</i> BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOK OF THE CENTURY • The modern, sophisticated suspense novel that became a runaway smash hit on TikTok and introduced the world to a family hiding a jaw-dropping secret.<br><br>"Thrilling, beautiful, and blisteringly smart, <i>We Were Liars</i> is utterly unforgettable." —John Green, #1<i> New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>The Fault in Our Stars</i><br><br></b>A beautiful and distinguished family.<br>A private island.<br>A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.<br>A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.<br>A revolution. An accident. A secret.<br>Lies upon lies.<br>True love.<br>The truth.<br><br>Read it.<br>And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.<b><br><br>Don’t miss any of the We Were Liars novels<br>WE WERE LIARS • FAMILY OF LIARS • WE FELL APART (Coming in November!)<br></b>
sadie
Courtney Summers · 2020
tender is the flesh
Agustina Bazterrica · 2020
<b>INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER</b><br> <br><b>Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.</b><br><br>His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.<br> <br>Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.
death in her hands
Moshfegh Ottessa · 2021
sharp objects
Gillian Flynn · 2008
carrie
Stephen King · 1974
gone girl
Gillian Flynn · 2012
the bell jar
Sylvia Plath · 2005
<p><i>The Bell Jar</i> chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made <i>The Bell Jar</i> a haunting American classic.</p> <p>This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.</p>
bunny
Mona Awad · 2020
rouge
Awad Mona · 2023
queen b
Juno Dawson
eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh · 2016
everyone i know is dying
Emily Slapper · 2024
the secret history
Donna Tartt · 1992
<b><b><b><b>ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • </b>INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "a<b>n accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (<i>Village Voice</i>)</b>, f<b>rom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of <i>The Goldfinch.<br><br></i></b></b></b>One of <i>The Atlantic</i>’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years</b><br><br>Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.<br><br><b>“A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” —<i>The New York Times</i></b>
nightbitch
Rachel Yoder · 2023
La laurea in un'università prestigiosa, un certo talento artistico, l'impiego come direttrice di una galleria locale. Poi, due anni fa, è arrivato il bambino. E dopo un disastroso tentativo di tornare al lavoro – il lavoro dei suoi sogni! – affidando il piccolo all'asilo nido, hanno deciso che era meglio se lei rimaneva a casa. E adesso il marito è sempre via per affari, la chiama da lontane stanze d'albergo, e lei si sente sola, esausta. Fino a che una notte succede qualcosa. Il suo corpo inizia a cambiare, la nuca si ricopre di una peluria sempre più folta. I canini si affilano. Sul fondoschiena le spunta una cosa che, sembra assurdo, pare proprio una coda… Sempre più smarrita e in preda a istinti animaleschi, la donna cerca informazioni su quello che le sta accadendo e si imbatte in uno strano libro, Guida illustrata alle donne magiche. Si trova così invischiata in un enigmatico gruppo di mamme che potrebbero non essere esattamente ciò che sembrano. Un romanzo scandalosamente originale che parla di arte, potere e femminilità sotto le vesti di una fiaba caustica. Un libro nel quale riconoscersi, che vi farà venir voglia di ululare. E dovreste farlo. Dovreste ululare quanto vi pare e piace.
play it as it lays
Joan Didion · 2005
a little life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2016
<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (<i>NPR</i>) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.<br></b><br><b><b><b><b><b><b><b>NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST <b><b><b>•</b></b></b></b> MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST <b>• <b><b><b><b><b> WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE</b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b><br><br><i>A Little Life</i> follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
the silent patient
Alex Michaelides · 2021
<p><b>**THE INSTANT #1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER**</b><br><br>"An unforgettable—and Hollywood-bound—new thriller... A mix of Hitchcockian suspense, Agatha Christie plotting, and Greek tragedy."<br><b>—<i>Entertainment Weekly</i></b><br><br><b><i>The Silent Patient</i> is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.</b><br><br>Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.<br><br>Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.<br><br>Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....</p>
the idiot
Elif Batuman · 2018
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction<br/><br/>“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ<br/><br/>“Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair<br/><br/>A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.<br/><br/>The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.<br/><br/>At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.<br/><br/>With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.<br/><br/>Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions
a place for us
Fatima Farheen Mirza · 2018
father of the rain
Lily King · 2010
severance
Ling Ma · 2019
post-traumatic
Chantal V. Johnson · 2023
crime and punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Robin Feuer Miller · 2006
perfume and pain
Anna Dorn · 2024
to-morrow
Joseph Conrad · 2020
jane eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 2003
Charlotte Brontë characterized the eponymous heroine of her 1847 novel as being "as poor and plain as myself." Presenting a heroine with neither great beauty nor entrancing charm was an unprecendented maneuver, but Brontë's instincts proved correct, for readers of her era and ever after have taken Jane Eyre into their hearts. The author drew upon her own experience to depict Jane's struggles at Lowood, an oppressive boarding school, and her troubled career as a governess. Unlike Jane, Brontë had the advantage of a warm family circle that shared and encouraged her literary pursuits. She found immediate success with this saga of an orphan girl forced to make her way alone in the world, from Lowood School to Thornfield, the estate of the majestically moody Mr. Rochester, and beyond. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
pride and prejudice
Jane Austen · 2002
diary of an oxygen thief
Anonymous · 2016
<b>Hurt people hurt people.</b><br><br>Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic and Lolita was a photographer’s assistant and, somehow, they met in <i>Bright Lights, Big City</i>. He’s blinded by love. She by ambition. <i>Diary of an Oxygen Thief</i> is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending novel, but above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us.
the diary of a nobody
George Grossmith · 2019
my year of rest and relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh · 2019
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible A New York Times Bestseller • New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly “Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
