
My favorite reads by year :)
Items in this hypelist
2024

People Collide
Isle McElroy · 2023

Natural Beauty
Ling Ling Huang · 2023

Juliet, Naked
Nick Hornby · 2009

Intermezzo
Sally Rooney · 2024
<p><b>"[B]rilliant narration by the actor </b><b>Éanna Hardwicke."</b><b>—<i>Financial Times</i></b><br><br><b>"</b><b>É</b><b>anna Hardwicke's narration highlights the rich emotionality of Rooney's newest novel. Hardwicke's smooth voice shifts to capture every mood--becoming desperately angry, bitter, and frantic yet also achingly tender, patient, and loving--as he performs a story of two grieving brothers.</b><i>"</i><b>—</b><i><b>AudioFile</b></i> <b>(Earphones Award Winner)</b><br><br><b>This program is read by actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for his role in Hulu's <i>Normal People</i>.<br><br>An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.<br></b><br>Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. <br><br>Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. <br><br>Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. <br><br>For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.<br><br><b>A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.</b></p>

All Fours
Miranda July · 2024
2023

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
Anna North · 2015

Talking at Night
Claire Daverley · 2023

Hello Beautiful
Ann Napolitano · 2023

Writers & Lovers
Lily King · 2020

I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman · 1997
A work of fantasy, I Who Have Never Known Men is the haunting and unforgettable account of a near future on a barren earth where women are kept in underground cages guarded by uniformed groups of men. It is narrated by the youngest of the women, the only one with no memory of what the world was like before the cages, who must teach herself, without books or sexual contact, the essential human emotions of longing, loving, learning, companionship, and dying. Part thriller, part mystery, I Who Have Never Known Men shows us the power of one person without memories to reinvent herself piece by piece, emotion by emotion, in the process teaching us much about what it means to be human.
2021

The Lake
Banana Yoshimoto · 2011

Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney · 2017
<b>NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Normal People</i> . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—<i>Entertainment Weekly</i><br> <br>SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE <i>TIME</i> 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE <i>SUNDAY TIMES</i> (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF <i>BUZZFEED</i>’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>Vogue, Slate</i> • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>Elle</i></b><br><br>Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.<br><br>Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, <i>Conversations with Friends</i> is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.<br><br><b>SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD</b><br><br>“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”<b>—Celeste Ng, <i>Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast</i></b><br><br>“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”<b>—Curtis Sittenfeld, <i>The Week</i></b><br><br>“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”<b>—<i>New York</i></b><br><br>“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”<b>—Alexandra Schwartz,</b> <b><i>The New Yorker</i></b><br><br>“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”<b>—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)</b>

Eating the Sun
Ella Frances Sanders · 2019

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith · 2006

Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner · 2021
2022

Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney · 2021
<p><b>AN INSTANT #1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><br><b><i><br>Beautiful World, Where Are You</i> is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of <i>Normal People </i>and <i>Conversations with Friends</i>.</b><br><br>Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.<br><br>Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?</p>

My Monticello
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson · 2021

Either/Or
Elif Batuman · 2022

You Had Me at Pet-Nat
Rachel Signer · 2021

Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier · 2012

Outlawed
Anna North · 2021
2020

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout · 2008

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1989
<b>The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.<br><br>“The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”<i>—<b>The New Yorker</b></i><br></b><br><b>One of <i>The Atlantic</i>’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years</b><br><br>Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. <i>Lolita </i>is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. <br><br>Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Skinny Legs and All
Tom Robbins · 2003

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 2008

Utopia Avenue
David Mitchell · 2020

Meet Me in the Bathroom
Lizzy Goodman · 2017
2018-2019 (pre-goodreads tracking)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera · 2023
<p>“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People</p><p>In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.</p><p>This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.</p>

Just Kids
Patti Smith · 2011

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Tom Robbins · 2003

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1998

Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins · 2003

Daisy Jones & The Six
Taylor Jenkins Reid · 20192019










