Intelligent and Hot: 7 Books You Should Read in Your Early Twenties
Reading is sexy. There’s something so alluring about slowing down and turning away from the instant gratification that our phones grant us to immerse ourselves in a book. Not to mention the aesthetic of it all. You’ve seen someone book in hand in a coffee shop and found yourself intrigued, admit it. We’re here to foster a love for reading with 7 books we think you should read, all read and recommended by us, because nothing says cool like a book.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Summary
“The Bell Jar 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 The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.”
Why You Should Read it
Sometimes a book lifts you up and whispers in your ear that you aren’t alone. This is one of them. Sylvia Plath beautifully chronicles the complexities of your early twenties and the unknowing of it all. The book’s honest portrayal of mental health struggles is so deeply human, readers relate to it even almost 60 years after its initial release.
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Summary
“Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes about the cultural prisms that have shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die.”
Why You Should Read it
It’s hard existing in the midst of late-stage capitalism. Tolentino expertly holds a mirror up to how we live and why we do it. This collection of essays speaks on the challenge of self- actualization in a world so hung up on fakeness. If you feel exhausted by social media and the expectations placed on real world young adults, this book is for you.
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Summary
“In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work–from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.”
Why You Should Read it
I love this book. I went into it not knowing anything about Patti or Robert and left it feeling fully immersed in their rich inner lives. This book proves to me what I’ve always known to be true: sometimes soulmates aren’t lovers. It explores the complicated relationship between lovers turned to friends and a duo that was forever linked to one another.
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Summary
“Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.”
Why You Should Read it
Conversations with Friends explores what happens when love and ambition meet. The book approaches mental health, academics, romantic relationships, and female friendships from the angle of processing complex emotions. Rooney’s matter-of-fact storytelling will resonate with anyone who finds themselves constantly and consistently over-analyzing their every feeling.
Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
Summary
“No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.”
Why You Should Read it
Eve Babitz’s storytelling, deeply witty and often glamorous, offers readers a peak into the life of the 70s party girl. Her candidness on all topics, both risque and not, upholds an attitude of refined carelessness that isn’t cruel, just human. You will find yourself nostalgic for a time and place you have never experienced first-hand. Reading this collection of essays feels like gossiping with an old friend, a deeply captivating, humorous conversation she expertly mixes with an air of closet-intellectualism.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Summary
“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.”
Why You Should Read it
Moshfegh’s narrator is so deeply unlikeable, yet the book is enjoyable despite, or because of, the unabshedly bad person she is. The book uses this unlikeability to show the honest, unglamorous realities of living through mental health struggles and the complexities in justifying bad behavior that surround the mental health conversation. You will find yourself rejecting the thoughts and actions of our protagonist and instead recognizing the lust for life hidden underneath the risk of living even when you don’t want to.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Summary
“Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.”
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: ‘[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.’”
Why You Should Read it
Joan Didion remains one of the greatest writers of all time, sharp, witty and personal without oversharing. Her debut work of nonfiction tackles the self, empathy, and the human experience, leaving readers to reflect on their place in the world and the nuances that come with it. Didion’s prose and storytelling capabilities reflect on the reality that we as individuals are both larger than life and also so small, all reflecting back on the idea of respect. Who we are and who we will become are not mutually exclusive, this intentional reflection on Didion’s part prioritizes a dry yet comforting perception of respect for yourself and for others.
Reading is good for you and looks good on you. Let us know if you read any of our recommendations and if you’ve already read any of these books, let us know how you liked it.
