If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you think the world is ending. Or at least that your world is ending. It’s not, by the way. You will be fine. It’s more likely that you’re feeling sad and bored and lost and lonely and annoyed and broke and horny and ugly and evil and vain and uncertain and alone not because the universe is coming to a crashing end but because you’re in your twenties – or maybe your teens, or maybe your thirties – and sometimes life just feels like that. Luckily, you’re not alone in going through this existential experience; plenty of great authors have gone through quarter-life (and midlife, and late-life) crises before you and lived (with some exceptions) to tell the tale. The temptation, when life feels overwhelming, to fall into the inertia of just lying in bed on your phone for hours, scrolling endlessly, is obviously huge, but we’re asking you to resist it. Put the FYP page away for a while and read some of these instead. You’ll feel better, the sun will come up tomorrow, life goes on, join a library, it’ll be okay.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
What’s it about? An unnamed beautiful blonde WASPy protagonist takes to her bed in New York City (the year is 2000, forget about that, that’s not important) and doesn’t get back up for a year. She lives off her inheritance and unemployment checks and numbs herself with anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication. The only place she ever goes to is the bodega. The only person who ever speaks to her is her best friend Reva, a banker who works in the World Trade Centre. What could go wrong!
Good for: If you don’t want to give into your own inertia but you want to read about someone else sleeping for a year instead. You, sadly, still have to pay the rent. Or if you just want to read the book before the film – finally! – comes out.
If you liked this read: Eileen, also by Ottessa Moshfegh. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The New Me by Halle Butler.
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
What’s it about? Thirty-six year old Tokyo-based Keiko has never fit in anywhere until she went to work at a convenience store. She was 18 then, and it made her feel at peace like nowhere else, so she stayed there, learning how to be a “normal person” within the confines of her small professional world. She’s happy, but her family and the outside world pressure her to want more from her life, and the pressures to conform to what she’s supposed to have – and want to have – by her age begin to weigh on Keiko. Basically, a funny and absurdist look at how absurd it is to have to want anything more from your life than what makes you happy.
Good for: If your family are always on at you to get a better job or a boyfriend or buy a house or start a family. If you feel like you’ve never fitted in anywhere. If you really love Big Tescos.
If you liked this read: Earthlings, also by Sayaka Murata.
Simple Passion, Annie Ernaux
What’s it about? The narrator, an impossibly chic and lovelorn older French woman that is absolutely not Annie Ernaux, falls in love with a younger, married diplomat. What follows is a short but painful depiction of their affair. The narrator loves her diplomat deeply. The diplomat, honestly, feels like he could take her or leave her. Who among us has not experienced this? Simple Passion is a sparse but powerful tale of obsession and shame and longing and loneliness, one that feels too simplistic to equate to a modern-day situationship. And yet! If the French were not too chic to have them, this is a story of a situationship.
Good for: A distraction from WhatsApp, because you keep checking to see if the archived messages will show the little (1) notification. He hasn’t texted you back and this is 48 pages long. Do something productive and read the work of a Nobel Prize winner instead of a text from someone’s grotty son.
If you liked this read: Getting Lost, Annie Ernaux’s diary which also details a two-year-long affair with a Russian diplomat. I’m A Fan by Sheena Patel.
Pour Me: A Life, by AA Gill
What’s it about? The late AA Gill’s memoir on addiction, recovery and finding yourself over and over. Opening on the ‘fold’ in his life when he gave up drinking and embraced a new life, the book is about self-discovery, memory and finding your passion in spite of setbacks – Gill, severely dyslexic, famously dictated all of his writing after an initial career in the art world – and about how it’s never too late to start over.
Good for: Meditations on starting over, on writing, on addiction.
If you liked this read: Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
What’s it about? A young woman gets an internship that takes her to work in the glamorous world of magazine publishing in New York City. She should be happy. But she’s not. She’s uncertain about her future – even if you’ve never read the book, you’ll be familiar with its fig tree metaphor – and what path she should take. She’s misanthropic and depressed and totally unable to concentrate on the work that she loves (and which fuels her crippling imposter syndrome) or the world around her filled with people she is supposed to love. It’s a coming-of-age story that holds up even 60 years after it was published.
Good for: Uncertainty. If you feel like your life is branching out in front of you like Plath’s fig tree and you’re just not sure where to go, better to read this than to lie down under your porch. Best enjoyed with food (the protagonist feels way better about her own fig tree once she just has something to eat). So eat something.
If you liked this read: Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, The Stranger by Albert Camus.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
What’s it about? Not a lot, really. But also kind of a lot? The plot follows two men, two women and their dog during the Prague Spring of 1968 and on into the 1970s. It’s a bit of a hero’s journey tale that involves falling in love, falling out of love, the fleeting nature of love, sex, following your dreams, finding out your dreams maybe aren’t worth following, infidelity, ambition, nihilism. The central theme of it all is that we only have one life to live and what we do with that life is up to us. We have the freedom to live as we please, to make mistakes and correct them.
Good for: If you only found out who Milan Kundera was when he died the other week and now you feel like you should read this. Also if life feels heavy.
If you liked this read: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
What’s it about? Cheryl Strayed has wrecked her entire life. She’s like, there’s no way back from how much I have wrecked my entire life. So in a last-ditch attempt to escape from it all, or at least to ‘walk back’ to the woman she used to be, she changes her name, divorces her husband – pre Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus chic young divorcee era, even – and decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail from California, a stretch of land that runs basically from Mexico to Canada. It takes her months and she has no previous hiking experience. Along the way, she grapples with her own grief, learns to be alone and you’ve guessed it (!) finds herself again. All is not lost. You don’t need to hike 3,000 miles to find this out for yourself, you can just read the book.
Good for: If you want to travel the world or at least just travel alone, but all the books you ever read are about men on Kerouac-style solo road trips in search of themselves.
If you liked this read: Tiny Beautiful Things, also by Cheryl Strayed. Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
What’s it about? The book basically takes the format of letters sent between the renowned writer Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. Franz wants to be a writer but he doesn’t know how, so he reaches out, in the days before email and Instagram DM and LinkedIn, to an artist he admires. Over the course of their letters the two of them grow in friendship but Franz also gains confidence in himself. Rilke helps him to find beauty in the uncertainty of his life and career, and tells him to stop looking for all the answers right now. A pre-imposters syndrome classic of the genre.
Good for: If you want to do something creative with your life but you’re worried you’ll be bad at it and you can’t stop comparing yourself to other people you think are better at it.
If you liked this read: Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Vera, if you like letters from writers. Also perhaps watch Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, a phenomenal movie which references this very book.
all about love, bell hooks
What’s it about? Shockingly, it is about love. More specifically it is about searching for love and emotional connection in an age of emotional unavailability and an individualistic culture that makes love an adversarial event to be endured rather than enjoyed. Each chapter explores a different aspect of love, which is good when you need a reminder that there are different types of love and not all of them come from Hinge.
Good for: Breakups. Obviously.
If you liked this read: Heartburn by Nora Ephron,
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing
What’s it about? Most of us move to a new city at some point in our early lives, whether for university or work or just a fresh start. On the whole this is an exciting thing to do; new friends, new challenges, a new world to explore. But then you hit your first Sunday night in a flat that isn’t your own and you start to think how big and loud and lonely and unfamiliar it all is. Maybe you get a little bit embarrassed by how little you know the place that’s supposed to be your hometown, or a little ashamed by how few people you know here. And the city is exciting and historic and beautiful but that feels incredibly isolating and overwhelming sometimes too, you know? This is how writer Olivia Laing felt when she moved to New York in her thirties.
Good for: If you’ve just moved to a new place and you’re not thriving just yet. If you want to move to New York. If you like art about New York.
If you liked this read: Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys, Just Kids by Patti Smith.
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
What’s it about? You know that feeling you get when you’re too old to really call your parents house “home” anymore? Time has passed and you’re older and taller and all of your most treasured memories are here but your parents are different and you’re different too and so going back there feels kind of strange, like you’re nostalgic for something but you don’t know what. Happy and sad at the same time. And you’re too old for home home but the place you live now isn’t your home either. You live kind of in-between the two states. Okay, well this book is basically about that, except instead of a rented flat and a house in which your childhood bedroom has been converted into a storage-cum-home-gym-cum-office space, the family live in a little cottage near a lighthouse.
Good for: If the passage of time is overwhelming to you. If you’re nostalgic. If you like open bodies of water because they make you feel meditative.
If you liked this read: Mrs Dalloway or A Room of One’s Own, also by Virginia Woolf