In the past month, your Facebook timeline has probably been flooded with challenges—challenges to share, donate, dump ice water on your head, and most recently, share your ideal booklist. It seems impossible to narrow down the millions of paperbacks you have read (or should have read) into a top 10 list, but as a collegiette, you don’t need to read all of them just yet. Try starting with these:
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston:
There’s nothing anti-woman about finding true love. You may also discover much more. And in this character’s journey, she proves it’s totally okay if it takes more than one love to do so.
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.”
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A quick spin through the 1920s lifestyle of jazz hands, champagne and diamonds shows us the dark side of materialism (remember your Juicy Couture days) and fulfilling the American Dream.
“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
3. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Euginides
Profound suburban gossip that teeters on the edge of mystery, love and adolescence keeps you engrossed, and slightly grossed out, as the neighborhood boys piece together why their high school crushes commit suicide.
“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”
4. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
A philosophy on writing and living that slaps your face and holds your hand at the same time.
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
5. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
Narratives alternate between a woman’s nightmare in 1940s Germany, and present day Minnesota as her daughter investigates this era, drawing the line between guilt, shame and survival.
“She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.”
6. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
A young girl grows up too fast in her quick moving love affair with a much older man.
“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
7. My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler
A laugh out loud series of the comedian’s one night stands. One involves a midget.
“Our relationship finally ended when he took to waking me up in the wee hours of the morning when he would go surfing. He thought it might be fun to have me come watch. “Fun for who?” I wanted to ask. I had never asked him to come to Happy Hour and watch me drink.”
8. Nineteen Minutes by Jodie Picoult
The tumultuous aftermath of a local tragedy has you search for moments of hardness and ask what could have been and what are you missing.
“When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.”
9. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
A call to culture and deciphering what defines the aspects of we are.
“Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
10. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
A young woman returns home to the south in the 1960s, and instead of getting a ring on her finger, she and the towns’ black maids team up to write a novel that will inevitably shake their town. Don’t let society or expectations get in the way of doing your thing.
“All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
And of course, read Harry Potter: “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”