Jia Tolentino's Reading List

“A really good middle-grade novel,” says the New Yorker essayist, whose debut collection is “Trick Mirror,” “will supersede a lot of contemporary fiction in terms of economy, lucidity and grace.”

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By the Book: Jia Tolentino (2019)

NYT By the Book column (2019-08-01).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Uncanny Valley

Anna Wiener · Buy on Amazon

"It's so deft and stunning that I started rereading chunks of it as soon as I was done."

Death's End

Liu Cixin · 2017 · Buy on Amazon

"The Three-Body trilogy makes insignificance and unknowability and futility seem so spiritually exciting that I felt breathless. I'd join a book club that just discusses it every month for a year."

When You Reach Me

Rebecca Stead · Buy on Amazon

"Everyone tunes me out when I recommend it, since it was written for kids. Their mistake! A really good middle-grade novel — and this book is a phenomenal one — will supersede a lot of contemporary fiction in terms of economy, lucidity and grace."

Random Family

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc · Buy on Amazon

"It's so spicy, so riveting, so empathetic and devoted, so alive in the world as it actually is."

Kids These Days

Malcolm Harris · Buy on Amazon

"Most writing about millennials has tended to focus on effects rather than causes... "Kids These Days," thankfully, goes straight for the point."

Evicted

Matthew Desmond · 2016 · Buy on Amazon

"I love books that demonstrate this, like Matthew Desmond's "Evicted," or George Saunders's "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.""

Furious Hours

Casey Cep · 2019 · Buy on Amazon

"From Casey Cep's "Furious Hours," that Harper Lee was once neighbors with Daryl Hall and John Oates. What?!"

Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson · Buy on Amazon

"My boyfriend got me a first edition of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" — one of my favorite books of all time."

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert · 1857 · Buy on Amazon

"I've got to read the Lydia Davis translation of "Madame Bovary." I'm having physical cravings for it."

Favorite books (2021)

Favorite books recommended by Jia Tolentino's Recommended Reads, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/jia-tolentino-favorite-books/.

Source: radicalreads.com

Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang · Buy on Amazon

"When I first read this book, I was on an airplane, and I had a strange sensation: How could my brain and my heart be unfolding into a thousand different dimensions while my body is trapped in Seat 14C? Reading Chiang’s sci-fi feels like witnessing a miracle of applied grace."

Mrs. Bridg e

Evan S. Connell · Buy on Amazon

"I have joined the small but growing ranks of fanatical proselytizers for this slim masterpiece of a novel about a Kansas City housewife. It’s one of the funniest, subtlest, most perfectly paced, and most existentially terrifying things I’ve ever read."

Gravity and Grace

Simone Weil · Buy on Amazon

"Many lines from Weil’s first published book are lodged in me forever. ‘You could not be born at a better time than the present, when we have lost everything.” Also: “The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul — like pincers to catch hold of God.'"

Slow Days, Fast Company

Eve Babitz · Buy on Amazon

"At some level I’ll spend my whole life wishing that I’d ever really lived, if just for a little while, the way Babitz did in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. No one writes about pleasure, recklessness, and evanescence better. This book is like a night with perfect velocity; a lavender sunrise; a pharmacological whisper that you can do this forever and never die."

The Emperor’s Children

Claire Messud · Buy on Amazon

"As a treat to myself, I reread this 500-page novel every summer, and every time I feel totally swallowed up in it, as if the book were soaking me with golden light. There’s so much pleasure in the plotting, the emotional acuity, the satire, the language itself. It also makes the best use of September 11 of any work of fiction I’ve ever read."

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee (also rec’d by Jia Tolentino & Roxane Gay ) · Buy on Amazon

"I’m in awe of this book and the way it combines a 19th-century novel’s powers of submersion with a blazingly contemporary sense of ethics. I was basically gasping as I read this saga of an ethnically Korean family in Japan — desperate to know what happened next, overwhelmed with love and sorrow."

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