essay on the best book i have ever read

The Best Book I've Ever Read

And yes, you should definitely take my word for it.

In my many years as a journalist, scholar and thinker, I have read nearly all the great works of literature, including Milton, Shakespeare and the first third of The Brothers Karamazov. But no book has ever spoken to me as profoundly or directly as Joel Stein's Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity.

Haven't we all, on some level, been a Jewish boy in 1970s New Jersey with only female friends, an Easy-Bake oven and a strong predilection for show tunes? Haven't we all had a panic attack when learning we're going to have a son, since that means we're going to have to figure out how to throw footballs, watch other people throw footballs and decide whether to be happy or sad about the results of said football throwing? Haven't we all then tried to rectify our lack of masculinity by becoming a Boy Scout, fighting fires with firefighters, driving a Lamborghini Superleggera, doing three days of Army boot camp, firing a tank and going one round with UFC champion Randy Couture? I know I have.

Although Man Made won't be published until May 15, I have already reread it more than 30 times, and to the shock of my lovely wife Cassandra, who overheard me, I still laughed at all the jokes on the 30th read. The quality of the writing is so consistently great that to find my favorite section, all I need to do is turn to a random page and read it. Like this one: Isn't the entire point of being seen in a Lamborghini to get two women for a threesome? But--and here is the car's one major design flaw--there are only two seats. So I'd have to meet two women at a club, take one home, drive back to the club, and take the second one home. By then, the effect of the Lamborghini would have worn off on the first one, so I'd have to take her for a quick drive somewhere, thus de-Lamborghini-sexing the second one. The math just doesn't work out.

The only parts I didn't fully enjoy were those in which the author suffered horribly. Like when after just three hours of boot camp--which admittedly was in Kentucky in the summer and he'd slept only three hours and wasn't told not to lock his knees--he fainted daintily into the arms of a soldier. Or when UFC president Dana White insisted that Stein get choked out so he'd know what it feels like, and Stein faked nodding off, which caused White to get his psycho jujitsu-training friend to choke him out yet again, causing Stein to not be able to swallow his own spit that night. I really felt for him there.

It is clear from the book that Stein deeply loves his son, his wife, his combative father, his self-reliant father-in-law, his editor, his agent and every one of the people he meets in the course of his quest. Even that jujitsu guy who choked him out. I'm sure all those people will enjoy all the jokes that celebrate and do not mock them and will thank Stein for writing about them. Possibly with gifts of 2009 grand cru Bordeaux.

I admit I feared this book would be just a longer version of Stein's column in Time, which wouldn't be a bad thing given the awesomeness of that artistic endeavor. But it is much more. It's got occasional cursing. And bigger type. I also admit I was wary of reading yet another book that traffics in the differences between men and women. But Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is to Man Made what Fifty Shades of Grey is to having sex with Venus. Just to make that completely clear: Time magazine says reading Man Made is better than having sex with the Roman goddess Venus. Also, to be clear, TIME magazine is fine with that sentence appearing in any promotional materials for the book.

Are there books with deeper insights, better reporting, more important ideas and a better theme song? No, there are not. In Man Made, Stein does that amazing thing great writers do when they take all these ideas that were already in your head, put them on paper and then charge you $27 for that paper. Or put them on e-readers and charge you $13 to download. Either way, it counts equally toward the author's sales figures.

The film rights to Man Made have already been sold to Fox, and I hope it gets turned into a movie with George Clooney playing the Stein role, since they remind me so much of each other.

Though this is only Stein's first book, I would already put him on par with David Sedaris, Dave Barry, James Thurber, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln. I have recommended Man Made not just to all my friends and family but also to strangers on Twitter, over and over and over again. My one fear is that after this great achievement, Stein will succumb to the soul-depleting self-promotion of book marketing and lose his ability to be a ruthless critic of our shallow times. Which is why, in case this is his only great book, I suggest buying one for yourself and one for your dad for Father's Day.

My five-star reads: 15 of the best books I’ve ever read

I only share books I know and love. If you buy through my links, I may earn a commission (learn more).

I read a lot of books each year. I have a ludicrous number of books on the go at any given time. And fortunately for the people in my life, I have this website to channel my thoughts about books.

But that said, I have a very high bar for 5* reviews. Most books I read fall into the 3-4* range – good enough to finish and recommend, but not quite life-changing.

For me, a five-star read is a rare beast – but when I encounter one, I can’t stop talking about it… for years (if not decades) after reading.

Including mostly fiction for now, many of the books below are engaging and unputdownable reads , but I’ve also included the most life-changing books I’ve read. These are books that have inspired me to change direction, think differently, overcome challenges, and work out who I really am.

So without further ado, read on for the five-star books I can’t say enough good things about.

My favourite books and five-star reads

Kafka on the shore by haruki murakami.

Why I love Kafka on the Shore … I think this is Murakami at his best. A story about running away from home to take refuge in a library? Yes, please.

During my late teens and early twenties, I went on a Murakami reading binge and ticked off nearly all of his major novels. I have to be in the right mood for his writing, but when I am, nothing else comes close. I’m currently re-reading Kafka on the Shore and remembering just how fantastic it is.

Haruki Murakami is the master of blending  slice-of-life  everyday events like cooking pasta and doing laundry with the supernatural – think talking cats, mysteriously deep wells, and otherworldly meetings with people who aren’t quite who they seem.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Why I love  War and Peace…  It’s a fantastically all-encompassing book about what living really feels like. Surprisingly, it also helped me through the anxiety I was experiencing in my late teens.

As you might be able to guess,  reading  War and Peace  is what inspired me to start this website. I first read it during one of the most anxious periods of my life, but Tolstoy’s timeless words unexpectedly helped me find perspective and calm.

Tolstoy’s masterpiece isn’t exactly known for being easy to read, but  choosing the right translation  can help a lot. (TLDR: I love Anthony Briggs’s translation – on each read, I’ve been reminded of just how immersive the book can be and usually finish it in a couple of weeks.)

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Why I love The Garden of Evening Mists … With no wasted words, Tan Twan Eng has written some of the most graceful and moving books I’ve ever read. They’re slow, beautiful, and absolutely not to be rushed.

When I think of my all-time favourite books, I often forget about Tan Twan Eng’s writing. As soon as I remember, I feel terrible for forgetting him.

In The Garden of Evening Mists , Supreme Court Judge Teoh Yun Ling chooses early retirement to return to the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia in the late 1980s, where she once served as an apprentice to a Japanese gardener.

Confronting the Japanese occupation of Malaya, this is a striking book that deservedly won the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize).

The Gift of Rain is also superb, as was Tan Twang Eng’s new book for 2023, The House of Doors (one of my favourite books of the year ).

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Why I love The Goldfinch … This book has everything I love most about Donna Tartt’s writing: a keen eye for beauty and turmoil, sprawling storylines, characters rebuilding their life after trauma, and way too many pages.

At least in my eyes, Donna Tartt is a literary icon and The Goldfinch a modern classic . In this Pulitzer Prize winner from 2013, a young New Yorker grieving the loss of his mother is dragged into a gritty underworld of art and wealth.

With Donna Tartt’s usual cadence of a book a decade, will she announce another book soon? Who knows, but I really hope so.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Why I love  One Hundred Years of Solitude…   It’s exactly what the best magical realism should be: otherworldly but so very human.

Although it’s been years since I last enjoyed his writing, Gabriel García Márquez will always be one of my favourite writers. Alongside Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits , I’d also nominate One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the best magical realism novels ever written.

A masterclass in the art of fiction, pick up García Márquez’s most popular novel for the magnetic story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo, told through the history of the Buendía family.

Circe by Madeline Miller

Why I love Circe … Madeline Miller’s bestseller reads like a dream. It’s one of the few books I wanted to re-read immediately after finishing (alongside Prodigal Summer , The Covenant of Water , and The Overstory ).

Ignoring the terrible whims of Greek Gods, one of my literary happy places is Aiaia, the island to which Circe is banished. Rather than acting as her prison, Aiaia becomes her sanctuary, with days focused on honing the art of  pharmaka –  the magic of herbs – as she forages, picks, blends, brews, and experiments with what she finds.

Although I loved The Song of Achilles , there’s something so dreamy, luscious, and evocative about Circe that makes it Miller’s masterpiece for me. The themes of love, loss, and motherhood are etched in my brain’s literary vault.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Why I love The Waves … This is one of the few books I’ve read that feels like the title. If the sea were a book, it’d be this classic.

Okay, a little honesty. Iain, my husband, is reading The Waves right now on my recommendation (I bought him a copy for Christmas) and struggling . I fell in love with this book during a modernist literature module at university, and while I was prepared for the stream of consciousness and lack of plot, he really wasn’t.

My advice? Try and let the book wash over you, rather than looking for a plot to follow. It’s gorgeously written, but reading it is more like admiring a beautiful piece of modern art than a gripping novel. It’s not for everyone, but you might just love it too.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Why I love Cutting for Stone … I’m convinced that Abraham Verghese is one of the best living writers, mostly because of this book.

When I worked at my village bookshop for several years as a teenager, the owner always recommended Cutting for Stone . His personal mission seemed to be making sure that every local resident read it. And it really is fantastic.

If you know Abraham Verghese’s name, it’s most likely to be from his 2023 sensation The Covenant of Water . I also thought this was incredible (although traumatic) and I’m still badgering my husband to read it every week.

That said, I still think Cutting for Stone – a moving story of twin brothers, medicine, and a country on the brink of revolution – comes out slightly ahead. I’d love to read both books again this year to make sure.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Why I love His Dark Materials … The Arctic. Magic. Animal sidekicks. Badass characters.

When I married Iain, we chose a reading from The Amber Spyglass in our ceremony. (If you’ve read the books, you’ll might be able to guess which section we chose.) We both grew up with Philip Pullman’s books and still love them, so it was a fairly easy choice.

Yes, the trilogy is written for children, but – like The Hobbit – it’s a work of genius. I think back to the books fairly often, including when pondering parenthood, growing up, courage, and being a good person.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Why I love  Prodigal Summer …  According to my personal formula for a perfect book, this is most likely the winner. Read it for wild nature, self-discovery, complex emotion, and intertwined stories.

Set during  a single summer by the Appalachian Mountains , Barbara Kingsolver whisks us away into three different yet interconnected lives as new life and the sensuality of nature blossom.

Deanna is a local girl turned biologist turned forest ranger, living reclusively in a cabin in the woods. Lusa is a city girl turned entomologist turned farmer’s wife. And Garnett is a grumpy old man, fed up with his eccentric neighbour Nannie Rawley.

Each time I re-read this book, especially when I’m feeling burnt out and in need of an escape, I remember how much I love all of these characters.

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Why I love King Lear…   This is the first Shakespeare play that swept me off my feet – and it’s stuck with me ever since.

While studying literature, I slogged through a lot of painfully arduous books. But occasionally, something I presumed would be difficult was actually… good. In the case of King Lear , it was really good.

Although King Lear is unavoidably bleak, it’s also an unparalleled exploration of family, what we pass to our children, and how we age – all told with passion, poetry, and dark humor.

Once you read it, you realise just how much Shakespeare’s timeless tale of family and inheritance has influenced. From TV award-winners ( Succession ) to classic novels ( Moby-Dick ), you can find echoes of King Lear everywhere.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler

Why I love A Whole Life … This book opened my heart, brought me to tears, and never let me forget it.

Although many of my five-star books can double as doorstops, A Whole Life is proof that plenty of beauty and emotion can fit in small packages.

Chosen as one of my favourite books that feel like a quiet life by the mountains , this is the story of Andreas Egger, a man who knows every path and peak of his mountain valley in the Austrian Alps.

As Andreas navigates loss, ageing, and a changing way of life, read this for  a stunning and heartbreaking book  about what life is really made of; both the little things and the biggest moments. 

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Why I love  Pachinko …  Love, loss, the repercussions of the past across centuries. Multigenerational stories don’t get much better than this.

Pachinko is one of the few books I recommend to everyone. This compulsively readable  multigenerational epic  follows the story of a poor Korean immigrant family to Japan and their reinvention over the following generations.

Told with so much force but also precision, this is one of my top recommendations if you want to fall back in love with reading and rediscover how immersive great fiction can be.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Why I love  The Overstory …  It’s one of the best books I’ve read to open my eyes to the world’s beauty, fragility, and interconnectedness.

The Overstory  has my vote as one of the  best modern novels of the century  so far. It took me a few attempts to get into the 502-page Pulitzer Prize winner, but when I did, I didn’t want it to end.

This magnificent book is a paean to the vast and marvellously intricate world that we depend on in so many ways:  the world of trees .

With stunning writing and creativity, Richard Powers weaves together interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. 

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Why I love  Wind, Sand and Stars…   It’s both a masterpiece and a welcome reminder that life really is fleeting.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s crowd favourite,  The Little Prince , is packed with lessons about kindness and living well. However, his memoir of his life as an aviator,  Wind, Sand and Stars , is always my top pick of his books.

Braiding philosophy and lyricism with the miracle and danger of early aviation, this is so much more than a memoir of flying. It’s a book with a bird’s eye view that manages to take in all of life below.

For more of my best book recommendations, you might also like…

• 20 of the best modern novels of the 21st century
• 30 best books of all time for your bucket list (classics + modern)
• 10 best new fiction books of 2023 – my favourite reads this year
• 10 big books that are absolutely worth the time to read

Lucy Fuggle is a professional writer, reader, and creator of Tolstoy Therapy. Drawing on her love for books and a degree in English Literature, she started Tolstoy Therapy in 2012 and has shared the most feel-good, cozy, and beautiful books for over a decade. After working as a content specialist with leading companies for nearly 10 years, she now focuses on her own websites and books ( Mountain Song , Your Life in Bloom , and Simple Business ). She grew up in England and now lives in Denmark with her husband. For more book recommendations, subscribe to Tolstoy Therapy's weekly email to inspire your reading list.

Top 10 – The Best Books I’ve Ever Read

This criterion of creating the top 10 best books would vary from each reader to reader. In fact, for me, it is always an evolving list. That means, it is always under formation and development. So I call it an inchoate list. These are not in any order. But all of these 10 books are evergreen and favorite.

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The first book that comes to my mind is Fish. Even reading it during my college days, it still keeps knocking my mind and conscious from time to time. This is, in fact, a thin book but a lot of value inside.

The second book is Goal. Both these books are powerful transformers. They have the power to transform the lives of any person.

Next is The Prophet. In fact, this book I can read any number of times. Every time I read it, it gives me a different meaning of life.

This book is by a very young author. The book has a strong message that comes in its purest form. That is why I have not been able to forget its story despite reading it a long time back. I am talking about The Helpline.

My next favorite book is Slow by Digonta Bordoloi. There is a high level of depth in this book. We are right now in the middle of my list.

The sixth book that I would like to mention is Sudhi Kannan. This book has a simple story. But the story has all the elements of adventure , hope, drama, and action.

Borderline is a book that probably everyone needs to read. It is about the psychological disorder.

The last book on my list is A Cupful of Aha!

That completes my top 10 list. The best books I’ve ever read. But that doesn’t mean these are the bestselling. In fact, I plan to write my next post on the Top 100.

You can read reviews of these books on my blog http://pebbleinthestillwaters.com

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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Essay on The Most Interesting book I read

Our school library is having books which I like very much. One of my friends showed me a certain book in the library and he said that is his favorite book. He also said that is was the second part of the most famous Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain.

I borrowed the book from the librarian on the advice of my friend. When I went home that day, I had an immediate lunch, when to my room and started reading the book.

Home interesting was it! It was a wonderful book. The book was full of adventures. The main character was Huckleberry Finn who was a poor English boy whose father was a third class drunkard. This father wanted to get his son’s fortune which he get previously in yet another adventure with Tom Sawyer, his friend. So Finn runs away from the custody of his father and meet another boy. This boy was Jim who had been running away from master. He had been a slave boy.

The two friends go to the sea and get on to a ship. They become friendly with the seamen and go on fishing. They also go to various island in the sea and engage themselves in many adventures. At last they come home. Finn finds that his father had died and hi was no more in danger. Jim also get his freedom with Finn’s help.

This interesting children’s novel had been written by well-known English Author Mark Twain who had previously written the famous book Tom Sawyer. Both these books are popular even today. So many millions of children throughout the English speaking world must have read these books. Much more than Tom Sawyer, it was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was the most interesting book I have ever read.

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Over 70 of the Best Books For Writers (2024)

by Joe Bunting and J. D. Edwin | 73 comments

Free Book Planning Course!  Sign up for our 3-part book planning course and make your book writing easy . It expires soon, though, so don’t wait.  Sign up here before the deadline!

Looking for a book to take your writing skills to the next level? Today we've rounded up the best books for writers. See if your favorite book made the list!

When we polled our writing community recently, we found that the top books on writing that came up over and over included:

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott On Writing by Steven King The Modern Library's Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch (one of Joe's favorites!)  On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Have you read any of them? 

It's an age old lesson that if you want to be a great writer, you need to read—and read a lot!

But how can you, a writer, pick the right books for you to read? Time is limited and precious, after all. As much as we'd love to read most everything, we can't.

So how do we choose our titles wisely? Which ones will help us level up our writing process? Which writing books will take us from amateur to professional writer? 

I'd recommend turning your attention and pocketbook to five types of books for honing your writing skills and for writing advice. (And full disclosure, some of the links here are affiliate links which won't affect your price but will help us keep finding great books for you here at The Write Practice!) 

5 Types of Books Every Writer Should Read

Over the years, I’ve learned that, to become a better writer, you must be simultaneously adventurous and targeted in your reading selection. This may sound contradictory, but trust me, it's not.

Luckily, I've realized that there are five types of books that will make me a better writer. So when I'm debating which books I want to invest time reading, I consider whether they're one of these.

1. Writing craft books that focus on writing techniques

You may have heard at some point that writing is all about talent. That couldn’t be more wrong.

Writing, like anything else, is a craft that can be learned and practiced. However, you don’t need a degree to learn how to write. You can do so by simply reading books that focus on the techniques of writing, such as plot, character, sentence building, constructing short stories, the works.

When you read these books, pay attention to examples and understand how they’re being used. Keep your favorite ones around for future reference, and mark the pages of the techniques that you like the most.

Figure out which topics are hardest for you and find practical advice books on them by an experienced writer or craft expert. I know that's intimidating, but this is how we learn. The same topic presented by different authors may offer you fresh perspective, and hopefully this will help you overcome a writing technique that you find difficult to master.

Here are some of our favorite craft of writing books:

Story Structure

• Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
• Story Grid by Shawn Coyne
• The Write Structure by Joe Bunting
• M astering Suspense, Structure, & Plot by Jane K. Cleland
• Story Genius by Lisa Cron
• Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

7. The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass 8. The Secrets of Character by Matt Bird

Elements of Fiction

9.  Write Great Fiction series by James Scott Bell, Ron Rozelle, Nancy Kress, and Gloria Kempton 10. Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight 11. Understanding Show, Don't Tell by Janice Hardy 12. The Art of Fiction by John Garner 13. Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley 14. T he Conflict Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi 15. The Describer's Dictionary by David Gramps and Ellen S. Levine 16. The Moral Premise by Dr. Stanley Williams

17. The Art of Memoir  by Mary Karr 18. The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith

Revision and Editing

19. It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences by June Casagrande 20. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White 21. Stein on Writing by Sol Stein 22. Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell 23. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King 24. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Process and Business of Writing

25. Before and After the Book Deal  by Courtney Maum 26. The Business of Being a Writer   by Jane Friedman 27. The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker 28. Your First 1,000 Copies by Tim Grahl 29. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain 30. The Write Fast System by J. Danforth

Which craft advice do you need most today to expand your writing tools? Don't get overwhelmed—just begin with one and practice today! 

2. Books that shed light on what it's like to be a writer

This is a category that people don’t often think of often. These are books by writers that are about the non-technical aspects of writing, such as productivity techniques, publishing, or just generally what it’s like to live as a writer.

That makes these books writers should read because we can learn a lot from those who came before us!

Why would I want to know how other writers live? This was something I didn’t understand myself when I first stumbled onto these books.

But the fact is, there is a lot to learn from reading about the path other writers have trod.

Did you know that even famous writers go through the same struggles with motivation? Or that most writers have day jobs and often question whether their writing is worth it when it doesn’t bring in money? We are all different, yet we are all alike, whether we’ve made it yet or not.

We all have our on responsibilities and priorities, but how we balance life and our writing life has similar patterns and hurdles. Learning from those who have come before us can help us avoid pitfalls, which saves us more time and keeps us motivated to get back to what we love—writing!

From these books, I learned that publishing is not as glamorous as I dreamed of as a teenager.

I learned that every writer who writes well has a pile of stories that no one has read.

I learned that Stephen King pinned rejection letters to the wall with a tack, then when the pile got too thick, he switched to using a large spike and kept writing. These books give you a view of reality, while simultaneously reminding you that every writer has struggled. You are never alone.

Some of our favorites on what it's like to live as a writer include:

31. The War of Art and Turning Pro  by Steven Pressfield 32. On Writing by Stephen King 33. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott 34. Writing Down the Bones  by Natalie Goldberg 35. Walking on Water by Madeline L'Engle 36. The Writing Life and Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard 37. Create Dangerously by Edwidge Dandicat 38. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert 39.  You Are a Writer by Jeff Goins 40. Write Away by Elizabeth George 41. Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk 42. Steal Like an Artist, Keep Going , and Show Your Work by Austin Kleon 43. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke 44. The Artist's Way or Write for Life by Julia Cameron

Maybe someday another favorite will be a book by you!

3. Popular books that keep you in the loop

Hear me out.

Popular books are popular for a reason, which means books that sold well and withstood time are books writers should read.

They don’t have to be your favorite style or genre, but almost always, a book is famous for a reason.

Maybe they appeal to a certain audience, or maybe they have a particular way of making people feel good. Maybe they bring a unique perspective. Maybe they indulge in a guilty pleasure.

No matter the reason, reading some of the chart-topping books will almost always teach you something.

If nothing else, it gives you an insight into what appeals to the general audience at the moment, and while we should never write a book to fit a trend, we can learn from the books that have captured the hearts of readers for years on end. We looked up some of the top books of the last two decades and threw in a few classic book titles too.

Here are a few crowd favorites and classics to start on:

45. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling 46 The Fault in Our Stars by John Green 47. Divergent series by Veronica Roth 48. The Martian by Andy Weir 49. Throne of Glass series by Sarah Maas 50. Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin 51. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot 52. The Da Vinci Code  by Dan Brown 53. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 54. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 55. A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman 56. The Kite Runner  by Khaled Hosseini 57. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 58. Pride and Prejudice  by Jane Austen 59. Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie 60. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 61. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus 62. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut 63. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jasmyn Ward  64. Grapes of Wrath , East of Eden , or Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 65. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márque 66. All the Pretty Horses  by Cormac McCarthy

4. Books in your genre (yes!)

Yes! One of the books writers should read are books in their genre!

To learn from others who have succeeded before you will benefit you tremendously. Reading will help you see what you like about the genre, what makes it unique, and what appeals to the audience that also loves reading these types of stories.

But maybe you have a fear of accidentally plagiarizing someone else.

What if you read so much of what others have written that you end up stealing their ideas without thinking?

If this is your fear, I have good news for you—it’s nearly impossible to truly steal someone else’s idea . Stories are more than often the same story but different, and you can tell a similar story but make it yours by changing up the characters, the plot, the setting, and the conflict.

There are lots of genres, and I'm sure you already have some titles that are your favorites in the genre you write popping up inside your head. Even if you read them once, go read them again.

Make a list of five books that you could read over and over again.

Only this time, read them like a writer. Read them with a radar that looks for how the genre applies its tropes, its patterns, and its themes .

(Need help doing this? Pick up a copy of Roy Peter Clark's book The Art of X-Ray Reading )

5. Books outside your genre

There is one major reason to read books outside the genre you write. In fact, it’s the same reason that some books writers should read lie outside the genres they normally read—it will broaden their horizons.

Reading books you normally don’t read pushes you outside your comfort zone and turns creative gears you didn’t know you had.

Do you write action? Try reading a romance . It could help you develop that romantic subplot.

Do you write fantasy? Try some science fiction. Maybe that fantasy world could use some unique old world tech.

Here are a few rather unique books we’ve come across in my long journey of reading that just might tickle something in you:

67. Geek Love  by Katherine Dunn 68. The Paper Menagerie  by Kevin Liu 69. Karate Chop  by Dorthe Nors 70. People I Want to Punch in the Throat  by Jen Mann 71. True Grit  by Charles Portis 72. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik 73. Congratulations, The Best is Over by R. Eric Thomas

What unusual titles have you read that have stayed with you? Share in the comments . 

Just Keep Reading, Just Keep Reading

I'll say it one last time: successful writers need to read.

There are also certain books writers should read to expand and refine your creative process.

Exploring books inside and outside of your comfort zone will not only make you a better writer, but they also might help you discover a story type you never knew you'd love. And stories change lives, so, maybe that life changing book for you is out there waiting for you to find it!

As writers, we all have something important to say, and how that's said is probably communicated in one of these five types of books shared in this post.

Becoming a better writer is a life of adventure, and reading is a giant, wonderful part of it. As you build a writing practice, books are a central part of learning. 

However, if you find yourself crunched for time, if you find yourself resistant to reading anything outside your genre, maybe this list of five types of books will give you the courage and understanding to try, every once in a while, something new. Something else.

I'd love to learn the books that have made a difference on your writing career, and I'm interested to see if they fall in one of these five book categories.

Have some of the best writing books you want to recommend? Share with your fellow writers in the comments !

Let's take some advice from one of Joe's favorite books: The Modern Library's Writer's Workshop . Write a story in one sitting. Write as quickly as you can, and if you get bogged down, just skip that part and move on. Just make sure you get to the end.

When you're finished with your fast draft, post a section (no more than three paragraphs ) the Pro Practice Workshop . And if you post be sure to comment on a few practices by other writers. Not a member? Join us!  

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

J. D. Edwin

J. D. Edwin is a daydreamer and writer of fiction both long and short, usually in soft sci-fi or urban fantasy. Sign up for her newsletter for free articles on the writer life and updates on her novel, find her on Facebook and Twitter ( @JDEdwinAuthor ), or read one of her many short stories on Short Fiction Break literary magazine .

Work with Joe Bunting?

WSJ Bestselling author, founder of The Write Practice, and book coach with 14+ years experience. Joe Bunting specializes in working with Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, How To, Literary Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Self Help books. Sound like a good fit for you?

73 Comments

Joe this sounds like a good one. Always glad to hear about a book that advances craft

Glad to hear it, Christa. Thanks!

Will order it today. Thanks Joe!

Great, Bryan. I think you in particular will like it.

I hadn’t heard of this book, but you can bet I’ll be getting it now! Thanks for the writeup.

You’re quite welcome, Julie. I hope you enjoy it.

Wow, that recommendation was so good, I just bought the book!

Good for you, Abigail. Thanks!

Very interesting. Perhaps the message is, there are as many different ways to write as there are writers. We all go about it slightly different. I think I would enjoy this book, especially reading the “discussion” between authors.

Yes and no. The nice thing is that they agree on quite a lot, which provides a standard structure so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, or the writing life, anyway. Still, the things they disagree about are fascinating.

1. I’m stuck here right now. I love rereading my own work (is that vain? Joe, don’t answer that. It’s a literary term called a rhetorical question) which often prevents me from moving forward. 2. I would love to hear a conversation between those folks.

1. Yes, it’s vain (I don’t care about your silly literary terms), but that makes me vain as well. 2. Me too. I’ll settle with reading it though. 😉

Ha! You two just made me laugh out loud!

Thanks, Giulia. Getting to banter with @JoeBunting:disqus is the best part about being on The Write Practice team. 😉

Thank you Mr. Bunting for suggesting a new book for me to read. My favorite book is Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird. I should write a book on writing, and call it “Mouse by Mouse.”

You should indeed, Mr. Hodges.

This is a great article. Thanks for sharing the book, it’s one I haven’t heard of.

Antoinette didn’t like horses. She didn’t like dresses. She didn’t like dolls. But, her mother ignored all of that. Louise McGill-Lynne continued to dress her darling, like a little girl, a princess, a cutie-pie, and she continued to buy her doll after doll after doll, hoping that her daughter would fall in love with at least one of them. Antoinette didn’t. She only liked a stuffed Minnie Mouse whom she dragged thought the dirt in the backyard. The Minnie Mouse’s name was Favorite. When Louise laundered Favorite the enormous metal cartoon eyes were scratched in the dryer and Louise was afraid that Antoinette would be upset, but Antoinette didn’t seem to mind. In fact she didn’t seem to notice.

When Antoinette was about to turn four, she and Louise were in the backyard playing in their new sandbox. Louise showed Antoinette how to draw the floor plan for a house in the sand and decorate it with peony petal furniture. Antoinette picked twigs from the grass for fences that she wanted to put in the bedroom to corral horses. While they were making their house in the sand, Louise saw a friend from work coming out of her backdoor waving and hollering.

“Hey Louise, hey Antoinette, I brought you something. Your husband told me you were out here.

Louise placed one last petal in the imaginary living room and stepped out of the sandbox trying not to disrupt the house. She was surprised to see her co-worker, and she didn’t like to see anything from work on the weekends.

Kathleen held out a small box wrapped in pink to Antoinette. “I got you something honey. It’s a present. Antoinette did not get to her feet, nor did she smile. Kathleen frowned and said, “Don’t you like presents honey.”

“She doesn’t like to be called honey. She funny about things,” said Louise in a low tone of voice, the tone of voice one uses when they don’t want a child to pay attention.

“Doesn’t like to be called honey. Why not?” said Kathleen to Antoinette.

Antoinette drew her brows down and tucked her chin in.

I want to know what was in the gift! I enjoyed reading your story so far…

Thanks Ruth.

I love that she is named Antoinette and hates dolls. Such a girly name for such stubborn miss. This piece is really great; it feels like it came straight from a completed work. Your style is lovely as usual, Marianne.

Thank you very much Missaralee. I like that you said that about her hame. I’m going to have her give herself a nickname in protest I think.

I enjoyed reading this and I too would like to know what the gift was. I like Antoinette, she seems quirky.

Thanks Karl. I like her to. She is one of those characters that just seemed to show up in my mind personality in place. I hope she stays interesting.

All right, I’m burning with curiousity to find out what that present is, and what Antoinette was going to say. If anything…I’m just dying to know the rest.

Thanks, I think it’s another doll or something girly which Antoinette won’t like.

I’ve been looking for another good book on writing so I’ll try the one by Koch. Another thing that’s good to use for writing advice is Glimmer Train’s “Writer’s Ask”. It is arranged by topic using the answers that various successful authors have used given in interviews. That doesn’t explain it very well but it’s well worth reading IMO.

I like Writer’s Ask, too, Marianne. Thanks for mentioning that.

I’ve added it to my list. At the moment I’m busy with Stein on Writing, has anyone else read it? I’m really enjoying it so far 😉

I’ve heard of it but haven’t read it. Glad to hear it’s good.

I love On Writing. It is one of my favorite writing books. Bird by Bird is also wonderful, as is On Writing. The remarkable thing about each of these books is the very different voice and perspective that each author brings to his/her craft. I look forward to adding Do the Work and Guide to Fiction. While I write non-fiction, I always find new approaches and tools in any book about writing.

That sounds like a great book! I like this writing in a dash concept. The practice below ballooned to 3000 words in one go and it might just hit 10,000 if I get time to really finish it today. ————- She had lived in the big old house with her grandmother for twenty years. Never straying through the garden gate, never going farther than the barn to feed the animals, or harvest them up for supper. Tonight she sat on the roof, her face thoughtful as the greens, yellows and pinks of the northern lights played across her cheeks and whispered sweet nothings to her ears. The lights had always told her to come out and catch them. So many evenings on the roof she wanted to slide down from the roof rail to land in the hawthorn bushes and tear herself away from the farm, from the turf, from the house and her ailing grandmother. Her grandmother. The only reason she disobeyed the northern lights was her grandmother, sick and frail. She had been practically catatonic since her husband had died 15 years back. Occasionally she would brighten up and ramble about wedding cakes and fancy candies she had made and sold in town. A diligent young woman, she had kept the farm afloat through droughts, depressions and pestilence by selling her handiwork and designing the polyresin domes that made life in the north possible. She was clever with her hands, a natural artist. She had passed the gift on to her granddaughter. The walls of every room were covered in paintings and designs. No wallpaper could ever be as beautiful as the tattoos Lindy had lovingly sketched out and painted floor to ceiling in every room. Some featured giraffes and monkeys on parade. Others shooting stars and wind whistling through pine trees. Lindy dreamed. Sitting in the musty house, making tea for her grandmother, tending the garden, cooking the meals, it was all done in a dream. Far away from there she was a maid in an emperors household. She was a geisha entertaining lords. She was a famous archeologist, digging up priceless artifacts as she removed the stones from the garden plots. Not a day in that house, was she really there, except that one day. The one where the butcher’s son had come calling after Tulip had been lamed stepping into a gopher hole in the pastures. Lindy was furious that day. Grieved. Beside herself. Tulip was her last friend in the northern cage. And now the boy had come to collect her to line his shelves with meat and glue. Lindy had made tea for the boy, Tinder. She’s brought out lemon-iced biscuits studded with currents. She kept back the fine cocoa dusted truffles she’d made after grandmother’s recipe. She had been determined to be civil, but that didn’t mean she had to treat him like a treasured guest. He afterall was not at fault for Tulip’s leg.

It had been gophers who’d signed her sale papers, and you had best believe that Lindy took after them good. They too had gotten treats today. What a merry funeral feast they would have before the poison took them. Serves them right living off her potatoes and nibbling the tops off her squash. Tinder was a well-built boy, strong from years of working in his father’s shop. Lindy had been impressed, despite herself, by his muscular arms and wide shoulders. “I’m truly sorry about your mare” he said quietly. “It’s a wrong sort of thing to lose a fine worker” he blushed as he dipped his biscuit into the tea, “and friend” he finished.

“Thank you” said Lindy, suddenly shy. “I think I have some chocolates in the pantry, if you’d like.”

I love the description in this piece. It’s beautiful.

Thanks Giulia 🙂 I saw a picture of an old house under the northern lights a few days ago and this story grew as I kept imagining those colours and the feeling the sadness of it.

It’s funny how looking at a picture can inspire a story. I remember doing that in my writer’s craft class in high school.

It sounds like the beginning of a love story. She is so lonely that you hope she will find someone.

It’s a well written excerpt. I want to read more. Very good work, Missaralie!

Oh wow this is so intimidating! I usually take over a week and countless sittings to finish just one draft. I’ll need to prep myself mentally for something like this. Phew. I’m sweating already.

You can do it! Just walk away from the computer and do something else and something will come to you. Walking away always helps me. I used to actually pace when I got stuck in the middle of an English paper back in my university days to get myself unstuck.

Darn it, I misread the pracitce. I just spent fifteen mintues taking a part of piece I speed wrote the other day, the ghost story with the twins, and doing a slow second draft. Grr. I’m posting it anyway. Mostly I went through this scene, was dialogue heavy and added in a lot of detail and narration that I had left out the first time. My Practice:

“Tom,dear…please, is something wrong?” Cassandra asked the question carefully, glancing at Adam.

Tom downed his wine and gave anironic laugh. “The love of my life is dead and you have the nerve to ask me that?” He stood suddenly, the movement lithe and violent. His eyes had a diabolical gleam. The hazel colour of his once bottle green eyes, eyes that had been identical to hers, shocked Cassandra; they had darkened even more just a few hours. “Stop staring at me!” Tom snapped, “I’m not insane you know!”

“Tom, calm down,” Adam said lowly.

“Why should I?” shouted Tom and threw the glass of wine against the wall. “How can I? Do you not see what’shappening?” He ran out of the room and soon they heard a door slam upstairs.Cassandra let her head fall into her hands and bit her lip until she tastedblood. What was happening to her twin? Why were the colour of his eyes changing?

She found she couldn’t sleepthat night. Her skin felt stretched too tight and she tossed and turned, hermind whirling. Tom, she felt certain, was slipping away. She was losing her brother. With a sudden thumping her in chest, she rose out of bed and slipped down the hall into Tom’s room. He slept face down, his breathing heavy and though the room was cold, he had kicked off the blankets and his skin was hotto the touch. Cassandra murmured to her twin, worrying he had a fever, but he slept soundly on. She moved to climb into bed with him, to sleep with him like they had when they were children, but even as she lifted the blanket to pull over herself, it was wrenched away.

“No!” Tom cried with wild, dark eyes. “No, he is mine!”

Cassandra pulled back with a horrified gasp, for the voice that came from her brother sounded nothing like his own. She let out a scream as Tom suddenly collapsed back on the bed, limp and lifeless.

He jolted upright almost in the next instant.

“Good God, Cassie, what are you doing here?” he asked hoarsely. “Why are you screaming?”

“The lights!” Cassandra grasped at the wall, flicking on the lights overhead. She grabbed her brother’s face between her hands. “Your eyes!”

“What’s wrong?” Tom asked again.

“Your eyes were nearly black—and look at them now, they are not green at all Tom, look.”

Tom pulled her hands from him gently. “ I know,” he whispered, “I know Cassie.”

Cassandra frowned, feeling fear swell in her heart. “But what is it?”

“It’s her,” he said after a moment in which he swallowed convulsively. “Don’t you see it’s her?”

“Her…Anne?”

“Yes.” The word was uttered sorrowfully.

“She’s-haunting you?”

He nodded, “yes.”

“But…Tom, what do we do? What does she want?”

His laugh was hollow. “Me,” he replied. “She wants me.”

Oooh I want to read more! Where can I read more 🙂

Currently, only in my notebook 😉 I’m glad you liked it.

That’s pretty dramatic. I thought he was going to turn into a werewolf or something. I want to know what happens.

Thanks Marianne, I might actually finished revising the entire story slow later on.

I look forward to reading this book, Joe. AND…let me share the best writing book I ever read, just last year. DO THE WORK, by Steven Pressfield, well-selling author of historical fiction,and The Legend of Bagger Vance, and the terrific nonfiction book, THE WAR OF ART. After reading DO THE WORK, I sat down and spent two hours writing a brand new synopsis of the script I just sent off. It’s a little book, available on Amazon for $7.00. I give copies away now, to anyone who’s “struggling” to write. It will kick you in the block. The Premise: On the field of the Self stand a Knight and a Dragon. You are the Knight. Resistance is the Dragon..

I love that book, Eric. Thanks for mentioning it!

I’ve heard of “The War on Art” and “Do the WorK” sounds great too. I’m going to get them too.

I need to get back to this entry and say. I got the book by Koch’s book and the one by Pressfield mentioned below and I love them. I’m writing much more confidently. Thanks again Joe and Eric for your recommendations.

I’m so glad to hear that Marianne! I found the same.

My library system is down, so can’t check to see if they have it and if they did, I can’t check it out until they are up an running again. But thanks so much Joe for the heads up on a great resource.

I just ordered the book from my library and just received an email notification that it is ready to be picked up. I can hardly wait until tomorrow.

I guess I’ll apologize for some of my crude language, but these are teenagers. I’m a teenager. It’s how we talk.

The best time I had ever was March two years ago. There was me, Ly, Jude, Mercy, Miliani, and Dempster. After school, every day, we all stayed at my house until it got dark and my parents got home. We’d bullshit our homework, listening Bing Crosby’s Christmas album, and then sit in either silence or talk about how much our lives suck.

“Would you rather rob a bank or kill a guy?”

“Shut up, Ring.”

“I’m genuinely asking.”

“Neither. It’s not worth my freedom.” Dempster.

“My conscience would eat me alive,” Mil insisted.

“What if there were no consequences?”

“It would have to be a big bank in a city. This town’s too small to steal from. Everyone knows everyone,” Ly said in a whiney tone. I don’t blame her. This place makes me sick.

“You guys are awful. Why steal from anyone? Those people could have families. You could be stealing from some kid’s college fund.” Mercy was always such a tight-ass. I don’t even know why she hung out with us.

“Yo, yo, Mercy.”

“Suck a dick.” I always gave Mercy a hard time, it was hilarious. “Lights. Lights, go.” My parents never knew about the group. They thought I didn’t have any friends, and I wanted to keep it that way since my parents seem to ruin everything that crosses their path, so when we see headlights, everyone grabs their bags and hops our fence and makes their way to the road and home. (We all lived pretty close to each other, so they were cool.) “Jude, you never chimed in. What about you?”

Jude, his legs over both sides of the fence, seemed to think about it for a second but just said, “Naaahh, man. No. No.” He laughed a little, imagining what it would be like if he had the balls to actually rob a bank, but he doesn’t.

“Alright, man. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, Ringo. I’ll see yuh.”

March, I think, we learned a lot about each other and ourselves and how far we’d go to satisfy ourselves. I don’t know, man… but that shit was cool.

I’m fascinated. Why are teenagers having this conversation? What’s Jude hiding? I have a feeling he’s hiding something big. And what else do they learn about each other in March? Very well written.

I was actually doing homework on Macbeth when I was writing this, which had a lot to do with their personalities. I don’t know these character’s very well, but I think I’m gonna keep writing and find out. One thing I did find out about Jude, though, is that his is a coward. I think he’s hiding something big, too. Maybe trying to suppress his black thoughts like Macbeth did. You’ve just made me really excited about these guys. Thank you for the complement and commenting! 🙂

No problem! Have fun!

I loved it.

Thanks so much for your post Joe. It really resonated with me as one of my 2013 writing goals is to continue to expand (and read) my collection of books about writing. I actually started Koch’s book one afternoon in the library, checked it out, and ended up returning it unfinished. I will add it to my to buy list! As others have mentioned, Bird by Bird is a fantastic book. I love her voice! Thanks again-

I m almost halfway thru the book and while I am not done yet, I already feel this is a winner of a book for nybdy who writes.

Having read so many writing books over the years, I can see this one taking its place along the “greats” like Bird by Bird, Stephen King’s, On Writing, and a few others.

I have three favorite books on writing:

1) The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Rebecca Puglisi ( http://www.amazon.com/The-Emotion-Thesaurus-Character-Expression/dp/1475004958/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367621680&sr=8-1&keywords=the+emotion+thesaurus ): This one really helps me with showing emtions (funny thing, eh?). I used to always go with “character x grinned” or something similar. Now, I write, “His cheeks curved up and his eyes sparkled.”

2) Robert’s Rules of Writing by Robert Masello ( http://www.amazon.com/Roberts-Rules-Writing-Robert-Masello/dp/B0042P5I10/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367621843&sr=1-1&keywords=Robert%27s+Rules+of+Writing ): This one really influenced my writing. The biggest things I took away from this book is rules that may work for you may not work for me and write what you read.

3) Ink by R.S.Guthrie ( http://www.amazon.com/Ink-Eight-Rules-Better-Book/dp/0989157601/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367622556&sr=1-1&keywords=ink+r.s.+guthrie ): This one taught me what was meant by “Show, Don’t Tell. I didn’t really understand it before, but I think I have it now. I hope others find these as useful as I do.

I love the “character X grinned” versus “his cheeks curved up and his eyes sparkled” example. I think that will stay with me a long time and hopefully inform my writing. Thanks.

I use 1) extensively in my writing and just finished reading 3). Haven’t seen 2) yet, but might consider it – thanks!

An inspirational book on writing is William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”. I also enjoyed Stephen King’s book on writing, as well as James Frey’s.

All hail the King!!!

Writing a story in one sitting can be quite a sad thing, I rarely do it because once you stand up the story is over, the characters are finished… but still there is always that hope for a future greater story to be bloomed from it. I wrote one story once, back in February I think, a fantasy story of course. It was called Candlelight, a magical five hundred word romance full of sweet sorrow. I wrote it in about half an hour, the characters started whispering in my head and then like an exhale of breath, they appeared on the page. Really breathtaking. Haha, but yeah, it was actually about four months later that I looked back at it, thinking that it was inspired by my forbidden lover, but then looking deeper (and falling once again for my Love that so easily gets away), I realized it was partly inspired by him and I, the one who keeps getting away, I mean and it was actually written on the day that he asked me for my number and we started talking, pondering all the Universe together in our budding Platonic love. Taken aback, I sent it to him, he saw it too. Sigh, I’m not sure where he is now, but we will find each other again. We always do…. But anyways, I do love Stephen King’s On Writing and find his radical resentment for adverbs hilarious and somehow understandable. Only F. Scott Fitzgerald could pull their excessive off gracefully, anyone else, good luck and may your rest in literary pieces. JK. Lol.

After finishing my Linguistics masters ( a long process for me), I wanted to expand my writing beyond the academic (which I handle quite well). Around that time, order to avoid airline miles expiring, I had to make an on-line purchase before midnight. A cooking book? A photography book? A self-help book? No…I thought..a WRITING book. Yay!! I had a short time to peruse the options, and happened upon Writing Down the Bones..Freeing the writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. Here’s what I wrote in my journal: aaahhhh..I just received Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. Some of the words elevate above the page, lifting to my eyes. I started reading the book and it brings me such peace. Natalie said to “giver [her] a moment to engage in some writing. I love her work already. I feel such peaceful energy and “permission” to write in my own voice, newly forming.

THANKS FOR ALL TE BOOK SUGGESTIONS. Looking forward to exploring them.

I would suggest those for a writer: http://thebooksmap.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/books-for-writers-and-enterpreneurs.html

I’ve got a stack of writing books on my book shelf. Some are my favourites for constant reference, but Stephen Koch’s Book is my favourite of favourites. It’s really gets down to the nuts and bolts of writing a story. After reading it you feel like you’ve been in conversation with the author.

Joe Bunting joebunting.com

One of the best books about writing I’ve ever run across, and one I would highly recommend is: “Reading Like A Writer” by Francine Prose. A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them. FritziGal

I started reading the article above, but a pop up covering the article came up, asking me to join your mailing list. I struggled to get rid of it, but eventually managed to by reloading the page. Just wanted to feedback how offputting it was.

I also dislike these and find them pointless. If I want to subscribe I will search for the big button, otherwise I use extensions like Pocket and bookmarks to keep up to date on my favorite sites. I love my ad blocker for these silly popups. Does anyone use their inbox to subscribe anymore? I usually send it all to the junk folder when it starts cluttering my mail.

I really enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing for tapping into creativity and inspiration.

‘True and False’ by David Mamet is a great book for writers. Guide books written by published authors are few and far between. There are no books or classes which teach ‘live’ in other words where you get to look over the shoulder and watch a writer write their novel from beginning to need. I believe that the only ‘course’ which teaches writing from inside the process is mine at http://www.kritikme.com…. .

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40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips)

I wanted to improve my writing skills. I thought that reading the forty best essays of all time would bring me closer to my goal.

I had little money (buying forty collections of essays was out of the question) so I’ve found them online instead. I’ve hacked through piles of them, and finally, I’ve found the great ones. Now I want to share the whole list with you (with the addition of my notes about writing). Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please click away and indulge yourself. Also, next to each essay, there’s an image of the book that contains the original work.

About this essay list:

Reading essays is like indulging in candy; once you start, it’s hard to stop. I sought out essays that were not only well-crafted but also impactful. These pieces genuinely shifted my perspective. Whether you’re diving in for enjoyment or to hone your writing, these essays promise to leave an imprint. It’s fascinating how an essay can resonate with you, and even if details fade, its essence remains. I haven’t ranked them in any way; they’re all stellar. Skim through, explore the summaries, and pick up some writing tips along the way. For more essay gems, consider “Best American Essays” by Joyce Carol Oates or “101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think” curated by Brianna Wiest.

40 Best Essays of All Time (With Links And Writing Tips)

1. david sedaris – laugh, kookaburra.

A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs… This is one of the top essays of the lot. It’s a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what’s most important in life. You’ll also learn an awful lot about the curious culture of the Aussies.

Writing tips from the essay:

• Use analogies (you can make it funny or dramatic to achieve a better effect): “Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand”.
• You can touch a few cognate stories in one piece of writing . Reveal the layers gradually. Intertwine them and arrange for a grand finale where everything is finally clear.
• Be on the side of the reader. Become their friend and tell the story naturally, like around the dinner table.
• Use short, punchy sentences. Tell only as much as is required to make your point vivid.
• Conjure sentences that create actual feelings: “I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body, and saw that it was a . . . what, exactly?”
• You may ask a few tough questions in a row to provoke interest and let the reader think.

2. Charles D’Ambrosio – Documents

Do you think your life punches you in the face all too often? After reading this essay, you will change your mind. Reading about loss and hardships often makes us sad at first, but then enables us to feel grateful for our lives . D’Ambrosio shares his documents (poems, letters) that had a major impact on his life, and brilliantly shows how not to let go of the past.

• The most powerful stories are about your family and the childhood moments that shaped your life.
• You don’t need to build up tension and pussyfoot around the crux of the matter. Instead, surprise the reader by telling it like it is: “The poem was an allegory about his desire to leave our family.” Or: “My father had three sons. I’m the eldest; Danny, the youngest, killed himself sixteen years ago”.
• You can use real documents and quotes from your family and friends. It makes it so much more personal and relatable.
• Don’t cringe before the long sentence if you know it’s a strong one.
• At the end of the essay, you may come back to the first theme to close the circuit.
• Using slightly poetic language is acceptable, as long as it improves the story.

3. E. B. White – Once more to the lake

What does it mean to be a father? Can you see your younger self, reflected in your child? This beautiful essay tells the story of the author, his son, and their traditional stay at a placid lake hidden within the forests of Maine. This place of nature is filled with sunshine and childhood memories. It also provides for one of the greatest meditations on nature and the passing of time.

• Use sophisticated language, but not at the expense of readability.
• Use vivid language to trigger the mirror neurons in the reader’s brain: “I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows”.
• It’s important to mention universal feelings that are rarely talked about (it helps to create a bond between two minds): “You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings when the lake was cool and motionless”.
• Animate the inanimate: “this constant and trustworthy body of water”.
• Mentioning tales of yore is a good way to add some mystery and timelessness to your piece.
• Using double, or even triple “and” in one sentence is fine. It can make the sentence sing.

4. Zadie Smith – Fail Better

Aspiring writers feel tremendous pressure to perform. The daily quota of words often turns out to be nothing more than gibberish. What then? Also, should the writer please the reader or should she be fully independent? What does it mean to be a writer, anyway? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions, but its contents are not only meant for scribblers. Within it, you’ll find some great notes about literary criticism, how we treat art , and the responsibility of the reader.

• A perfect novel ? There’s no such thing.
• The novel always reflects the inner world of the writer. That’s why we’re fascinated with writers.
• Writing is not simply about craftsmanship, but about taking your reader to the unknown lands. In the words of Christopher Hitchens: “Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”
• Style comes from your unique personality and the perception of the world. It takes time to develop it.
• Never try to tell it all. “All” can never be put into language. Take a part of it and tell it the best you can.
• Avoid being cliché. Try to infuse new life into your writing .
• Writing is about your way of being. It’s your game. Paradoxically, if you try to please everyone, your writing will become less appealing. You’ll lose the interest of the readers. This rule doesn’t apply in the business world where you have to write for a specific person (a target audience).
• As a reader, you have responsibilities too. According to the critics, every thirty years, there’s just a handful of great novels. Maybe it’s true. But there’s also an element of personal connection between the reader and the writer. That’s why for one person a novel is a marvel, while for the other, nothing special at all. That’s why you have to search and find the author who will touch you.

5. Virginia Woolf – Death of the Moth

Amid an ordinary day, sitting in a room of her own, Virginia Woolf tells about the epic struggle for survival and the evanescence of life. This short essay is truly powerful. In the beginning, the atmosphere is happy. Life is in full force. And then, suddenly, it fades away. This sense of melancholy would mark the last years of Woolf’s life.

• The melody of language… A good sentence is like music: “Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow- underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us”.
• You can show the grandest in the mundane (for example, the moth at your window and the drama of life and death).
• Using simple comparisons makes the style more lucid: “Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure”.

6. Meghan Daum – My Misspent Youth

Many of us, at some point or another, dream about living in New York. Meghan Daum’s take on the subject differs slightly from what you might expect. There’s no glamour, no Broadway shows, and no fancy restaurants. Instead, there’s the sullen reality of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. You’ll get all the juicy details about credit cards, overdue payments, and scrambling for survival. It’s a word of warning. But it’s also a great story about shattered fantasies of living in a big city. Word on the street is: “You ain’t promised mañana in the rotten manzana.”

• You can paint a picture of your former self. What did that person believe in? What kind of world did he or she live in?
• “The day that turned your life around” is a good theme you may use in a story. Memories of a special day are filled with emotions. Strong emotions often breed strong writing.
• Use cultural references and relevant slang to create a context for your story.
• You can tell all the details of the story, even if in some people’s eyes you’ll look like the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived. It adds to the originality.
• Say it in a new way: “In this mindset, the dollars spent, like the mechanics of a machine no one bothers to understand, become an abstraction, an intangible avenue toward self-expression, a mere vehicle of style”.
• You can mix your personal story with the zeitgeist or the ethos of the time.

7. Roger Ebert – Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Probably the greatest film critic of all time, Roger Ebert, tells us not to rage against the dying of the light. This essay is full of courage, erudition, and humanism. From it, we learn about what it means to be dying (Hitchens’ “Mortality” is another great work on that theme). But there’s so much more. It’s a great celebration of life too. It’s about not giving up, and sticking to your principles until the very end. It brings to mind the famous scene from Dead Poets Society where John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students: “Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary”.

• Start with a powerful sentence: “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”
• Use quotes to prove your point -”‘Ask someone how they feel about death’, he said, ‘and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die’. Ask them, ‘In the next 30 seconds?’ No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen”.
• Admit the basic truths about reality in a childlike way (especially after pondering quantum physics) – “I believe my wristwatch exists, and even when I am unconscious, it is ticking all the same. You have to start somewhere”.
• Let other thinkers prove your point. Use quotes and ideas from your favorite authors and friends.

8. George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant

Even after one reading, you’ll remember this one for years. The story, set in British Burma, is about shooting an elephant (it’s not for the squeamish). It’s also the most powerful denunciation of colonialism ever put into writing. Orwell, apparently a free representative of British rule, feels to be nothing more than a puppet succumbing to the whim of the mob.

• The first sentence is the most important one: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me”.
• You can use just the first paragraph to set the stage for the whole piece of prose.
• Use beautiful language that stirs the imagination: “I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains.” Or: “I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.”
• If you’ve ever been to war, you will have a story to tell: “(Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)”
• Use simple words, and admit the sad truth only you can perceive: “They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching”.
• Share words of wisdom to add texture to the writing: “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his freedom that he destroys.”
• I highly recommend reading everything written by Orwell, especially if you’re looking for the best essay collections on Amazon or Goodreads.

9. George Orwell – A Hanging

It’s just another day in Burma – time to hang a man. Without much ado, Orwell recounts the grim reality of taking another person’s life. A man is taken from his cage and in a few minutes, he’s going to be hanged. The most horrible thing is the normality of it. It’s a powerful story about human nature. Also, there’s an extraordinary incident with the dog, but I won’t get ahead of myself.

• Create brilliant, yet short descriptions of characters: “He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting mustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the mustache of a comic man on the films”.
• Understand and share the felt presence of a unique experience: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man”.
• Make your readers hear the sound that will stay with them forever: “And then when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
• Make the ending original by refusing the tendency to seek closure or summing it up.

10. Christopher Hitchens – Assassins of The Mind

In one of the greatest essays written in defense of free speech, Christopher Hitchens shares many examples of how modern media kneel to the explicit threats of violence posed by Islamic extremists. He recounts the story of his friend, Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses who, for many years, had to watch over his shoulder because of the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini. With his usual wit, Hitchens shares various examples of people who died because of their opinions and of editors who refuse to publish anything related to Islam because of fear (and it was written long before the Charlie Hebdo massacre). After reading the essay, you realize that freedom of expression is one of the most precious things we have and that we have to fight for it. I highly recommend all essay collections penned by Hitchens, especially the ones written for Vanity Fair.

• Assume that the readers will know the cultural references. When they do, their self-esteem goes up – they are a part of an insider group.
• When proving your point, give a variety of real-life examples from eclectic sources. Leave no room for ambiguity or vagueness. Research and overall knowledge are essential here.
• Use italics to emphasize a specific word or phrase (here I use the underlining): “We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. In consequence, several things have not happened.”
• Think about how to make it sound more original: “So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and the broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table.”

11. Christopher Hitchens – The New Commandments

It’s high time to shatter the tablets and amend the biblical rules of conduct. Watch, as Christopher Hitchens slays one commandment after the other on moral, as well as historical grounds. For example, did you know that there are many versions of the divine law dictated by God to Moses which you can find in the Bible? Aren’t we thus empowered to write our version of a proper moral code? If you approach it with an open mind, this essay may change the way you think about the Bible and religion.

• Take the iconoclastic approach. Have a party on the hallowed soil.
• Use humor to undermine orthodox ideas (it seems to be the best way to deal with an established authority).
• Use sarcasm and irony when appropriate (or not): “Nobody is opposed to a day of rest. The international Communist movement got its start by proclaiming a strike for an eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, against Christian employers who used child labor seven days a week”.
• Defeat God on legal grounds: “Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey”.
• Be ruthless in the logic of your argument. Provide evidence.

12. Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre

While reading this fantastic essay, this quote from Slavoj Žižek kept coming back to me: “I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves”. I can bear the onus of happiness or joie de vivre for some time. But this force enables me to get free and wallow in the sweet feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. By reading this work of Lopate, you’ll enter into the world of an intelligent man who finds most social rituals a drag. It’s worth exploring.

• Go against the grain. Be flamboyant and controversial (if you can handle it).
• Treat the paragraph like a group of thoughts on one theme. Next paragraph, next theme.
• Use references to other artists to set the context and enrich the prose: “These sunny little canvases with their talented innocence, the third-generation spirit of Montmartre, bore testimony to a love of life so unbending as to leave an impression of rigid narrow-mindedness as extreme as any Savonarola. Their rejection of sorrow was total”.
• Capture the emotions in life that are universal, yet remain unspoken.
• Don’t be afraid to share your intimate experiences.

13. Philip Larkin – The Pleasure Principle

This piece comes from the Required Writing collection of personal essays. Larkin argues that reading in verse should be a source of intimate pleasure – not a medley of unintelligible thoughts that only the author can (or can’t?) decipher. It’s a sobering take on modern poetry and a great call to action for all those involved in it. Well worth a read.

• Write about complicated ideas (such as poetry) simply. You can change how people look at things if you express yourself enough.
• Go boldly. The reader wants a bold writer: “We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try”.
• Play with words and sentence length. Create music: “It is time some of you playboys realized, says the judge, that reading a poem is hard work. Fourteen days in stir. Next case”.
• Persuade the reader to take action. Here, direct language is the most effective.

14. Sigmund Freud – Thoughts for the Times on War and Death

This essay reveals Freud’s disillusionment with the whole project of Western civilization. How the peaceful European countries could engage in a war that would eventually cost over 17 million lives? What stirs people to kill each other? Is it their nature, or are they puppets of imperial forces with agendas of their own? From the perspective of time, this work by Freud doesn’t seem to be fully accurate. Even so, it’s well worth your time.

• Commence with long words derived from Latin. Get grandiloquent, make your argument incontrovertible, and leave your audience discombobulated.
• Use unending sentences, so that the reader feels confused, yet impressed.
• Say it well: “In this way, he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow-covered mountains and green meadowlands; the magic of northern forests and the splendor of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature”.
• Human nature is a subject that never gets dry.

15. Zadie Smith – Some Notes on Attunement

“You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing” – Francis Dolarhyde. This one is about the elusiveness of change occurring within you. For Zadie, it was hard to attune to the vibes of Joni Mitchell – especially her Blue album. But eventually, she grew up to appreciate her genius, and all the other things changed as well. This top essay is all about the relationship between humans, and art. We shouldn’t like art because we’re supposed to. We should like it because it has an instantaneous, emotional effect on us. Although, according to Stansfield (Gary Oldman) in Léon, liking Beethoven is rather mandatory.

• Build an expectation of what’s coming: “The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all”.
• Don’t be afraid of repetition if it feels good.
• Psychedelic drugs let you appreciate things you never appreciated.
• Intertwine a personal journey with philosophical musings.
• Show rather than tell: “My friends pitied their eyes. The same look the faithful give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces”.
• Let the poets speak for you: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no
• more, / And all its dizzy raptures”.
• By voicing your anxieties, you can heal the anxieties of the reader. In that way, you say: “I’m just like you. I’m your friend in this struggle”.
• Admit your flaws to make your persona more relatable.

16. Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse

My imagination was always stirred by the scene of the solar eclipse in Pharaoh, by Boleslaw Prus. I wondered about the shock of the disoriented crowd when they saw how their ruler could switch off the light. Getting immersed in this essay by Annie Dillard has a similar effect. It produces amazement and some kind of primeval fear. It’s not only the environment that changes; it’s your mind and the perception of the world. After the eclipse, nothing is going to be the same again.

• Yet again, the power of the first sentence draws you in: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass”.
• Don’t miss the extraordinary scene. Then describe it: “Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring”.
• Use colloquial language. Write as you talk. Short sentences often win.
• Contrast the numinous with the mundane to enthrall the reader.

17. Édouard Levé – When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue

This suicidally beautiful essay will teach you a lot about the appreciation of life and the struggle with mental illness. It’s a collection of personal, apparently unrelated thoughts that show us the rich interior of the author. You look at the real-time thoughts of another person, and then recognize the same patterns within yourself… It sounds like a confession of a person who’s about to take their life, and it’s striking in its originality.

• Use the stream-of-consciousness technique and put random thoughts on paper. Then, polish them: “I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it”.
• Place the treasure deep within the story: “When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss”.
• Don’t worry about what people might think. The more you expose, the more powerful the writing. Readers also take part in the great drama. They experience universal emotions that mostly stay inside.  You can translate them into writing.

18. Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Anzaldúa, who was born in south Texas, had to struggle to find her true identity. She was American, but her culture was grounded in Mexico. In this way, she and her people were not fully respected in either of the countries. This essay is an account of her journey of becoming the ambassador of the Chicano (Mexican-American) culture. It’s full of anecdotes, interesting references, and different shades of Spanish. It’s a window into a new cultural dimension that you’ve never experienced before.

• If your mother tongue is not English, but you write in English, use some of your unique homeland vocabulary.
• You come from a rich cultural heritage. You can share it with people who never heard about it, and are not even looking for it, but it is of immense value to them when they discover it.
• Never forget about your identity. It is precious. It is a part of who you are. Even if you migrate, try to preserve it. Use it to your best advantage and become the voice of other people in the same situation.
• Tell them what’s really on your mind: “So if you want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language”.

19. Kurt Vonnegut – Dispatch From A Man Without a Country

In terms of style, this essay is flawless. It’s simple, conversational, humorous, and yet, full of wisdom. And when Vonnegut becomes a teacher and draws an axis of “beginning – end”, and, “good fortune – bad fortune” to explain literature, it becomes outright hilarious. It’s hard to find an author with such a down-to-earth approach. He doesn’t need to get intellectual to prove a point. And the point could be summed up by the quote from Great Expectations – “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip – such is Life!”

• Start with a curious question: “Do you know what a twerp is?”
• Surprise your readers with uncanny analogies: “I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station.”
• Use your natural language without too many special effects. In time, the style will crystalize.
• An amusing lesson in writing from Mr. Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college”.
• You can put actual images or vignettes between the paragraphs to illustrate something.

20. Mary Ruefle – On Fear

Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. It’s programmed into our minds to keep us away from imaginary harm. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. She explores fear from so many angles (especially in the world of poetry-writing) that at the end of this personal essay, you will look at it, dissect it, untangle it, and hopefully be able to say “f**k you” the next time your brain is trying to stop you.

• Research your subject thoroughly. Ask people, have interviews, get expert opinions, and gather as much information as possible. Then scavenge through the fields of data, and pull out the golden bits that will let your prose shine.
• Use powerful quotes to add color to your story: “The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart”. – Lorca.
• Writing advice from the essay: “One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice”.

21. Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation

In this highly intellectual essay, Sontag fights for art and its interpretation. It’s a great lesson, especially for critics and interpreters who endlessly chew on works that simply defy interpretation. Why don’t we just leave the art alone? I always hated it when at school they asked me: “What did the author have in mind when he did X or Y?” Iēsous Pantocrator! Hell if I know! I will judge it through my subjective experience!

• Leave the art alone: “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities”.
• When you have something really important to say, style matters less.
• There’s no use in creating a second meaning or inviting interpretation of our art. Just leave it be and let it speak for itself.

22. Nora Ephron – A Few Words About Breasts

This is a heartwarming, coming-of-age story about a young girl who waits in vain for her breasts to grow. It’s simply a humorous and pleasurable read. The size of breasts is a big deal for women. If you’re a man, you may peek into the mind of a woman and learn many interesting things. If you’re a woman, maybe you’ll be able to relate and at last, be at peace with your bosom.

• Touch an interesting subject and establish a strong connection with the readers (in that case, women with small breasts). Let your personality shine through the written piece. If you are lighthearted, show it.
• Use hyphens to create an impression of real talk: “My house was full of apples and peaches and milk and homemade chocolate chip cookies – which were nice, and good for you, but-not-right-before-dinner-or-you’ll-spoil-your-appetite.”
• Use present tense when you tell a story to add more life to it.
• Share the pronounced, memorable traits of characters: “A previous girlfriend named Solange, who was famous throughout Beverly Hills High School for having no pigment in her right eyebrow, had knitted them for him (angora dice)”.

23. Carl Sagan – Does Truth Matter – Science, Pseudoscience, and Civilization

Carl Sagan was one of the greatest proponents of skepticism, and an author of numerous books, including one of my all-time favorites – The Demon-Haunted World . He was also a renowned physicist and the host of the fantastic Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which inspired a whole generation to uncover the mysteries of the cosmos. He was also a dedicated weed smoker – clearly ahead of his time. The essay that you’re about to read is a crystallization of his views about true science, and why you should check the evidence before believing in UFOs or similar sorts of crap.

• Tell people the brutal truth they need to hear. Be the one who spells it out for them.
• Give a multitude of examples to prove your point. Giving hard facts helps to establish trust with the readers and show the veracity of your arguments.
• Recommend a good book that will change your reader’s minds – How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

24. Paul Graham – How To Do What You Love

How To Do What You Love should be read by every college student and young adult. The Internet is flooded with a large number of articles and videos that are supposed to tell you what to do with your life. Most of them are worthless, but this one is different. It’s sincere, and there’s no hidden agenda behind it. There’s so much we take for granted – what we study, where we work, what we do in our free time… Surely we have another two hundred years to figure it out, right? Life’s too short to be so naïve. Please, read the essay and let it help you gain fulfillment from your work.

• Ask simple, yet thought-provoking questions (especially at the beginning of the paragraph) to engage the reader: “How much are you supposed to like what you do?”
• Let the readers question their basic assumptions: “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like”.
• If you’re writing for a younger audience, you can act as a mentor. It’s beneficial for younger people to read a few words of advice from a person with experience.

25. John Jeremiah Sullivan – Mister Lytle

A young, aspiring writer is about to become a nurse of a fading writer – Mister Lytle (Andrew Nelson Lytle), and there will be trouble. This essay by Sullivan is probably my favorite one from the whole list. The amount of beautiful sentences it contains is just overwhelming. But that’s just a part of its charm. It also takes you to the Old South which has an incredible atmosphere. It’s grim and tawny but you want to stay there for a while.

• Short, distinct sentences are often the most powerful ones: “He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly”.
• Stay consistent with the mood of the story. When reading Mister Lytle you are immersed in that southern, forsaken, gloomy world, and it’s a pleasure.
• The spectacular language that captures it all: “His French was superb, but his accent in English was best—that extinct mid-Southern, land-grant pioneer speech, with its tinges of the abandoned Celtic urban Northeast (“boned” for burned) and its raw gentility”.
• This essay is just too good. You have to read it.

26. Joan Didion – On Self Respect

Normally, with that title, you would expect some straightforward advice about how to improve your character and get on with your goddamn life – but not from Joan Didion. From the very beginning, you can feel the depth of her thinking, and the unmistakable style of a true woman who’s been hurt. You can learn more from this essay than from whole books about self-improvement . It reminds me of the scene from True Detective, where Frank Semyon tells Ray Velcoro to “own it” after he realizes he killed the wrong man all these years ago. I guess we all have to “own it”, recognize our mistakes, and move forward sometimes.

• Share your moral advice: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs”.
• It’s worth exploring the subject further from a different angle. It doesn’t matter how many people have already written on self-respect or self-reliance – you can still write passionately about it.
• Whatever happens, you must take responsibility for it. Brave the storms of discontent.

27. Susan Sontag – Notes on Camp

I’ve never read anything so thorough and lucid about an artistic current. After reading this essay, you will know what camp is. But not only that – you will learn about so many artists you’ve never heard of. You will follow their traces and go to places where you’ve never been before. You will vastly increase your appreciation of art. It’s interesting how something written as a list could be so amazing. All the listicles we usually see on the web simply cannot compare with it.

• Talking about artistic sensibilities is a tough job. When you read the essay, you will see how much research, thought and raw intellect came into it. But that’s one of the reasons why people still read it today, even though it was written in 1964.
• You can choose an unorthodox way of expression in the medium for which you produce. For example, Notes on Camp is a listicle – one of the most popular content formats on the web. But in the olden days, it was uncommon to see it in print form.
• Just think about what is camp: “And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling”.

28. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance

That’s the oldest one from the lot. Written in 1841, it still inspires generations of people. It will let you understand what it means to be self-made. It contains some of the most memorable quotes of all time. I don’t know why, but this one especially touched me: “Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design, and posterity seems to follow his steps as a train of clients”. Now isn’t it purely individualistic, American thought? Emerson told me (and he will tell you) to do something amazing with my life. The language it contains is a bit archaic, but that just adds to the weight of the argument. You can consider it to be a meeting with a great philosopher who shaped the ethos of the modern United States.

• You can start with a powerful poem that will set the stage for your work.
• Be free in your creative flow. Do not wait for the approval of others: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness”.
• Use rhetorical questions to strengthen your argument: “I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly say a new and spontaneous word?”

29. David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster

When you want simple field notes about a food festival, you needn’t send there the formidable David Foster Wallace. He sees right through the hypocrisy and cruelty behind killing hundreds of thousands of innocent lobsters – by boiling them alive. This essay uncovers some of the worst traits of modern American people. There are no apologies or hedging one’s bets. There’s just plain truth that stabs you in the eye like a lobster claw. After reading this essay, you may reconsider the whole animal-eating business.

• When it’s important, say it plainly and stagger the reader: “[Lobsters] survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point”.
• In your writing, put exact quotes of the people you’ve been interviewing (including slang and grammatical errors). It makes it more vivid, and interesting.
• You can use humor in serious situations to make your story grotesque.
• Use captions to expound on interesting points of your essay.

30. David Foster Wallace – The Nature of the Fun

The famous novelist and author of the most powerful commencement speech ever done is going to tell you about the joys and sorrows of writing a work of fiction. It’s like taking care of a mutant child that constantly oozes smelly liquids. But you love that child and you want others to love it too. It’s a very humorous account of what it means to be an author. If you ever plan to write a novel, you should read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless.

• Base your point on a chimerical analogy. Here, the writer’s unfinished work is a “hideously damaged infant”.
• Even in expository writing, you may share an interesting story to keep things lively.
• Share your true emotions (even when you think they won’t interest anyone). Often, that’s exactly what will interest the reader.
• Read the whole essay for marvelous advice on writing fiction.

31. Margaret Atwood – Attitude

This is not an essay per se, but I included it on the list for the sake of variety. It was delivered as a commencement speech at The University of Toronto, and it’s about keeping the right attitude. Soon after leaving university, most graduates have to forget about safety, parties, and travel and start a new life – one filled with a painful routine that will last until they drop. Atwood says that you don’t have to accept that. You can choose how you react to everything that happens to you (and you don’t have to stay in that dead-end job for the rest of your days).

• At times, we are all too eager to persuade, but the strongest persuasion is not forceful. It’s subtle. It speaks to the heart. It affects you gradually.
• You may be tempted to talk about a subject by first stating what it is not, rather than what it is. Try to avoid that.
• Simple advice for writers (and life in general): “When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it”.

32. Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter

Read that one as soon as possible. It’s one of the most masterful and impactful essays you’ll ever read. It’s like a good horror – a slow build-up, and then your jaw drops to the ground. To summarize the story would be to spoil it, so I recommend that you just dig in and devour this essay in one sitting. It’s a perfect example of “show, don’t tell” writing, where the actions of characters are enough to create the right effect. No need for flowery adjectives here.

• The best story you will tell is going to come from your personal experience.
• Use mysteries that will nag the reader. For example, at the beginning of the essay, we learn about the “vanished husband” but there’s no explanation. We have to keep reading to get the answer.
• Explain it in simple terms: “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma”. Why complicate?

33. Terence McKenna – Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

To me, Terence McKenna was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. His many lectures (now available on YouTube) attracted millions of people who suspect that consciousness holds secrets yet to be unveiled. McKenna consumed psychedelic drugs for most of his life and it shows (in a positive way). Many people consider him a looney, and a hippie, but he was so much more than that. He dared to go into the abyss of his psyche and come back to tell the tale. He also wrote many books (the most famous being Food Of The Gods ), built a huge botanical garden in Hawaii , lived with shamans, and was a connoisseur of all things enigmatic and obscure. Take a look at this essay, and learn more about the explorations of the subconscious mind.

• Become the original thinker, but remember that it may require extraordinary measures: “I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist because the area that I’m looking at contains insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science”.
• Learn new words every day to make your thoughts lucid.
• Come up with the most outlandish ideas to push the envelope of what’s possible. Don’t take things for granted or become intellectually lazy. Question everything.

34. Eudora Welty – The Little Store

By reading this little-known essay, you will be transported into the world of the old American South. It’s a remembrance of trips to the little store in a little town. It’s warm and straightforward, and when you read it, you feel like a child once more. All these beautiful memories live inside of us. They lay somewhere deep in our minds, hidden from sight. The work by Eudora Welty is an attempt to uncover some of them and let you get reacquainted with some smells and tastes of the past.

• When you’re from the South, flaunt it. It’s still good old English but sometimes it sounds so foreign. I can hear the Southern accent too: “There were almost tangible smells – licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek, dill-pickle brine that had leaked through a paper sack in a fresh trail across the wooden floor, ammonia-loaded ice that had been hoisted from wet Croker sacks and slammed into the icebox with its sweet butter at the door, and perhaps the smell of still-untrapped mice”.
• Yet again, never forget your roots.
• Childhood stories can be the most powerful ones. You can write about how they shaped you.

35. John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens

The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. It’s a story about a Monopoly championship, but also, it’s the author’s search for the lost streets visible on the board of the famous board game. It also presents a historical perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations, and on Atlantic City, which once was a lively place, and then, slowly declined, the streets filled with dirt and broken windows.

• There’s nothing like irony: “A sign- ‘Slow, Children at Play’- has been bent backward by an automobile”.
• Telling the story in apparently unrelated fragments is sometimes better than telling the whole thing in a logical order.
• Creativity is everything. The best writing may come just from connecting two ideas and mixing them to achieve a great effect. Shush! The muse is whispering.

36. Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman

A dead body at the bottom of the well makes for a beautiful literary device. The first line of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red delivers it perfectly: “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well”. There’s something creepy about the idea of the well. Just think about the “It puts the lotion in the basket” scene from The Silence of the Lambs. In the first paragraph of Kingston’s essay, we learn about a suicide committed by uncommon means of jumping into the well. But this time it’s a real story. Who was this woman? Why did she do it? Read the essay.

• Mysterious death always gets attention. The macabre details are like daiquiris on a hot day – you savor them – you don’t let them spill.
• One sentence can speak volumes: “But the rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space”.
• It’s interesting to write about cultural differences – especially if you have the relevant experience. Something normal for us is unthinkable for others. Show this different world.
• The subject of sex is never boring.

37. Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is one of the most famous collections of essays of all time. In it, you will find a curious piece called On Keeping A Notebook. It’s not only a meditation about keeping a journal. It’s also Didion’s reconciliation with her past self. After reading it, you will seriously reconsider your life’s choices and look at your life from a wider perspective.

• When you write things down in your journal, be more specific – unless you want to write a deep essay about it years later.
• Use the beauty of the language to relate to the past: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing ‘How High the Moon’ on the car radio”.
• Drop some brand names if you want to feel posh.

38. Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That

This one touched me because I also lived in New York City for a while. I don’t know why, but stories about life in NYC are so often full of charm and this eerie-melancholy-jazz feeling. They are powerful. They go like this: “There was a hard blizzard in NYC. As the sound of sirens faded, Tony descended into the dark world of hustlers and pimps.” That’s pulp literature but in the context of NYC, it always sounds cool. Anyway, this essay is amazing in too many ways. You just have to read it.

• Talk about New York City. They will read it.
• Talk about the human experience: “It did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?”
• Look back at your life and reexamine it. Draw lessons from it.

39. George Orwell – Reflections on Gandhi

George Orwell could see things as they were. No exaggeration, no romanticism – just facts. He recognized totalitarianism and communism for what they were and shared his worries through books like 1984 and Animal Farm . He took the same sober approach when dealing with saints and sages. Today, we regard Gandhi as one of the greatest political leaders of the twentieth century – and rightfully so. But did you know that when asked about the Jews during World War II, Gandhi said that they should commit collective suicide and that it: “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” He also recommended utter pacifism in 1942, during the Japanese invasion, even though he knew it would cost millions of lives. But overall he was a good guy. Read the essay and broaden your perspective on the Bapu of the Indian Nation.

• Share a philosophical thought that stops the reader for a moment: “No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid”.
• Be straightforward in your writing – no mannerisms, no attempts to create ‘style’, and no invocations of the numinous – unless you feel the mystical vibe.

40. George Orwell – Politics and the English Language

Let Mr. Orwell give you some writing tips. Written in 1946, this essay is still one of the most helpful documents on writing in English. Orwell was probably the first person who exposed the deliberate vagueness of political language. He was very serious about it and I admire his efforts to slay all unclear sentences (including ones written by distinguished professors). But it’s good to make it humorous too from time to time. My favorite examples of that would be the immortal Soft Language sketch by George Carlin or the “Romans Go Home” scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Overall, it’s a great essay filled with examples from many written materials. It’s a must-read for any writer.

• Listen to the master: “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose.” Do something about it.
• This essay is all about writing better, so go to the source if you want the goodies.

Other Essays You May Find Interesting

The list that I’ve prepared is by no means complete. The literary world is full of exciting essays and you’ll never know which one is going to change your life. I’ve found reading essays very rewarding because sometimes, a single one means more than reading a whole book. It’s almost like wandering around and peeking into the minds of the greatest writers and thinkers that ever lived. To make this list more comprehensive, below I included more essays you may find interesting.

Oliver Sacks – On Libraries

One of the greatest contributors to the knowledge about the human mind, Oliver Sacks meditates on the value of libraries and his love of books.

Noam Chomsky – The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Chomsky did probably more than anyone else to define the role of the intelligentsia in the modern world . There is a war of ideas over there – good and bad – intellectuals are going to be those who ought to be fighting for the former.

Sam Harris – The Riddle of The Gun

Sam Harris, now a famous philosopher and neuroscientist, takes on the problem of gun control in the United States. His thoughts are clear of prejudice. After reading this, you’ll appreciate the value of logical discourse overheated, irrational debate that more often than not has real implications on policy.

Tim Ferriss – Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

This piece was written as a blog post , but it’s worth your time. The author of the NYT bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek shares an emotional story about how he almost killed himself, and what can you do to save yourself or your friends from suicide.

Edward Said – Reflections on Exile

The life of Edward Said was a truly fascinating one. Born in Jerusalem, he lived between Palestine and Egypt and finally settled down in the United States, where he completed his most famous work – Orientalism. In this essay, he shares his thoughts about what it means to be in exile.

Richard Feynman – It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…

Richard Feynman is one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant physicist, but also an undeniably great communicator of science, an artist, and a traveler. By reading this essay, you can observe his thought process when he tries to figure out what affects our perception of time. It’s a truly fascinating read.

Rabindranath Tagore – The Religion of The Forest

I like to think about Tagore as my spiritual Friend. His poems are just marvelous. They are like some of the Persian verses that praise love, nature, and the unity of all things. By reading this short essay, you will learn a lot about Indian philosophy and its relation to its Western counterpart.

Richard Dawkins – Letter To His 10-Year-Old Daughter

Every father should be able to articulate his philosophy of life to his children. With this letter that’s similar to what you find in the Paris Review essays , the famed atheist and defender of reason, Richard Dawkins, does exactly that. It’s beautifully written and stresses the importance of looking at evidence when we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Albert Camus – The Minotaur (or, The Stop In Oran)

Each person requires a period of solitude – a period when one’s able to gather thoughts and make sense of life. There are many places where you may attempt to find quietude. Albert Camus tells about his favorite one.

Koty Neelis – 21 Incredible Life Lessons From Anthony Bourdain

I included it as the last one because it’s not really an essay, but I just had to put it somewhere. In this listicle, you’ll find the 21 most original thoughts of the high-profile cook, writer, and TV host, Anthony Bourdain. Some of them are shocking, others are funny, but they’re all worth checking out.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca – On the Shortness of Life

It’s similar to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam because it praises life. Seneca shares some of his stoic philosophy and tells you not to waste your time on stupidities. Drink! – for once dead you shall never return.

Bertrand Russell – In Praise of Idleness

This old essay is a must-read for modern humans. We are so preoccupied with our work, our phones, and all the media input we drown in our business. Bertrand Russell tells you to chill out a bit – maybe it will do you some good.

James Baldwin – Stranger in the Village

It’s an essay on the author’s experiences as an African-American in a Swiss village, exploring race, identity, and alienation while highlighting the complexities of racial dynamics and the quest for belonging.

Bonus – More writing tips from two great books

The mission to improve my writing skills took me further than just going through the essays. I’ve come across some great books on writing too. I highly recommend you read them in their entirety. They’re written beautifully and contain lots of useful knowledge. Below you’ll find random (but useful) notes that I took from The Sense of Style and On Writing.

The Sense of Style – By Steven Pinker

• Style manuals are full of inconsistencies. Following their advice might not be the best idea. They might make your prose boring.
• Grammarians from all eras condemn students for not knowing grammar. But it just evolves. It cannot be rigid.
• “Nothing worth learning can be taught” – Oscar Wilde. It’s hard to learn to write from a manual – you have to read, write, and analyze.
• Good writing makes you imagine things and feel them for yourself – use word pictures.
• Don’t fear using voluptuous words.
• Phonesthetics – or how the words sound.
• Use parallel language (consistency of tense).
• Good writing finishes strong.
• Write to someone. Never write for no one in mind. Try to show people your view of the world.
• Don’t tell everything you are going to say in summary (signposting) – be logical, but be conversational.
• Don’t be pompous.
• Don’t use quotation marks where they don’t “belong”. Be confident about your style.
• Don’t hedge your claims (research first, and then tell it like it is).
• Avoid clichés and meta-concepts (concepts about concepts). Be more straightforward!
• Not prevention – but prevents or prevented – don’t use dead nouns.
• Be more vivid while using your mother tongue – don’t use passive where it’s not needed. Direct the reader’s gaze to something in the world.
• The curse of knowledge – the reader doesn’t know what you know – beware of that.
• Explain technical terms.
• Use examples when you explain a difficult term.
• If you ever say “I think I understand this” it probably means you don’t.
• It’s better to underestimate the lingo of your readers than to overestimate it.
• Functional fixedness – if we know some object (or idea) well, we tend to see it in terms of usage, not just as an object.
• Use concrete language instead of an abstraction.
• Show your work to people before you publish (get feedback!).
• Wait for a few days and then revise, revise, revise. Think about clarity and the sound of sentences. Then show it to someone. Then revise one more time. Then publish (if it’s to be serious work).
• Look at it from the perspective of other people.
• Omit needless words.
• Put the heaviest words at the end of the sentence.
• It’s good to use the passive, but only when appropriate.
• Check all text for cohesion. Make sure that the sentences flow gently.
• In expository work, go from general to more specific. But in journalism start from the big news and then give more details.
• Use the paragraph break to give the reader a moment to take a breath.
• Use the verb instead of a noun (make it more active) – not “cancellation”, but “canceled”. But after you introduce the action, you can refer to it with a noun.
• Avoid too many negations.
• If you write about why something is so, don’t spend too much time writing about why it is not.

On Writing Well – By William Zinsser

• Writing is a craft. You need to sit down every day and practice your craft.
• You should re-write and polish your prose a lot.
• Throw out all the clutter. Don’t keep it because you like it. Aim for readability.
• Look at the best examples of English literature . There’s hardly any needless garbage there.
• Use shorter expressions. Don’t add extra words that don’t bring any value to your work.
• Don’t use pompous language. Use simple language and say plainly what’s going on (“because” equals “because”).
• The media and politics are full of cluttered prose (because it helps them to cover up for their mistakes).
• You can’t add style to your work (and especially, don’t add fancy words to create an illusion of style). That will look fake. You need to develop a style.
• Write in the “I” mode. Write to a friend or just for yourself. Show your personality. There is a person behind the writing.
• Choose your words carefully. Use the dictionary to learn different shades of meaning.
• Remember about phonology. Make music with words .
• The lead is essential. Pull the reader in. Otherwise, your article is dead.
• You don’t have to make the final judgment on any topic. Just pick the right angle.
• Do your research. Not just obvious research, but a deep one.
• When it’s time to stop, stop. And finish strong. Think about the last sentence. Surprise them.
• Use quotations. Ask people. Get them talking.
• If you write about travel, it must be significant to the reader. Don’t bother with the obvious. Choose your words with special care. Avoid travel clichés at all costs. Don’t tell that the sand was white and there were rocks on the beach. Look for the right detail.
• If you want to learn how to write about art, travel, science, etc. – read the best examples available. Learn from the masters.
• Concentrate on one big idea (“Let’s not go peeing down both legs”).
• “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.”
• One very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What the piece is about?”)

Now immerse yourself in the world of essays

By reading the essays from the list above, you’ll become a better writer , a better reader, but also a better person. An essay is a special form of writing. It is the only literary form that I know of that is an absolute requirement for career or educational advancement. Nowadays, you can use an AI essay writer or an AI essay generator that will get the writing done for you, but if you have personal integrity and strong moral principles, avoid doing this at all costs. For me as a writer, the effect of these authors’ masterpieces is often deeply personal. You won’t be able to find the beautiful thoughts they contain in any other literary form. I hope you enjoy the read and that it will inspire you to do your writing. This list is only an attempt to share some of the best essays available online. Next up, you may want to check the list of magazines and websites that accept personal essays .

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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The Best Book I Have Ever Read. (Essay)

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From ur unsurpassed description of the book u made me luv the book! heheh! I am very eager to read the book! Marvellous descriptive writer! - Joony ( as usual :p )

Thx and I know if you read the whole book you will feel you are in a Recycle World!

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About the first book I read

IELTS essay About the first book I read

• The government spends about 220 million pounds a year supporting museums and art galleries in the UK, and a similar amount subsidising the visual and performing arts. This is a huge sum to spend on minority interests, and the money would be better spent on more important things. It should be up to people who enjoy cultural attractions to pay for them. Some articles have reported that the UK government invests millions of dollars a year in museums and galleries, spending less money on visuals and performing arts. I agree that this is beneficial in some ways, I believe that money should be spent on essentials. Museum preserves history and it has e ...
• Some people think that the best way to reduce time spent time in traveling to work is to replace parks and gardens close to City Center with apartment building for commuters, but others disagree discuss both views and give your own In the fast-paced world, relaxing our body and mind is essential because the whole body procedure is dependent on it. Most echelons of the society reckon that public parks and gardens are the greatest method to relax rather than time spending on traveling because parts are easily available near the ...
• Because of the pressure of new subjects such as business studies, many schools have dropped sport of physical education (PE) from the curriculum. How important is sport or PE in a young person's education? In today's modern world, the incorporation of career-oriented subjects such as Business studies in the educational system has removed Physical Education (PE). This is a very big threat to the lives of our younger generations. According to the latest survey in schools and colleges, students are more ...
• People nowadays work hard to buy more things. This has made our live more comfortable, but many traditional values and customs have been lost a and this is a pity, to want extend During those days, the living standard for human beings have significantly increased, modern technologies benefits normal lives. However people purchase goods beyond their needs, causing the valuable customs faded. I completely agree with this view. As employees work harder, their income will incre ...
• In today's competitive world, many families find it necessary for both parents to en to work. While some say the children in these families benefit from the additional income, others feel they lack support because of their parents' absence. What are your opinions on this? The problem of children lacks care has been more note in society. People usually say parents should take the most responsibility for young children, but there are many reasons make the situation out of control. Whole family suffered by busy life and less love. First, why both folks should have jobs ...
• e live today in an electronic information age. It is easier to be connected by technology yet many people seem to no closer to feeling happy in their lives. it is real that we are living in the era of electronic information that we can’t doubt that it is easier to be connected to with technology; however, the involvement of technology still left many people left to live no closer to feeling happy. This essay will discuss these problems. Firstly, nowada ...
• The youth in many countries are unemployed and unskilled, while at the same time, the military services are in need of people. Compulsory military service is beneficial and necessary. with this statement? There is no denying that in most of the countries people, especially adolescents prefer to avoid the military service and start thinking to be part of the work force without having any experience or studies. I strongly agree with the idea of having mandatory military service can bring many benefits ...
• The number of books that were borrowed in four different months in 2014 from four village libraries, and the pie chart shows the percentage of books, by type, that were borrowed over this time. The two sets of data illustrate the quantity of books checked-out in various libraries, during the months of June, July, August and September; additionally depicting the types of books borrowed by percentage. Overall, Sutton Wood’s library had mayor fluctuations, in contrary to the other three whom ...
• An international language would remove one of the main differences separating people of different nationalities, and this would lead to greater international understanding and cooperation. There should be one international language that everyone agrees to learn and speak There are about over a hundred different languages in the world. Every country has its unique language related to either their culture or religon or maybe both. However, in order to comunicate with the rest of the world there. has to be one language that everyone should learn and speak Nevertheless, ...
• Violence in playgrounds is increasing. However, it is important that parents should teach children not to hit back at bullies. Discuss this view and give your own opinion. In recent years violence and bullying have become a serious issues especially between teenagers. We can see that these problems are going up not only among young people but also adults. Parents have different ways to educate their children how to deal with it in case they face it. Schools can be re ...
• Air transport is increasingly used to export fruit and vegetables to countries where they cannot be grown or are out of season. Do the benefits of this trend outweigh the drawbacks? With the growth in aviation, many countries now choose this mode of transport to export food such as fruit and vegetables to places where they are not in season or cannot be grown. I would argue that this has more positive than negative effects. The first positive effect is that it helps local farm ...
• Write a letter to the editor to give your opinion about a magazine that you purchased. Include Why you bought it What you liked and disliked about it Suggestions for improvement Dear editer I've purchased few days ago, your feetball magazine via your website. I received the magine yesterday and I finished reading it this morning, I'm writing you this letter to give you seme foodback I am a football fan and I really enjoy reading feetball news. I have been following footba ...

My Favorite Book Essay

100 words on my favorite book essay.

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Books are excellent friends. They never leave your side. I enjoy reading books . Books have the ability to move people across the world without requiring them to leave their homes.

I have read so many books. But my favorite is Harry Potter. The author of this book is J.K. Rowling. These books are about the wizarding world. The Harry Potter series contains seven books. The Sorcerer’s Stone is my favorite book in the series.

It’s one of the most engaging and exciting books I’ve ever read. I’ve read all of the books in the series, and none of them have captured me as much as this one. I read them over and over because they never tire me.

150 Words on My Favorite Book Essay

Books are excellent friends. They never leave your side. I enjoy reading books.Books have the ability to move people across the world without requiring them to leave their homes. 

Books also help in the development of our creativity. My parents and instructors developed in me the habit of reading. They instilled in me the importance of reading.

I have read so many books. But my favorite is Harry Potter. The author of this book is J.K. Rowling. These books are about the wizarding world. The Harry Potter series contains seven books. The Sorcerer’s Stone is my favorite book from the series.

200 Words on My Favorite Book Essay

Books are great friends and they never leave your side. I really enjoy reading books. Books have the ability to move people across the world without requiring them to leave their homes.

Books also help in the development of our creativity. I was constantly encouraged to read by my parents and teachers.They instilled in me the importance of reading.

I have read so many books. But my favorite is Harry Potter. The author of this book is J.K. Rowling. These books are about the wizarding world. The Harry Potter series contains seven books. The first book in the series, The Sorcerer’s Stone, is my favorite from the series.

It’s one of the most exciting and fascinating books I’ve ever read. I’ve read all of the books in the series, and none of them have captured me as much as this one. I read them over and over because they never tire me.

There are so many things for young people to learn in this series. The book teaches us the importance of friendship. Throughout the novels, Harry, Hermoine, and Ron stayed together and never gave up. It taught me the real meaning of friendship. It also demonstrated to me that no one in the universe is perfect. Everyone has good and also evil inside them.

250 Words on My Favorite Book Essay

Books are great friends and they never leave your side. I really enjoy reading books.Books have the ability to move people across the world without requiring them to leave their homes. 

There are so many things for young people to learn in this series. The book teaches us the importance of friendship. Throughout the novels, Harry, Hermoine, and Ron stayed together and never gave up. It taught me the real meaning of friendship.

It also demonstrated to me that no one in the universe is perfect. Everyone has good and also evil inside them. The series’ most flawed characters, such as Snape, had goodness among them.

Similarly, how the nicest one’s character, like Dumbledore, had some bad traits. So it all depends on whom you want to be

300 Words on My Favorite Book Essay

Books are great friends, and they never leave your side. I really enjoy reading books.Books have the ability to move people across the world without requiring them to leave their homes. 

Similarly, how the nicest one’s character, like Dumbledore, had some bad traits. So it all depends on whom you want to be This book changed my attitude toward people and taught me to be more considerate.

Finally, these books showed me what real hope is. It taught me that there is hope at the end of the road, and these are just a few of the most significant and intriguing lessons I took away from Harry Potter.

We have an Essay on every topic, Check the complete list here . If you are Studying in Matric Free Video Lectures of Maths , Physics and English are here, and if we got you covered for I.COM Business Maths also. 

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Writingskills

6 Paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’

A Book I Have Recently Read: Books are the best resources of people. With which no earthly wealth can be compared. By reading books we can keep our mind healthy and happy. A good book opens the eyes of the human mind as well as expands and develops the knowledge and intellect and helps to light the mind. Many people like to read story books or other kinds of books. Reading books is a good habit. ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’ is an important paragraph for the students. In this post I have presented six paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’.

A Book I Have Recently Read

Reading books is my passion. I have recently read a book named “ Pather Panchali “. It was written by famous writer Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay. The novel is about a little village boy named Apu. The main characters of the book are Apu, Durga, Harihar and Sarbajaya. Harihar and Sarbajaya, a rustic couple, spent their days in miserable distress. But they dreamt of a rosy future. Apu and Durga are their children. Durga died a premature death. It was a great shock to the family. One cannot shed tears when one reads about the death of Apu’s dearest sister Durga. The novel gives us a very living picture of the beauty of a remote village in Bengal. The story reminds us of the hardship of the thousands of poor and helpless people of our country. Really it is an immortal creation of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

Also read :  Paragraph on Black Fungus or Mucormycosis

I have little time to read books other than school books. But l heard the story of “Ramer Sumati” written by Saratchandra Chattapadhyay from my grandpa. The story charmed me very much. Recently I managed to have a copy of the book which I finished in a single sitting. It is entirely the story of a joint family of rural Bengal. Here are a few principal characters – Ramlal, the hero, Shyamlal, his step-brother and Narayani, the wife of Shyamlal. Apart from them there are Shyamla’s son and Digambari, his mother-in-law. Ramlal lost his mother when he was only two and a half years old. Narayani, the sister-in-law brought him up with all motherly love and affection. Digambari could not tolerate the sweet relationship between the two. Ramlal was very wayward and that was at the root of all problems. The ancestral home was partitioned and Ramlal was separated much to the pain of Narayani. The author’s portrayal of the characters of Ramlal and Narayani is simply unique. Details of the book cannot be given in this short span. But everybody should go through the book whenever he gets a chance.

Also read : Paragraph on Corona Virus (Covid-19)

I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. I am a big fan of cricket as well. My father recently gifted me the autobiography of Sachin Tendulkar “Sachin Tendulkar – Playing It My Way” on my birthday. The book is really very interesting. Sachin Tendulkar is not only a great player but also has become an icon. So a chance to peek into the life of such an icon is always sought after. The chapters describe all the important events of his life. The reader is bound to respect the legend more after going through the book. The book not only brings out Sachin’s passion for cricket but also reveals how caring a father and gentle son he is. I will cherish the experience of reading the book forever and this will be a guide force in my life. I wish to read it once again in future.

  A Book I Have Recently Read

Reading books is my passion. I have recently read William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. It is the last play of the great playwright, which was written in 1611 at Stafford. Prospero was a learned man. He did not like to rule Milan as merely a Duke. His power was his wisdom. His brother, Antonio, took advantage of this craving for knowledge and conspired to drive him away from Milan with the help of the king of Naples, Alonoso.

Prospero and his daughter eventually took shelter in an alien island. It was a mystic land of which Prospero was little aware. Caliban was an evil spirit which was living in that island. Gradually, Prospero dominated Caliban and became a supreme power by way of his white magic. Dr. Faustus of Marlowe exercised necromancy, but Prospero used his magic for the welfare of the world. Hence his magic was a boon not a bane. His daughter, Miranda, was a lovable and beautiful young lady. Caliban wanted to seduce Miranda, but in vain. At last Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, came to the mysterious land. Miranda was very much appalled to see a beautiful young man for the first time. Seeing Ferdinand, she cried out, “O brave new world.” Later Miranda and Ferdinand fell in love. Prospero wanted to test Ferdinand’s devotion to his daughter. Ferdinand won the mind of Prospero. Using his white magic, Prospero taught everyone including his brother good lessons. Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian realized their misdeed. Gonzalo, who helped Prospero once to escape from his cruel brother, was rewarded.

Finally, everyone was reconciled. Prospero returned to Milan with his daughter and he freed Ariel, the spirit which helped Prospero in fulfilling his desires while living in the alien island. The happy reunion of the play implies the fact that Prospero is a major figure who by way of using his white magic helps everyone reconcile in spite of shortcomings. Honesty and goodness have been rewarded. I felt much aesthetic pleasure while reading the play. Shakespeare’s language, his style, above all, his blending of tragedy and comedy gave to my mind a soothing effect which I cannot forget ever.

Books are our best friends. Even in today’s world of internet and mobile, the importance of books cannot be ignored. I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. Recently I have read Bibhutibhushan’s classic novel ‘Chander Pahar’. I loved the book so much that I have lost count of the number of times I flipped through the book even after I had finished reading it.

The book ‘Chander Pahar’ records the adventures of Shankar, the main character of the novel. Shankar, a young bengali boy, faces many adventures in Africa where he goes in connection with his job on the railways. He encounters many ferocious animals like lions, black mamba etc. But the real adventure begins when Shankar accompanies Diago Alverage, a European adventurer, to the Kilimanjaro mountain in search of diamonds. In the course of the events Diago gets killed by a terrible animal called ‘Buniyp’ and Shankar is left all alone in that unknown land of adversity and danger. But he braves it with extraordinary courage and valour.

After a great struggle, he is saved from the desert. Shankar is the embodiment of courage. I love the character very much. I am attracted by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s great narrative skill. He makes the description of African jungles and Shankar’s adventures alive with his narrative skill. Author’s creativity makes Shankar’s character one of the most popular characters of Bengali literature. Whenever I read the novel, I find myself engrossed in it. My mind also travels with Shankar in the land of Africa and feels the adventure. This is why ‘Chander Pahar’ holds such a special place in my mind.

Books are our best friends. Even in today’s world of internet and mobile, the importance of books cannot be ignored. I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. Of all the books I have read, I like ‘The Story of My Life’ by Helen Keller the most. The episode centres round the hard struggle of life of Helen Keller. She writes with a natural ease and power, hardly equaled by any other writer of that category.  In this book we see that Helen Keller became blind and deaf after a serious illness in her childhood. However, the day when Miss Sullivan came to her as her teacher was the most memorable day in her life. After a long hard process Helen learnt to read, in raised letters in Braille method . She learnt to write also in a special type of typewriter. In the book ‘The Story of My Life’ an account of the first twenty two years of Helen Keller’s life has been given. During this time she came into contact with many noble and affectionate persons. In her autobiography Helen describes her experiences with so much ease and sincerity in such a lucid style that it cannot but arouse love and wonder for her. But the most striking feature of this book is her strong will and iron determination to cross all the hurdles of a handicapped person in her own life. And therefore, it has the universal appeal to all the readers throughout the world. Everybody should go through the book whenever he gets a chance.

Paragraph on ‘My Hobby”

Paragraph On ‘My Aim In Life’

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8 thoughts on “6 Paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’”

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Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77

The writer of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 – known for his stylised postmodernist fiction – has died from complications of lung cancer

‘A literary voice for the ages’: Paul Auster remembered by Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates and more

Paul Auster – a life in quotes

Paul Auster – a life in pictures

Paul Auster, the author of 34 books including the acclaimed New York Trilogy, has died aged 77.

The author died on Tuesday due to complications from lung cancer, the Guardian has been told.

Auster became known for his “highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting,” the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in 2010.

His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from early novels appearing again in later ones.

“Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature,” wrote critic Michael Dirda in 2008. “His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear.”

The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight when he missed out on getting an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his parents had carried a pencil to the game. From then on, he took a pencil everywhere. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay .

While hiking during a summer camp aged 14, Auster witnessed a boy inches away from him getting struck by lightning and dying instantly – an event that he said “absolutely changed” his life and that he thought about “every day”. Chance, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” wrote the critic Laura Miller in 2017. A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1: one of the book’s four versions of protagonist Archie Ferguson runs under a tree at a summer camp and is killed by a falling branch when lightning strikes.

Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked a variety of jobs, including translation, and lived with his “on-again off-again” girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met while at college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly afterwards.

In January 1979, Auster’s father, Samuel, died, and the event became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. In it, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother, who was acquitted on grounds of insanity. “A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man,” Auster wrote in reference to his father, with whom he described himself having an “un-movable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall”.

Auster’s breakthrough came with the 1985 publication of City of Glass, the first novel in his New York trilogy. While the books are ostensibly mystery stories, Auster wielded the form to ask existential questions about identity. “The more [Auster’s detectives] stalk their eccentric quarry, the more they seem actually to be stalking the Big Questions – the implications of authorship, the enigmas of epistemology, the veils and masks of language,” wrote the critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff in 1987.

Auster published regularly throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, writing more than a dozen novels including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003). He also became involved in film, writing the screenplay for Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, for which he won the Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay in 1995.

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In 1981, Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt and they married the following year. In 1987 they had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor. Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, features a character called Iris Vegan, who is the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

Auster was better known in Europe than in his native United States: “Merely a bestselling author in these parts,” read a 2007 New York magazine article , “Auster is a rock star in Paris.” In 2006, he was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias prize for literature, and in 1993 he was given the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He was also a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In April 2022, Auster and Davis’s son, Daniel, died from a drug overdose. In March 2023, Hustvedt revealed that Auster was being treated for cancer after having been diagnosed the previous December. His final novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed septuagenarian writer, was published in October.

Auster is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.

• Paul Auster

More on this story

Paul Auster obituary

‘Getting a book idea feels like a buzz in the head’: Paul Auster – a life in quotes

Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation

‘This might be the last thing I ever write’: Paul Auster on cancer, connection and the fallacy of closure

Paul Auster: ‘The gun that killed my grandfather was the same gun that ruined my father’s life’

Baumgartner by Paul Auster review – love, ageing and loss

Paul Auster: ‘It’s distress that generates art’

Paul Auster: ‘I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'

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The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

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Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Last updated on May 31, 2022

The 40 Best Books About Writing: A Reading List for Authors

For this post, we’ve scoured the web (so you don’t have to) and asked our community of writers for recommendations on some indispensable books about writing. We've filled this list with dozens of amazing titles, all of which are great — but this list might seem intimidating. So for starters, here are our top 10 books about writing:

• On Writing by Stephen King
• The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig
• Dreyer’s Englis h by Benjamin Dreyer
• The Elements of Style by Strunk, White, and Kalman
• The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne
• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison
• How to Market a Book by Ricardo Fayet
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser

But if you're ready to get into the weeds, here are 40 of our favorite writing books.

Books about becoming a writer

1. on writing by stephen king.

Perhaps the most-cited book on this list, On Writing is part-memoir, part-masterclass from one of America’s leading authors. Come for the vivid accounts of his childhood and youth — including his extended "lost weekend" spent on alcohol and drugs in the 1980s. Stay for the actionable advice on how to use your emotions and experiences to kickstart your writing, hone your skills, and become an author. Among the many craft-based tips are King’s expert takes on plot, story, character, and more.

From the book: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” 

2. The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig

If you haven’t checked out Wendig’s personal blog, head over there now and bookmark it. Unfiltered, profane, and almost always right, Wendig’s become a leading voice among online writing communities in the past few years. In The Kick-Ass Writer , he offers over 1,000 pearls of wisdom for authors, ranging from express writing tips to guidance on getting published. Written to be read in short bursts, we’re sure he’d agree that this is the perfect bathroom book for writers.

From the book: “I have been writing professionally for a lucky-despite-the-number 13 years. Not once — seriously, not once ever — has anyone ever asked me where I got my writing degree… Nobody gives two ferrets fornicating in a filth-caked gym sock whether or not you have a degree… The only thing that matters is, Can you write well? ” 

3. Find Your Voice by Angie Thomas

Taking advice from famous authors is not about imitation, but about finding your own voice . Take it from someone who knows: Thomas is the New York Times #1 Bestselling author of The Hate U Give , On the Come Up , and Concrete Rose . While she’s found her calling in YA literature , she has plenty of insight into finding your own voice in your genre of choice. Written in the form of a guided journal, this volume comes with step-by-step instructions, writing prompts, and exercises especially aimed at helping younger creatives develop the strength and skills to realize their vision.

From the book: “Write fearlessly. Write what is true and real to you.” 

4. The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner

Since its publication in 2000, The Forest for the Trees has remained an essential resource for authors at various stages in their careers. As an editor, Lerner gives advice not only on producing quality content, but also on how to build your career as an author and develop a winning routine — like how writers can be more productive in their creative process, how to get published , and how to publish well . 

From the book: “The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”

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5. How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen

From the book: “Great writers can be inhibiting, and maybe after one has read a Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James one can’t escape imitat­ing them; but more often such writers are inspiring.”

6. Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

Smith is well-known for her fiction, but she is also a prolific essay writer. In Feel Free , she has gathered several essays on recent cultural and political developments and combined them with experiences from her own life and career. In “The I Who Is Not Me”, she explores how her own lived experience comes into play in her fiction writing, and how she manages to extrapolate that to comment on contemporary social contexts, discussing race, class, and ethnicity.

From the book: “Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”

Books about language and style 

7. dreyer’s english by benjamin dreyer.

A staple book about writing well, Dreyer’s English serves as a one-stop guide to proper English, based on the knowledge that Dreyer — a senior copy editor at Random House — has accumulated throughout his career. From punctuation to tricky homophones, passive voice, and commas, the goal of these tools should be to facilitate effective communication of ideas and thoughts. Dreyer delivers this and then some, but not without its due dosage of humor and informative examples. 

From the book: “A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection.”

8. The Elements of Style (Illustrated) by William Strunk, Jr., E. B. White, and Maira Kalman

A perfect resource for visual learners, this illustrated edition of The Elements of Style has taken the classic style manual to a new, more accessible level but kept its main tenet intact: make every word tell. The written content by Strunk and White has long been referred to as an outline of the basic principles of style. Maira Kalman’s illustrations elevate the experience and make it a feast for both the mind and the eye. 

From the book: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

9. Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale

If you’re looking to bring a bit of spunk into your writing, copy editor Constance Hale may hold the key . Whether you’re writing a work-related email or the next rap anthem, she has one goal: to make creative communication available to everyone by dispelling old writing myths and making every word count. Peppered with writing prompts and challenges, this book will have you itching to put pen to paper.

From the book: “Verbose is not a synonym for literary.”

10. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

Combining entertainment with intellectual pursuit, Pinker, a cognitive scientist and dictionary consultant, explores and rethinks language usage in the 21st century . With illustrative examples of both great and not-so-great linguistic constructions, Pinker breaks down the art of writing and gives a gentle but firm nudge in the right direction, towards coherent yet stylish prose. This is not a polemic on the decay of the English language, nor a recitation of pet peeves, but a thoughtful, challenging, and practical take on the science of communication. 

From the book: “Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing—and why should we care?”

11. Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

From the book: “A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Books about story structure

12. save the cat by blake snyder.

Best known as a screenwriting manual, Save the Cat! is just as often named by authors as one of their most influential books about writing. The title comes from the tried-and-true trope of the protagonist doing something heroic in the first act (such as saving a cat) in order to win over the audience. Yes, it might sound trite to some — but others swear by its bulletproof beat sheet. More recently, there has been Save the Cat! Writes a Novel , which tailors its principles specifically to the literary crowd. (For a concise breakdown of the beat sheet, check this post out!)

From the book: “Because liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story.” 

13. The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

Shawn Coyne is a veteran editor with over 25 years of publishing experience, and he knows exactly what works and what doesn’t in a story — indeed, he’s pretty much got it down to a science. The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know outlines Coyne’s original “Story Grid” evaluation technique, which both writers and editors can use to appraise, revise, and ultimately improve their writing (in order to get it ready for publication). Coyne and his friend Tim Grahl also co-host the acclaimed Story Grid podcast , another great resource for aspiring writers.

From the book: “The Story Grid is a tool with many applications. It pinpoints problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer… it is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attack drawer, and it can inspire an original creation.”

14. Story Structure Architect by Victoria Schmidt

For those who find the idea of improvising utterly terrifying and prefer the security of structures, this book breaks down just about every kind of story structure you’ve ever heard of. Victoria Schmidt offers no less than fifty-five different creative paths for your story to follow — some of which are more unconventional, or outright outlandish than others. The level of detail here is pretty staggering: Schmidt goes into the various conflicts, subplots, and resolutions these different story structures entail — with plenty of concrete examples! Suffice to say that no matter what kind of story you’re writing, you’ll find a blueprint for it in Story Structure Architect .

From the book: “When you grow up in a Westernized culture, the traditional plot structure becomes so embedded in your subconscious that you may have to work hard to create a plot structure that deviates from it… Understand this and keep your mind open when reading [this book]. Just because a piece doesn’t conform to the model you are used to, does not make it bad or wrong.”

15. The Writer's Journey  by Christopher Vogler

Moving on, we hone in on the mythic structure. Vogler’s book, originally published in 1992, is now a modern classic of writing advice; though intended as a screenwriting textbook, its contents apply to any story of mythic proportions. In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers , Vogler takes a page (literally) from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces to ruminate upon the most essential narrative structures and character archetypes of the writing craft. So if you’re thinking of drawing up an epic fantasy series full of those tropes we all know and love, this guide should be right up your alley.

From the book: “The Hero’s Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design… It’s difficult to avoid the sensation that the Hero’s Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an external reality, a Platonic ideal form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highly varied copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spirit of the form.”

16. Story Genius by Lisa Cron

From the book: “We don't turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.”

17. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

More than just a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the Booker Prize, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a distillation of the MFA class on Russian short stories that Saunders has been teaching. Breaking down narrative functions and why we become immersed in a story, this is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand and nurture our continued need for fiction.

From the book: “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?”

Books about overcoming obstacles as a writer

18. bird by bird by anne lamott .

Like Stephen King’s book about writing craft, this work from acclaimed novelist and nonfiction writer Anne Lamott also fuses elements of a memoir with invaluable advice on the writer’s journey. Particularly known for popularizing the concept of “shitty first drafts”, Bird by Bird was recently recommended by editor Jennifer Hartmann in her Reedsy Live webinar for its outlook take on book writing. She said, “This book does exactly what it says it will do: it teaches you to become a better writer. [Lamott] is funny and witty and very knowledgeable.”

From the book: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

19. Take Off Your Pants by Libbie Hawker 

From the book: “When it comes to the eternal quandary of pantsing or plotting, you can keep a foot in each camp. But if your goals will require you to write with speed and confidence, an effective outline will be your best friend.”

20. Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith 

And for those who eschew structure altogether, we’ll now refer you to this title from profile science fiction author Dean Wesley Smith . Having authored a number of official Star Trek novels, he definitely knows what he’s talking about when he encourages writers to go boldly into the unknown with an approach to writing books that doesn’t necessarily involve an elaborate plan. It might not be your action plan, but it can be a fresh perspective to get out of the occasional writer’s block .

From the book: “Imagine if every novel you picked up had a detailed outline of the entire plot… Would you read the novel after reading the outline? Chances are, no. What would be the point? You already know the journey the writer is going to take you on. So, as a writer, why do an outline and then have to spend all that time creating a book you already know?”

21. No Plot, No Problem by Chris Baty

If you’re procrastinating to the point where you haven’t even started your novel yet, NaNo founder Chris Baty is your guy! No Plot, No Problem is a “low-stress, high-velocity” guide to writing a novel in just 30 days (yup, it’s great prep for the NaNoWriMo challenge ). You’ll get tons of tips on how to survive this rigorous process, from taking advantage of your initial momentum to persisting through moments of doubt . Whether you’re participating in everyone’s favorite November write-a-thon or you just want to bang out a novel that’s been in your head forever, Baty will help you cross that elusive finish line.

From the book: “A rough draft is best written in the steam-cooker of an already busy life. If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal.”

22. The 90-Day Novel by Alan Watt

And for those who think 30 days is a bit too steam cooker-esque, there’s always Alan Watt’s more laid-back option. In The 90-Day Novel , Watt provides a unique three-part process to assist you with your writing. The first part provides assistance in developing your story’s premise, the second part helps you work through obstacles to execute it, and the third part is full of writing exercises to unlock the “primal forces” of your story — aka the energy that will invigorate your work and incite readers to devour it like popcorn at the movies.

From the book: “Why we write is as important as what we write. Grammar, punctuation, and syntax are fairly irrelevant in the first draft. Get the story down… fast. Get out of your head, so you can surprise yourself on the page.”

23. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

If you feel like you’re constantly in the trenches of your “inner creative battle,” The War of Art is the book for you. Pressfield emphasizes the importance of breaking down creative barriers — what he calls “Resistance” — in order to defeat your demons (i.e. procrastination, self-doubt, etc.) and fulfill your potential. Though some of his opinions are no doubt controversial (he makes repeated claims that almost anything can be procrastination, including going to the doctor), this book is the perfect remedy for prevaricating writers who need a little bit of tough love.

From the book: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

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Books about writing as a lifestyle and career

24. steal like an artist by austin kleon.

As Kleon notes in the first section of Steal Like an Artist , this title obviously doesn’t refer to plagiarism. Rather, it acknowledges that art cannot be created in a vacuum, and encourages writers (and all other artists) to be open and receptive to all sources of inspiration. By “stealing like an artist,” writers can construct stories that already have a baseline of familiarity for readers, but with new twists that keep them fresh and exciting .

From the book: “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”

25. Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison

From the book: “A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

26. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

No matter what stage you’re at in your writing career, Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones will help you write more skillfully and creatively. With suggestions, encouragement, and valuable advice on the many aspects of the writing craft, Goldberg doesn’t shy away from making the crucial connection between writing and adding value to your life. Covering a range of topics including taking notes of your initial thoughts, listening, overcoming doubt, choosing where to write, and the selection of your verbs, this guide has plenty to say about the minute details of writing, but excels at exploring the author life.

From the book: “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

27. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

What does it take to become a great author? According to the beloved writer Ray Bradbury , it takes zest, gusto, curiosity, as well as a spirit of adventure. Sharing his wisdom and experiences as one of the most prolific writers in America, Bradbury gives plenty of practical tips and tricks on how to develop ideas, find your voice, and create your own style in this thoughtful volume. In addition to that, this is also an insight into the life and mind of this prolific writer, and a celebration of the act of writing. 

From the book: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!”

28. The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison

One of the most common dilemmas an author faces is the struggle between spontaneity and control. Literary endeavors need those unexpected light-bulb moments, but a book will never be finished if you rely solely on inspiration. In The Kite and the String , Mattison has heard your cry for help and developed a guide for balancing these elements throughout the different stages of writing a novel or a memoir. Sure, there may be language and grammar rules that govern the way you write, but letting a bit of playfulness breathe life into your writing will see it take off to a whole new level. On the other hand, your writing routine, solitude, audience, and goal-setting will act as the strings that keep you from floating too far away. 

From the book: "Don’t make yourself miserable wishing for a kind of success that you wouldn’t enjoy if you had it."

29. How to Become a Successful Indie Author by Craig Martelle

This one’s for all the indie authors out there! Even if you’ve already self-published a book , you can still learn a lot from this guide by Craig Martelle , who has dozens of indie books — “over two and a half million words,” as he puts it — under his belt. With patience and expertise, Martelle walks you through everything you need to know: from developing your premise to perfecting your writing routine, to finally getting your work to the top of the Amazon charts.

From the book: “No matter where you are on your author journey, there’s always a new level you can reach. Roll up your sleeves, because it’s time to get to work.”

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30. How to Market a Book by Ricardo Fayet 

From the book: “Here’s the thing: authors don’t find readers; readers find books . [...] Marketing is not about selling your book to readers. It’s about getting readers to find it.”

31. Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

The full title of Handley’s all-inclusive book on writing is actually Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content — which should tell you something about its broad appeal. Not only does Handley have some great ideas on how to plan and produce a great story, but she also provides tips on general content writing, which comes in handy when it’s time to build your author platform or a mailing list to promote your book. As such, Everybody Writes is nothing like your other books on novel writing — it’ll make you see writing in a whole new light.

From the book: “In our world, many hold a notion that the ability to write, or write well, is a gift bestowed on a chosen few. That leaves us thinking there are two kinds of people: the writing haves — and the hapless, for whom writing well is a hopeless struggle, like trying to carve marble with a butter knife. But I don’t believe that, and neither should you.” 

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Books on writing poetry 

32. madness, rack, and honey by mary ruefle.

With a long history of crafting and lecturing about poetry, Ruefle invites the reader of Madness, Rack, and Honey to immerse themselves into its beauty and magic. In a powerful combination of lectures and musings, she expertly explores the mind and craft of writers while excavating the magical potential of poetry. Often a struggle between giving and taking, poetry is, according to Ruefle, a unique art form that reveals the innermost workings of the human heart.

From the book: “In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again”

33. Threads by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya, and Bhanu Kapil

If you’re looking for something that explores the philosophical aspects of writing, Threads asks big questions about writing and the position of the writer in an industry that has largely excluded marginalized voices. Where does the writer exist in relation to its text and, particularly in the case of poetry, who is the “I”? Examining the common white, British, male lens, this collection of short essays will make it hard for you not to critically consider your own perceptions and how they affect your writing process.

From the book: “It is impossible to consider the lyric without fully interrogating its inherent promise of universality, its coded whiteness.”

34. The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

Despite its eye-catching title, this short essay is actually a defense of poetry . Lerner begins with his own hatred of the art form, and then moves on to explore this love-hate dichotomy that actually doesn’t seem to be contradictory. Rather, such a multitude of emotions might be one of the reasons that writers and readers alike turn to it. With its ability to evoke feelings and responses through word-play and meter, poetry has often been misconceived as inaccessible and elitist; this is a call to change that perception. 

From the book: “All I ask the haters — and I, too, am one — is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.”

35. Poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge

If you’ve ever felt that the mysterious workings of poetry are out of your reach and expressly not for you, Wooldridge is here to tell you that anyone who wants to can write poetry . An experienced workshop leader, she will help you find your inner voice and to express it through the written word. Giving you advice on how to think, use your senses, and practice your writing, Wooldrige will have you putting down rhyme schemes before you know it. 

From the book: “Writing a poem is a form of listening, helping me discover what's wrong or frightening in my world as well as what delights me.”

36. Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison

From the book: “Don't be afraid to write crap — it makes the best fertilizer. The more of it you write, the better your chances are of growing something wonderful.”

Books about writing nonfiction

37. on writing well by william zinsser.

Going strong with its 30th-anniversary edition, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is an evergreen resource for nonfiction writers which breaks down the fundamental principles of written communication. As a bonus, the insights and guidelines in this book can certainly be applied to most forms of writing, from interviewing to camp-fire storytelling. Beyond giving tips on how to stay consistent in your writing and voice, how to edit, and how to avoid common pitfalls, Zinsser can also help you grow as a professional writer, strengthening your career and taking steps in a new direction. 

From the book: “Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.”

38. Essays by Lydia Davis

Ironically enough, this rather lengthy book is a celebration of brevity. As one of the leading American voices in flash-fiction and short-form writing, Davis traces her literary roots and inspirations in essays on everything, ranging from the mastodonic work of Proust to minimalism. In both her translations and her own writing, she celebrates experimental writing that stretches the boundaries of language. Playing with the contrast between what is said and what is not, this collection of essays is another tool to the writing shed to help you feel and use the power of every word you write.

From the book: “Free yourself of your device, for at least certain hours of the day — or at the very least one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people, and without a device that is turned on. Learn to experience the purity of that kind of concentration. Develop focus, learn to focus intently on one thing, uninterrupted, for a long time.”

39. Essayism by Brian Dillon

In this volume, Dillon explores the often overlooked genre of essay writing and its place in literature’s past, present, and future. He argues that essays are an “experiment in attention” but also highlights how and why certain essays have directly impacted the development of the cultural and political landscape, from the end of the Middle Ages until the present day. At its heart, despite its many forms, subject areas, and purposes, essayism has its root in self-exploration. Dip in and out of Dillon’s short texts to find inspiration for your own nonfiction writing.

From the book: “What exactly do I mean, even, by 'style'? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush.”

40. Naked, Drunk, and Writing by Adair Lara

From the book: “Write it down. Whatever it is, write it down. Chip it into marble. Type it into Microsoft Word. Spell it out in seaweeds on the shore. We are each of us an endangered species, delicate as unicorns.”

With a few of these books in your arsenal, you’ll be penning perfect plots in no time! And if you’re interested in learning more about the editing process, check these books on editing out as well!

ZUrlocker says:

11/03/2019 – 19:46

I'm familiar with several of these books. But for new authors, I urge you caution. It is very tempting to read so many books about writing that you never get around to writing. (I did this successfully for many years!) So I will suggest paring it down to just two books: Stephen King on Writing and Blake Snyder Save the Cat. Snyder's book is mostly about screenwriting, so you could also consider Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. Best of luck!

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The 7 Best Books I’ve Ever Read About Writing

Writing has helped me to become better at thinking, speaking, and making decisions. And I’ve used books about writing to improve myself.

I firmly believe that anything worthwhile in your career should start with writing.

From creating resumes to business plans. If you don’t start with writing, you often lack clarity in your messaging.

And that was also the story of my life. In fact, it still is. Most people never think about it, but it’s damned hard to express yourself. Do you have a clear answer to questions like:

• What’s the number one priority in your career?
• Why did you apply for this job?
• What does your business exactly do?

Often, we just come up with the first thing that pops up in our mind.

And after a barrage of meaningless words, we think, “what on earth did I just say?”

I’ve made a list of the best books I’ve read on writing. I must say that I don’t consider myself a writer first . Above everything else, I’m an entrepreneur. I like to share stories.

That’s why this list is more geared towards people who want to write better blogs, non-fiction, emails, cover letters, about pages, etc. Not people who want to write the next The Great Gatsby. I hope you find a book that’s relevant to you.

1. On Writing by Stephen King

Stephen King is one hell of a thinker and writer. And the man churns out books like it’s nothing. Only that fact makes you want to read more about how his mind works.

If you write, and you haven’t read On Writing, it’s time to stop everything you do and get that book. My favorite Stephen King quote?

Probably this:

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”

If you want to do something, don’t be such a weasel. Just start already.

2. On Writing Well by William Zinsser

A solid book with solid advice about writing non-fiction. When you start reading this book, you immediately can tell the man knows his business. And he knows it well.

Zinsser, a respected writer, and teacher, talks about the principles and methods of writing in this book. But he also shares tips about different writing forms such as memoirs, sports, business, and humor.

This is a valuable book for all people who want to improve their writing and messaging.

3. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White

I like the simplicity of this book. It’s short, simple, and to the point. This is more of a technical book with style suggestions about the English language.

In this little book, Strunk and White do a great job of demonstrating the most common style errors.

Style is such a complicated thing that I try to refer to this book often. One of my favorite pieces of advice from this book is this:

“Write in a way that comes naturally.”

4. Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips

There’s no point in denying it; Hemingway was one of the best writers in modern history.

And this little book is a collection of letters he sent to his editor, friends, and other authors.

He didn’t want them to be published initially. Hemingway believed that there’s no pride in writing about writing.

This book is not only packed with writing advice. It also shows Hemingway’s character. He was a funny guy who took satisfaction in what he did.

5. Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit by Steven Pressfield

Pressfield is one of my favorite writers. The War Of Art is a classic.

In this book, he talks about why no one cares about your shit. If you’re trying to write and no one’s reading it, read this book.

Pressfield has a background in advertising. And you can tell. He knows how to sell his shit without being annoying.

We live in a world where everyone is trying to sell us all kinds of things. And it’s annoying. This book is essential if you want to stand out in an information-flooded world.

6. The Writers Journey by Christopher Vogler

The Writers Journey is the most in-depth book on this list. It’s also the most comprehensive book I’ve read on storytelling. It’s also a very practical book.

It’s more like a textbook that you want to take notes on. Vogler, a story consultant for major Hollywood film companies, talks about the relationship between mythology and storytelling in this book.

It’s a classic for screenwriters and playwrights. After reading this book, you’ll truly understand the art of storytelling.

However, putting this stuff into practice is another story. That takes a lot of practice.

7. Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy

I think too many people romanticize writing. But I don’t like to like to look at writing from a starving artist’s point of view.

In life, everything is business. And so is writing. If you don’t know how to sell your writing, no one will ever read it.

And one of the best books you can read about copywriting, selling, and advertising is Confessions Of An Advertising Man. Ogilvy doesn’t need an introduction.

The man is a legend. And this book is definitely worth your time.

Studying vs. Doing

I hope you pick up one of these books and read them, or maybe reread them. However, never read too much about writing.

Because writing is not something you study, it’s something you do .

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Book review: joseph epstein’s excellent ‘never say you’ve had a lucky life’.

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Looks can be deceiving. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The grass isn’t always greener. Insert your line here for responses to the presumption that someone has it better, or that some situation is better.

My comment as has always been that in looking at others who on the surface seem to have it all figured out, we ascribe perfection or near perfection to situations that aren’t as great as we imagine. As in, on the surface all marriages seem so loving, and all parents seem so confident and happy. Only for life to teach us that looks most certainly can be deceiving.

I found myself thinking about these things while reading the great Joseph Epstein’s excellent new memoir, Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . I’ve been reading Epstein’s fabulous columns in the Wall Street Journal for years, I’ve read one of his books (about charm, review here ) but plan to read many more, and I say this as a way of acknowledging that in reading him all of this time, I developed a perception of him that has run counter to my reply that an individual’s surface qualities rarely tell the whole story.

In my imagining, Epstein grew up in a house full of deep conversations about big ideas, that he got straight As in school before attending a prominent university of the Ivy League variety, and that he subsequently married one woman and raised with this woman really well-behaved, really wise kids. About Epstein, I assumed he’s lived a life free of the warts and bad decisions that shape the lives of so many. Epstein’s brilliant writing quite simply gave me the impression that he was different, that his life had been largely free of the personal frailty and failings that define the lives of so many.

Which is one of many reasons his memoir is so good. Underneath Epstein’s brilliance is a real person, someone whose actual life has been reflective of my view that it’s a mistake to ascribe excellent decisions, ease, and eternal happiness to most anyone. Charmed lives are a myth. Memory says that in a book review that Epstein himself once wrote about a book covering the life of Cary Grant, that Epstein wrote something of a similar, knowing bent, that Grant’s life separate from the image wasn’t so great, nor was Cary Grant actually Cary Grant in the figurative sense. Finally getting to the point (?), I’d without thinking deeply about it thought that Epstein had lived the intellectual version of the life that people imagined Grant had lived.

In reality, and at risk of being seriously trite, life is real. It’s messy at times. While Epstein happily contends that his own life has been defined by “extraordinarily good luck, in the time in which I was born, in the parents to whom I was born, in my education, and much more,” all is perhaps not as it may seem? For instance, he writes that “my brother and I were never at the center of my mother’s or father’s lives,” and that “the parents of our generation were nowhere near so child-centered as subsequent generations of parents.” More on the latter in a bit.

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About his brother, Epstein somewhat casually notes that he hasn’t been in touch with him in years, and that his mother never read any of his books. To be clear, I’m not revealing these anecdotes to question the title of Epstein’s book, or his frequent assertions about a lucky life that continues to this day. I merely mention them as a way of hopefully bolstering Epstein’s point that even the very lucky lives have their serious warts, that all once again isn’t as it seems, but that the unfortunate, sad and tragic isn’t an excuse for individuals to wallow in what’s unfortunate. And this is true for everyone. In my case, I always knew I was at the center of the lives of my parents (born four and six years after Epstein), but would guess they’ve likely not read my books either!

Ok, but wasn’t Epstein raised by extreme intellectuals? It turns out no. While his father was a great salesman, and owned his own business such that the Chicagoland-based Epsteins were “petit bourgeois,” he didn’t grow up having discussions about War and Peace , or Crime and Punishment , or the deep thoughts of high-end policy writers. Epstein reports that “I have no recollection of ever having brought a book home to study,” and this reflected in his grades: at Nicholas Senn High School he recalls that he “rarely received a grade above a C.” During a senior year train trip to Washington, D.C., Epstein admits that “I never left the train to visit the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and other national buildings and monuments, but remained aboard with friends playing cards.”Most of Epstein’s intellectual evolution took place years after leaving home.

Back to his parents, business was on his father’s mind, including aphorisms like “Always keep a low overhead,” “Never run away from business,” and “You can’t argue with success.” Epstein argued with the latter while embracing the former (“I still find it hard to turn down a writing assignment” – he’ll be hearing from me…), plus they argued politics, including the merits (or lack thereof) of a balanced budget. Epstein’s father was in favor of balance, while his son was not. At least in his twenties. He concludes in his eighties that his father “turned out to be right: all things considered, balanced is better.” Epstein the writer should have stuck to his guns. It matters not a bit how wealth is extracted from the private sector (whether through taxes or borrowing), the only thing that matters is how much is extracted. In other words, an annual budget of $5 trillion that is in balance is much more freedom sapping and economically crippling than an annual budget of $1 trillion where $500 billion of it is borrowed.

As for Epstein’s mother, she took what Epstein describes as “the commercial course”: typing, dictation, bookkeeping, etc. Which means Epstein’s mother took practical courses, and realistically the only relevant ones. I’m sorry, but learnedness is a choice, not an effect of education. Typing remains the most valuable high school course I ever took.

Even at University of Illinois, Epstein was hardly a deep-in-thought type. He was even kicked out after taking part in a plan to sell copies of a stolen exam to different fraternities. The good news is that life was different then? Instead of a career or education killer (that’s probably not even true today, thankfully), Epstein eventually moved on to the University of Chicago, which truly changed him. At least that’s what he says. Epstein writes that after a year there, “I no longer believed that success in life was marked by large bank accounts, handsome houses in approved neighborhoods, flashy cars.” My guess is that Epstein didn’t require time at Chicago to change his views of life, but it seemingly accelerated the process. Someone who formerly couldn’t be bothered to bring books home, someone whose high school years were defined by “gambling, whoring, bugging, smoking, laughing,” was suddenly deeply immersed in great books and deep thought. And for this, we get to enjoy endlessly good and entertaining writing.

At the same time, there was still a life to be lived. Epstein was drafted into the Army, but thankfully not at a time of war. About the latter, he wrote that “engaging in war is viewed differently if some of those boots were to be filled by your own youthful children and grandchildren.” He adds that “A truly American military, inclusive of all social classes, would cause politicians and voters to be selective in choosing which battles are worth fighting and at what expense.” Amen. Thousands of times over. About this, I DO think some of the hawkishness on the U.S. right is rooted in the reality that the children and relatives close to the laptop hawks aren’t as likely to be filling the proverbial boots on the ground. In my case, I’m a Cobdenite. I’m a believer that free trade is the greatest foreign policy that mankind ever conceived, and that we should be unilaterally opening the U.S. up to all foreign production, including social media sites like TikTok that have conservatives so anxious. My view is that if the horrors of war were more evenly spread across all U.S. social classes, that more would share my views. Let’s call TikTok a peaceful shield of sorts, and one made that way by its immense popularity in the U.S.

While in the Army, and after Fort Hood in Killeen, TX, Epstein was transferred to Little Rock, AR Arweave . It was from Arkansas that Epstein published his first magazine article (on race relations for the New Leader ), but for the purposes of this review, it’s where Epstein met his first wife. Notable here is that while this was Epstein’s first marriage, it was his wife’s third. She would eventually have five husbands. She brought two buys into the marriage. Epstein reports that his father objected based on age and religion, and that surprised me. Really, the whole marriage surprised me in light of the Epstein readers know now. It just didn’t sound like him. I don’t mean this critically. See the front of this review to understand what I mean. Epstein’s writing screams wise , but in this case a very young Epstein made a marital choice that doesn’t sound like his opinion pieces. Life is bumpy, which is the point. Don’t judge books by their cover, right?

Epstein’s will surprise you because even the lucky lives their difficult periods. As the previous paragraph alludes, Epstein’s first marriage didn’t last. In his words, marriages of his era “have been our second marriages.” As mentioned earlier, I ascribed what Epstein describes as “real marriage” to him on the first try. Except that no one is as they seem. I also imagined Epstein the eternally doting parent, but by Epstein’s own admission, “I am one of those fellows for whom work comes first – always had been, still am. A full-time husband or, for that matter, full-court press father, I could never be.” I imagined differently. In writing what I imagined, my hope once again is that my imaginings won’t be read as disappointment. No. I again believe that we frequently and errantly imagine perfection within others that doesn’t exist. Which means I’m the person I’m describing in that I do it too.

Epstein’s first wife as mentioned already had two boys, and it’s very had to contemplate what their mother’s troubles must have meant for them. Epstein also had two boys with the first wife. One became a big success in financial services, but the other, Burt, died of an overdose. Burt fathered a child before the overdose, but the ever truthful Epstein admits he wouldn’t see this grandchild at first. Eventually they had a loving and enriching grandfather/granddaughter relationship, but yes, I was still surprised to read there was ever a time he wouldn’t see her. Again, his life wasn’t what I expected considering such occasional sadness (Burt’s overdose, no contact with stepsons, a suicide admittedly before he was born of Epstein’s mother’s father), but Epstein’s willingness to share the difficult parts speaks yet again to what a great memoir it is. While he views his life as somewhat “emblematic of the times,” but also very lucky, he’s yet again making the crucial point to people of all ages that a great and lucky life is not without extreme difficulty.

It brings to mind David Frum’s book on the 1970s, How We Got Here . This was the first book (I read it when I was 30, and still single) I ever read that said “love” wasn’t a fairy tale, that generations past in the U.S. had expected love to be a lot of work, and frequently bereft of all the “soulmate” stuff, the feeling stuff. Maybe this is Epstein’s point? While life is never easy, it seems he’s of the old mindset that it’s supposed to be hard at times. Which is right. He writes that “mine was a happy childhood, lived on playgrounds.” I read the latter, and found myself wanting many others to read his book, Jonathan Haidt in particular.

Haidt can be found not infrequently on the same editorial page that Epstein can be found on, and because he can be, I’ve had occasion to rebut his pessimism about today’s youth more than once. Haidt is looking for victims. While most couldn’t analyze the psyche of the street they live on, Haidt claims an ability via endless academic studies to analyze a whole generation of young people. He says smartphones have made young people depressed, anti-social, etc. This digression is important mainly because I’ll wager Epstein smirks at Haidt’s alarmism.

Again, warts and all he felt his childhood was happy, and lucky, as has his life been since. Crucial here is that Epstein came up in what he describes as “non-therapeutic age.” Yes!!! Here’s hoping Haidt finds time in between fawning media appearances and book reviews to read Epstein. He then might see that depression, shame about one’s body, and a desire for solitude didn’t begin with the iPhone, Instagram and texting. Neither did depression. Childhood has always been a challenge, but in non-therapeutic ages kids weren’t so thoroughly analyzed. No doubt Epstein had his down moments too as a teen, but in his era there wasn’t enough wealth to support the work of people like Haidt (nor admittedly my work, nor Epstein’s!) and those creating the studies Haidt cites about how allegedly sad and isolated young people are. Basically Epstein got through his teen years intact, as most do. Rest assured that the Gen Zers whose alleged sadness has Haidt anxious will similarly get through the difficulties of being a teen, only to thrive as past American generations have. Today’s affected, occasionally depressed, smartphone obsessed teens will live to have their own worries about their own kids, only for future Haidts to feed their needless alarmism about the technology that will surely replace the smartphone, Facebook and texting. If we live in a therapeutic age now, imagine the future!

Which brings up a quibble with Epstein. While there’s no disagreement that today’s youth are way over-analyzed, he writes of children brought up today as “eminently fragile creatures.” I’d like to think he could be convinced otherwise. Young people as fragile, lazy, entitled, and countless other pejoratives is as old as American youth is. It’s called progress . In a nation defined by near constant wealth creation dating back to its beginning, it’s only natural that young people appear soft (or are raised softly) in comparison to their elders. Surely Epstein has read “A Message to Garcia”? The point here is that even the grandparents of the alleged “Greatest Generation” were viewed as soft and lazy and unable to take orders. Progress yet again. If American youth are ever viewed as serious and hard, we’ll know we’re in decline.

Along the lines of progress, it seems Epstein’s successful father couldn’t quite grasp that his son could be paid for his thoughts. About this, let’s call “they pay you to do that?” the six most bullish words in the English language. Not long before Epstein’s father died, and while in the car with him, Epstein told him he’d been invited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania. The fee was $5,000 for a fifty minute talk. Dad was astonished it seems, worried and skeptical too. In Epstein’s words, “The country had to be in one hell of a sorry condition if they were passing out that kind of dough for mere talk from his son.” Yes! Progress. As wealth grows, the range of ways we can earn it grows, as do the range of ways that we can showcase our intelligence in the workplace. What had Epstein pere skeptical should have had him wildly optimistic.

Why was Epstein’s father “never a very engaged parent”? It’s a question I ask over and over again, and have been asking it long before reading Epstein’s memoir. Why did The Great Santini resonate with my dad’s generation (my dad, USNA ’65, had a rather militaristic, Great Santini-style father who was USNA ’37), but why would it not resonate with the young people of today? Epstein’s father was by no means at all mean, but clearly his parenting style was different. I keep asking this because I’m writing a book called The Reluctant Father . My own guess is that the answer is economic. Life really and truly was much more uncertain long ago, and this reflected in how parents parented. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think parents helicopter nowadays because they can. Yes, progress.

Some readers of this review, or analysis, or self-analysis within an analysis, are no doubt wondering (assuming they’ve read this far) when – if ever – the alleged reviewer will get to Epstein’s wonderful writing. It’s a reasonable question, but then Epstein has published a memoir , and there’s much to be taken from it that has relevance beyond the writing.

Epstein writes a fifth of the way through the book that “no new cars were produced during the war.” He was writing about WWII. Readers know the reason why. Production was directed toward war materials. This requires prominent mention simply because economists who should surely know better (?) claim near-monolithically that WWII and all the spending ended the Great Depression. Such a view, in addition to being horrific, surely insults stupid.

As Epstein makes plain, production was much less market-driven during the war, and far more government driven. And the production was geared toward weaponry meant to kill and maim, all the while destroying wealth. Which is a reminder that war is by its very name what crushes economic growth. It’s not just that we’re killing potential customers while losing our own best and brightest, it’s that we’re exterminating the very “hands” and “minds” around the world that we, if there were no war, could work in concert with on the way to great productivity leaps.

Taking this further, in writing about his Judaism, Epstein grew up feeling he was part of “a very superior club, one whose members over the centuries survived the most vicious persecutions, while accounting for some of the world’s most impressive scientific, artistic and intellectual achievements.” And WWII was particularly hard on members of this Club. Stop and think about this with the popular view among economists that WWII was economically stimulative top of mind. Can they be serious? What could the economy have done in the 1940s, and what could it have done since if millions of frequently talented people hadn’t been tragically murdered? Economists who believe that war has a growth upside rate our endless scorn. Which means economists rate our scorn.

After which, Epstein’s pride in his superior club rates mention for his pride (and his memoirs overall) revealing the opposite of victimhood. Awful things occasionally inserted themselves in Epstein’s lucky life, but this didn’t stop him. Terrible things happened to the Jews in total, yet they’ve thrived. I bring this up as a member of the right who believes the right increasingly embraces the very victimhood that it decries in the left. Schools, the media, Democrats, liberals, professors, they’re all out to get us, or hurt us, or “ruin” this great country. The Jews went through much worse, only to once again thrive. It’s not even close. The right needs to stop whining.

Ok, we can get to the writing. And the insights. Epstein writes that “the least marriageable man is the fifty-year old bachelor who has never married.” These types are too critical. We learn that “savant idiots” are “intellectually dazzling figures who get all important things wrong.” Yes! I’ll be using that more than a lot in my writing life.

In a lunch with Robert Manning at The Atlantic , Epstein recalls that Manning had two carafes of wine without listening to anything Epstein said. Where are the Mannings of today?

There were words/phrases that Epstein wouldn’t allow into American Scholar , the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. They included “impact,” “in terms of, “as it were,” and “weasel words like ‘arguably.’” I worry I’ve used them all over the years.

Writing about Frankie Sommers, a friend from childhood, Epstein describes him as “a boy two years older than I.” Why this? Because in books and columns it’s routine nowadays to read “two years older than me.” I write older than I, and was gratified to find in Epstein evidence that I’m correct, while writers and editors increasingly are not.

Surprisingly, but probably a comment on how little editing help any writer gets anymore from publishers, on p. 227 Epstein wrote of “all the things I could with the annual interest” on a $2 million contribution to American Scholar. The contribution was ultimately refused ahead of Epstein losing his perch there, but it seems “do” was left out between could and with.

Epstein happily doesn’t consider himself conservative or right wing, rather he’s part of the “anti-bullshit party.” Good.

Epstein retired as an instructor (not tenure track) at Northwestern in 2002, when “political correctness had not yet kicked in.” That didn’t read as true. John L’Heureux had already published the wildly funny The Handmaid of Desire about the PC movement at Stanford in the 1990s, David Lodge had written Changing Places about loony left-wingers at Berkeley in the 1960s, William F. Buckley had of course published God and Man at Yale in the 1950s, and then anecdotally, the movement was alive and well during my time at the University of Texas from 1988-1992, and during which I was shouted at for being “David Duke” after running for campus president on a platform that included ending affirmative action. About all this, I strongly feel the right has vastly overplayed its hand on political correctness and affirmative action not because I support either, but because I think they shouldn’t go to courts to fix preferential treatment, and then I think they well overstate the pervasiveness of left-wingery on campus in order to secure donor dollars. Sorry, but college life looks as it always has: largely glorious. I base this on my own experiences speaking about – yes – the glories of wealth inequality to college students whom members of the right claim are near monolithically socialist. Nah, the kids are alright. Life isn’t that bad. Particularly not life in the United States.

As Epstein’s wonderful book inches to conclusion, he writes that his disappointments in life are “too trivial to mention: that I cannot play the piano, that I’m not a superior tennis player, that I never learned ancient Greek.” These are the words of a lucky man , but much more important, a lucky man who knows it, and who doesn’t dwell on life’s inevitable difficulties. Very lucky for us is that we have Joseph Epstein and all his brilliant writings. Read them, buy the books, and buy his memoir.

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