When I was seventeen I fell into a depression that hollowed my life. It wrapped its tendrils around my flesh and made a home in the spaces between my bones. It consumed me. Everyday life became violent, like war. I was a soldier fighting an enemy I could not see. And I told no one. I used to spend my lunch period sitting reading in the sun and scrawling out pages of prose as I overlooked the football field. I loved that hour. I would listen to Bon Iver’s “Holocene” on repeat and watch the world of high school spin around me. That hour to myself always felt like standing in the eye of a storm, calm even while surrounded by chaos. And no one knew I was there.

Except my English teacher. I remember the calmness that he maintained as he would walk by and casually say hello. Any other adult on that campus would have seen me sitting there alone, in some far off corner of campus, and asked me if I were alright, if I needed to talk, if I had friends, why I was so far away from the other kids. But he never did those things. And it meant the world to me. Then one day, randomly, he called me up to his desk and told me that he knew how hard it was to be someone who knows who they are at an early age. I was frozen. I remember standing there with tears in my eyes, stunned that seemed to know everything without me ever having to say anything. On his desk that day sat a pile of books, books that I would consume over the course of that year. Books that, one at a time, would save my life.

These are those books.

The things they carried By Tim O’brien (1990)

This is one of the first books I read that year and one that I still come back to again and again. Rooted in O’Brien’s own experience fighting in the Vietnam war, the book is a collection of short essays about young men navigating literal and metaphorical minefields. They are stories about what it felt like to be a kid in love and a kid at war and a kid who did not recognize the world before their eyes anymore. Each essay is chilling, heartbreaking, and applicable to all facets of life, no matter where you are.

The Bell Jar by sylvia plath (1963)

I read this book like it was water. Semi-autobiographical, it is written from the perspective of a young woman in college who is recognized for poetic excellence and it would seem to have everything going for her, but cannot find her way out from beneath the bell jar that suffocates her inside of her own, dark world. She grows increasingly disillusioned with society, disgusted with the expectations of women, and nauseated over the pressure to pick one path for her life to follow. It has been equated to being the “female version” of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but I found it to be far more profound.

Written on the body By jeanette Winterson (1992)

Entangled within my own love triangle my senior year, this book gutted me. Told from the perspective of a gender neutral narrator, it accounts the experience of falling in love with someone that you cannot have and all of the pain and beauty and heartbreak that goes with it. There is an obsession with the body, with how it functions and how it fails. There is a raw, aching realness that permeates each character, taking the novel away from any romantic plot you have known and into a realm that is entirely it’s own. Winterson is unlike any other author I have ever read in that sense and would highly recommend her poetic prose, filled with perfect metaphors and universal truths, to anyone. I reread this one all of the time.

The passion by Jeanette Winterson (1987)

Another gem by Winterson, The Passion deals with another love triangle, set during the Napoleonic Wars. It draws a thought-provoking parallel between love and gambling, where what you risk reveals what you value. It deals with the pain of loving people that you cannot have and the way in which it is often that love that marks us for the rest of our lives. The heart, and who you give yours to, becomes a wrenching symbol throughout the novel. Beautifully written, it left me scrawling several pages of quotes that I still read to this day. Definitely unlike any other novel you have ever read and one that will keep you interested.

slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

You cannot go wrong with Vonnegut. Wrought with satire and commentaries on love and war, Slaughterhouse-Five reads like a fever dream, but in the best possible way. Within it, you travel through space and time with Billy Pilgrim, a problematic soldier in World War II who is taken as a prisoner of war. He witnesses the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut’s brilliant way of highlighting one of the most horrific, yet utterly pointless bombings of the war. It saturated with some of the most clever and seamless symbols and metaphors that I have ever read and it’s themes remain painfully ever-relevant to contemporary society. It will make you laugh while punching you in the gut.

The colossus of new york by colson whitehead (2003)

This one houses a special place in my heart and it’s undying love for New York. It is a short collection of essays, each one an ode to living in a city that is constantly morphing before you eyes. Whitehead writes about the brutality of the rain and the filth of rush hour and the stupendous amount of heartbreak that is involved in watching the city you know and love turn into another one right before your eyes. He writes about frustration and annoyance, but all through a lens of love that you cannot separate from his prose anymore than he can separate it from his relationship with the city. It simply stains each page, capturing something of the enigma that is the love one feels for New York, if one is so unlucky.

The Underground Railroad By colson whitehead (2016)

Whitehead’s true gift for writing is on full display in this heart-wrenching historical novel that follows Cora, a young enslaved girl, as she escapes from a plantation. What makes it especially fascinating is that Whitehead made the underground railroad an actual railroad with a running train. It reads like a movie. Each chapter follows Cora through a different state and her experience within it as she traverses the country, searching for freedom. An extremely powerful story told by one of our best contemporary authors.

The marginalian by maria popova

Not a book, but a blog that I have been reading religiously since high school. Popova is one of the most brilliant and devoted readers and writers that I have ever come across. Her blog is completely free for anyone to access and is overwhelmingly laden with mind-altering commentaries on love, science, literature, art, philosophy, and the general experience of being a human being.

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