The Best Things I Have Ever Read

(Well, really, my personal favorites)

Note: I recently published a piece in DAZED magazine concerning Rex Orange County and discourses surrounding musicians accused of sexual assault in a digitised world. You can read the piece here.)

I have read many things in my brief 22 years on this planet. I have also not read many things. Such is the nature of the vast, infinite archive of human literature. Here is a list of some of my all-time favorites, broken down by category (novels, short story collections, essays, non-fiction). This list is fully subjective and speaks only to my own personal taste, but I’d like to think I’ve got pretty alright taste.

Please share your favorite pieces of writing (especially those others may not have heard of or considered—I’d reckon to guess that the evil female readership is already familiar with The Yellow Wallpaper, Jia Tolentino, and Rayne’s Substack) below.

Fiction: Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

The first word that comes to mind when describing the prose in Giovanni’s Room is delicious. It’s the perfect mix of broody, snobby, pastoral, and urbane. Dotted throughout the novel—which follows an American man in Paris as he navigates his relationship with the titular Giovanni—are untranslated passages of French. It helps to know French but it is by no means necessary: the hazy confusion of ununderstanding perfectly matches the novel’s tone and plot.