Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
List for Summer Reading
22
items Here is a careful selection of books I wish I read earlier. Made of both female and male-centered perspectives, glamorous characters (albeit deranged), and plots that kill (literally?)
Sections
3
Have You Read These Modern Classics?
Philosophy Classics Everyone Should Quote at Least Once
Supernatural and psychological novels that leave their readers in awe
Have You Read These Modern Classics?
A perfect late-night read under your night-stand lamp. Follow a glamorous 20-something who is desperately trying to sleep away her depression and pretty privilege in a rich NYC appartment!
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Paperback
If you like Hollywood ennui and chain-smoking in a convertible vibe, this book is for you!
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, Paperback
My favorite 1960s intellectual malaise. A book of poetry, internal reckoning, and Sylvia Plath's most iconic publication. If you have a deep love for literature or Lana Del Rey, this book's for you!
The Bell Jar (P.S. Series) by Sylvia Plath, Paperback
fragmented, witty, cerebral, drifting through urban alienation with Didion-esque cool.
Speedboat by Renata Adler, Paperback
confessional, messy, intellectual obsession + feminism, very cvnty if you ask me!
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, Paperback
The writing in this book is statuesque in its deliberateness. devastatingly internal, strange, philosophical but punchy.
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, Paperback
LA foil to Didion, playful, seductive, and self-aware.
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz, ...
sharp, erotic, cruel, honest, this one is all short stories that sting but that you won't be able to put down.
Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill, Paperback
A hybrid memoir about love, queerness, and theory-infused tenderness for all you folks like me.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Paperback
elliptical, literary, deeply emotional but pared down book.
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Paperback
This one is a devastating portrait of despair, exile, and female vulnerability that made me both furious and tender.
Good Morning, Midnight - Jean Rhys
Half-novel, half-memoir experiment where she writes about her own life, like artistic struggles, messy friendships, bad sex, ambition, and self-doubt.
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, Paperback
The Idiot is about Selin, a Turkish-American freshman at Harvard in the mid-90s. She’s brilliant, socially awkward, and fascinated by language—she studies linguistics and Russian, constantly analyzing how words shape reality
The Idiot by Elif Batuman, Paperback
Philosophy Classics Everyone Should Quote at Least Once
Just Added some French lore: Emil Cioran makes everyone want to be the excecutioner's son. Oh and he has great aphorisms in The Trouble With Being Born.
Okay this is one of the most famous books of philosophy EVER! And the best part about it? It is actually easy to read because of the poetic style and flow of ideas. It follows a prophet-like character inspired by Zorostrianism (one of the oldest reli...
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One
“It is like waiting for Godot” is an idiom to use when you want to express hopelessness but in a chic and elevated manner. Wait, does that spoil the book? Read it, and find out! It is only two acts long, four characters wide, and a few turnips short ...
Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts by Samuel Beckett, Paperback
“Today, my mother died. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I don't know.” This is the kind of book that makes you gasp, wonder, and sigh at ONCE all for the protagonist's unrelenting indifference towards the universe.
The Stranger by Albert Camus, Paperback
High theater, stupendous indifference, priceless irreverence, and a touch of evil all in this two act play about the Roman emperor Caligula, who loses it after fetishizing the moon, but that's my hot take, what's yours?
Caligula by Albert Camus, Paperback
Here's how I read The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, both times: As it is made completely of short aphorisms (fancy deep paragraphs), I take it with me when I travel, whether long or short haul, andd just feast on a few that give me food for tho...
The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche
He yearned for eviscerating shame, the kind only an executioner’s son could inherit. This book is a chain of short, burning aphorisms, perfect if, like the lazy (but practical) academic I am, you read to unwind.
The Trouble with Being Born by E. M. Cioran, Paperback
Supernatural and psychological novels that leave their readers in awe
Intriguing parallel plot lines that cross paths too conveniently. Oh and the monk is NOT who you think he is!
The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis, Fiction, Horror
Shell shock, wartime drama, and sexual confusion all within the walls of an asylum. If you like neat writing and subtextual innuendo, this is for you.
Regeneration a book by Pat Barker
Has the best monologue ever written then delivered on film. Gone Girl is about a woman who is easy to villify and to glorify. Make your own choice by reading it!
Gone Girl a book by Gillian Flynn