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!
Reads That Make You Feel Something
16
items For your health! Novels (well, mostly novels) that feel like an experience, remind you of your humanity, and turn you into a different person than the one you were when you started reading. These are mostly also books that reward slow, close reading....
The writing is poetic and hard-hitting, with segments of prose-poetry that punctuate the storyline and deep dives into the motivations and lives of each character that are full of empathy and pathos.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Paperback
an insanely funny, sharp read - it bottles together the experience of being a Theater Kid, having dysfunctional parents, and the experience of being catapulted into adulthood in such a biting yet warm way
Colors Insulting to Nature: A Novel
a book that slowly bends your sense of reality through the lens of religious and generational trauma. very delicate and bold, as you'd expect from JB
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage Intl)
really captures the feeling of living in Brooklyn in the late aughts-early 2010s, and more importantly features an antihero protagonist who is Just Figuring It Out
Nevada - Binnie, Imogen: Books
among other things, a catalog of feelings from a younger millennial about the isolation of late capitalism
Severance: A Novel: Ma, Ling
a beautiful stream of consciousness from someone contemplating their life and their personhood
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
a beautiful (and sort of chilling) look into the mind of someone who can't get out of their own way
The Remains of the Day: Nobel Prize Winner
a light but hard-hitting lesbian romance that puts you in the passenger seat of someone's struggle (and partial failure) to grow as a person
Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn
a heartbreaking prose poetry memoir about a great artist continuing to work and trying to keep living during the Holocaust
Charlotte by David Foenkinos
a beautifully written novel (in the form of a script) about the American immigrant experience and self acceptance
Interior Chinatown: A Novel by Charles Yu
another Ishiguro recommendation - heartbreaking and disoriented storytelling about parenthood and loss in the face of tragedy
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
a story about a community in transition, and the lore that people ascribe to change
Sula - Toni Morrison: Books
a story about crystalizing the self, and the steps we take to do that
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
probably the only science fiction book on this list - the imminent end of the world brings up a lot of feelings!
Childhood's End: Clarke, Arthur C.
a wonderfully funny and clever satire (for those who like historical fiction, but also for those who might not?)
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
A coming of age story of sorts, framed through letters, this is a book that's both immediate and tender, written in a beautiful prose-poetic style.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel