I’d like to say I read for enlightenment. But mostly, I read so I can be the most insufferable person at any social gathering. “You found that derivative? Interesting.” That’s me. I’m a monster.
But sometimes, a book will actually rewire my brain. Not in a life-affirming, self-help kind of way. It’s more of a “stare at a wall for several hours contemplating the void” kind of way. Which is less useful, but more memorable.
A therapist might call reading a form of socially sanctioned disassociation. I wouldn’t know, I spend my therapy money on books.
Anyway, here are seven books everyone should read if you enjoy a good, memorable disassociation. You’ll probably ignore this list. I almost did. I started each one, got distracted by my phone, and came back weeks later with no memory of the plot. It’s a process.
Contents
- 0.1 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- 0.2 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
- 0.3 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
- 0.4 Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
- 0.5 The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
- 0.6 How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
- 0.7 Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- 1 In Conclusion, I’m Very Tired
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
This book is about a butler, Stevens, who is so emotionally constipated he makes a statue look expressive.
No, that’s not quite right. Let me try again. This book will RUIN you. That’s the review. Five stars. Highly recommend.
The author, Kazuo Ishiguro, snagged a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and this book shows you why. His writing is a masterclass in restraint, each sentence perfectly polished while screaming into a void of unexpressed feeling.
Stevens dedicates his entire existence to being the perfect butler. He serves his employer, Lord Darlington, with a loyalty that borders on self-annihilation.
While he’s busy perfecting the silver, his own life is crumbling. He’s in love with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who is all but waving a giant flag that says, “I HAVE FEELINGS FOR YOU.” Stevens’s response is to discuss staffing matters.
Reading their interactions is an exercise in agony. You want to shake him. The novel is a devastating portrait of regret and a life given over to a flawed ideal. It’s one of the books everyone should read to understand the cost of a life unlived.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s novel is about anarchists living on a barren moon. I picked it up during my “everything is broken” phase, which has been ongoing since my early twenties.
The protagonist, Shevek, is a physicist from Anarres, a world with no government, no property, and a lot of dust. It’s a society built on sharing and mutual aid. Then, he travels to the twin planet, Urras, a lush world drowning in capitalism, where everyone owns everything and is miserable.
The book’s subtitle is “An Ambiguous Utopia,” which is the whole point. Le Guin isn’t selling a perfect system. She’s showing that every ideology, no matter how noble, is complicated by the messy reality of human nature.
Anarres is free from coercion but stifled by conformity. Urras offers abundance but is poisoned by inequality. There’s a line in it about not being able to buy the revolution, only be the revolution. I underlined it so hard I almost tore the page. It’s a book that makes you feel brilliant and hopeless all at once.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
In this book, the explorer Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. The catch is, none of these cities actually exist. Or maybe they do. Maybe Marco Polo doesn’t exist.
After reading this, I’m not entirely sure I exist. Each city is a miniature prose poem, a philosophical puzzle. There’s a city made of memories, a city visible only in reflections. It’s impossible to explain, and that’s the beauty of it.
I first read this to impress someone who said it was their favorite book. The relationship lasted less than a month. The book, however, is still on my shelf. I don’t know if it’s “good” in a traditional sense, but it made my brain feel like it was pleasantly melting. It’s like a legal, over-the-counter hallucinogen.
There’s one city where relationships are marked by strings stretched between houses, until the entire city is an impassable web. Calvino basically invented the social media timeline in 1972. This is one of those life-changing books for anyone who loves language and ideas.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
I don’t have the exact same family issues as Alison Bechdel, but this graphic memoir made me feel seen in a way that was deeply uncomfortable.
Bechdel dissects her family with the precision of a surgeon. Her father was a closeted gay man, a high school English teacher, and a funeral home director. He was a man of many secrets. She is an out lesbian, trying to piece together the puzzle of her father after his probable suicide.
The part that gets me is her exploration of how she and her father were both opposites and mirror images. He was a gay man who performed straightness; she was a butch lesbian who rejected traditional femininity. It’s a dense, layered work, full of literary allusions and heartbreaking honesty.
My own father saw me reading it and asked why I was reading a comic. I tried to explain that it was a graphic novel that earned the author a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” but he just shrugged. It’s one of the essential books everyone should read.
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
This is a 600-page history of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South. As a white person from the Midwest, I read it and realized I knew absolutely nothing about my own country. That’s the review. But I’ll elaborate.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson tells this epic story by focusing on the lives of three individuals. She makes history feel intensely personal. This isn’t a dry, academic text. It’s a visceral story of people fleeing a system of terror.
There’s a passage where one of the subjects, Ida Mae, is picking cotton and Wilkerson describes the physical weight of the sack. I swear, I could feel it on my own shoulders.
I was reading in a cafe, and I had to get up and walk outside. I felt ashamed to be sitting there with my overpriced coffee, reading about people who escaped what was essentially domestic terrorism.
This book made me want to understand my own family’s history, to find the stories we don’t tell. This is one of the books everyone should read to understand the America we live in today.
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
I bought this book hoping it would fix my crippling phone addiction. It did not. I am checking social media as I write this.
Odell’s argument isn’t really about doing nothing. It’s about resisting the “attention economy”—the ecosystem of apps and platforms designed to monetize our focus. She argues for redirecting our attention to the physical world around us.
She’s very into birds. Like, there are whole chapters about birds. I skipped them at first, felt bad, and went back. It turns out, birds are pretty interesting. The book is a stealth critique of capitalism. It starts with “hey, look at this cool bird,” and before you know it, you’re wondering why you feel a crushing need to be productive every second of the day.
It’s a book that might give you an existential crisis in a public park. Which, honestly, is an improvement over having one at your desk.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The author is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes about plants with such reverence that I now feel the need to apologize to my salad. I’m only half-joking.
The book contrasts the Indigenous worldview, which sees the Earth as a series of gifts and relationships, with the Western view of nature as a collection of resources to be exploited. She does this with a gentle, generous spirit that is almost more convicting than anger would be.
There’s a chapter on strawberries that is emotionally devastating. STRAWBERRIES. She writes about them as a gift from the Earth. I read it while eating those sad, flavorless strawberries from the supermarket and had a revelation.
I’ve never tasted a real strawberry, only the ghost of one. The point is, we are profoundly disconnected. We are destroying the planet, and the plants are probably plotting their revenge. I’m on their side. This is one of the most life-changing books you will ever read.
In Conclusion, I’m Very Tired
Look, I don’t know. It’s late. I’ve had too much coffee. But these books did something to me. They rewired my thinking. They made me feel more alone and, somehow, less lonely. They made me angrier at the world and more compassionate toward the people in it.
They are the kind of books everyone should read because they don’t offer easy answers. They just leave you with better, more complicated questions. These are life-changing books that will mess you up in the best possible way.
(Seriously, though. Read The Remains of the Day. It will break your heart. You’ll thank me.)