Most Read Essays Books

Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is a counterintuitive self-help book that pushes back against the relentless positivity of the genre. Manson's argument is simple but bracing: caring about everything leaves you exhausted and anxious, so the real skill is choosing the few things that genuinely deserve your attention and letting the rest go. Drawing on Stoic ideas, blunt personal anecdotes, and the occasional pointed profanity, Manson makes the case that struggle is unavoidable and even necessary — that a good life comes not from escaping problems but from picking better problems to have. He examines how values shape our sense of success, why entitlement and the pursuit of constant happiness backfire, and how accepting responsibility (even for things that aren't our fault) restores a sense of control. Irreverent, funny, and deliberately unglamorous, the book reframes self-improvement around honesty, limitation, and the acceptance of death rather than affirmations and hustle. It became a global bestseller and a defining title of the modern "anti-self-help" wave.

Born a Crime (2016) is Trevor Noah's sharp, funny, and moving memoir of growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and the turbulent decade that followed. The son of a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, Noah was born when such a union was literally illegal — his very existence was evidence of a crime. He recounts a childhood spent partly in hiding, navigating the absurd and brutal logic of a system built on racial classification, and the poverty, violence, and improvised survival of township life after apartheid's fall. At the center of every story is his mother, Patricia — fearless, devout, stubborn, and endlessly resourceful — whose tough love and refusal to be limited shaped the man Noah became. Told in vivid, self-deprecating vignettes, the book is by turns hilarious and harrowing, a portrait of a singular family and a country remaking itself.

• coming of age

A candid, funny memoir of a woman's twenties as she navigates friendship, heartbreak, and the messy path toward self-acceptance.

This classic tale follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a man whose heart is as cold as the winter air. On Christmas Eve, he's visited by three spirits who show him the error of his ways. Can these spectral encounters help him find the true spirit of Christmas before it's too late?

• redemption arc

Michelle Zauner grew up feeling half in and half out of her Korean heritage — the only Asian kid in most rooms in Eugene, Oregon, but Korean enough at home, where her mother expressed love not in words but in the food she cooked and the ritual of their frequent trips to H Mart, the Korean grocery chain that stocked the ingredients of Zauner's childhood. When her mother is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Zauner moves back home to become her caretaker, relearning her mother's recipes as a way of holding onto her and of finally understanding her. Cooking jjigae and kimchi becomes an act of grief and an act of connection at once, a way to keep a language and a culture alive after the person who taught it to her is gone. Michelle Zauner, also known as the musician Japanese Breakfast, writes with unflinching candor about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the particular ache of losing a parent in your twenties, and the way food can hold a person's memory when words fail. Crying in H Mart is a wrenching, funny, and generous memoir about grief, identity, and the inheritance of love through the kitchen.

In thirty-one letters, the senior devil Screwtape coaches his inept nephew Wormwood in the art of tempting an ordinary Englishman away from God — not with grand sins, but with distraction, vanity, and small daily compromises. Narrated entirely from the demons' inverted point of view, C.S. Lewis's satirical classic is a funny, piercing meditation on temptation and the moral life.

• epistolary

Written in 1513 and circulated in manuscript during Machiavelli's lifetime, The Prince is the most famous — and most notorious — work of political philosophy in the Western canon. Composed after the author's fall from office in Florence, it is a compact, unsentimental manual on how rulers seize power, hold it, and keep their states intact. Breaking sharply with the classical tradition that treated politics as a branch of ethics, Machiavelli argues that a ruler must be prepared to act against conventional morality when necessity demands it. He weighs whether it is better to be feared or loved, why appearing virtuous can matter more than being virtuous, how fortune must be mastered rather than trusted, and why a prince's first concern must be the strength of his own arms. Drawing on the recent history of Italy's city-states and figures such as Cesare Borgia, he illustrates his maxims with cold, concrete examples. Published in 1532, five years after his death, The Prince has been read ever since as everything from a cynical handbook for tyrants to a clear-eyed diagnosis of how power actually works.

In 1992, Christopher McCandless gave away his savings, abandoned his possessions, and walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness under the name Alexander Supertramp. Four months later he was dead. Jon Krakauer retraces his two-year journey across the American West through journals, letters, and the people who met him — a haunting, unflinching portrait of an idealistic seeker and a meditation on risk, family, and the pull of the wild.

• survival

Part memoir, part practical handbook, On Writing is Stephen King's account of how one of the world's most successful authors became a writer — and what he learned about the craft along the way. King opens with a candid, often funny recollection of his childhood, his early struggles, the stacks of rejection slips, and the years of poverty and addiction that preceded his success. The second half turns to the work itself: King's no-nonsense advice on grammar, vocabulary, the "toolbox" every writer needs, the danger of adverbs, the importance of reading widely, and his conviction that plot should be discovered rather than imposed. Threaded throughout is the 1999 accident that nearly killed him and the role writing played in his recovery. Honest, direct, and free of mystique, On Writing has become one of the most widely recommended books on the writing life — as much a portrait of an artist as a manual for aspiring ones.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama's candid, best-selling memoir traces her life from a working-class childhood on the South Side of Chicago, through Princeton and Harvard Law, to marriage, motherhood, and the White House. Structured as "Becoming Me," "Becoming Us," and "Becoming More," it's an intimate meditation on identity, resilience, and finding your voice.

In diary form, a rational gentleman becomes convinced that an invisible being he calls the Horla has entered his home and is feeding on his will. As terror overtakes him, he can no longer tell whether he faces a real, supernatural predator or his own collapsing mind. A landmark of psychological horror by Guy de Maupassant.

• unreliable narrator
• epistolary

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring super-states, where his job is to rewrite the historical record so that the Party is never wrong. Everywhere he goes, the face of Big Brother watches from posters and the ever-present telescreen watches back, recording every word and expression. Even a private thought against the Party is a crime punishable by death. Worn down by hunger, surveillance, and the deliberate poverty of daily life, Winston begins to keep a secret diary and to nurse a quiet, dangerous conviction that the past was different and the truth still exists somewhere outside the Party's control. When he falls into a forbidden love affair with a bold young woman named Julia, the two carve out a small world of their own and let themselves imagine resistance. Their rebellion draws the attention of the inner Party and the enigmatic official O'Brien, and Winston is forced to confront just how far a total state will go to own not only a person's actions but their mind. George Orwell's 1949 novel gave the language "Big Brother," "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," and "Newspeak," and remains one of the most influential warnings ever written about totalitarianism, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth. Bleak, exact, and unsparing, it is a study of how power sustains itself by controlling memory, language, and love.

In All About Love: New Visions, cultural critic and feminist theorist bell hooks argues that our society's confusion and cynicism about love stem from a failure to understand what love truly is. Rejecting the idea of love as a mere feeling, she insists that love is an action — a practice rooted in care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and honesty — and one that cannot be separated from justice. Across a series of clear, personal, and searching essays, hooks examines how a culture shaped by patriarchy, consumerism, and domination distorts our capacity to love, from childhood and family to romance, friendship, community, and spiritual life. Blending memoir, criticism, and ethics, All About Love is both a diagnosis of a loveless culture and a hopeful blueprint for change. It is the first book in hooks's Love Song to the Nation trilogy.

At twenty-four, novelist Matt Haig's world caved in and he came close to ending his life. This bestselling memoir is his frank, hopeful account of living through severe depression and anxiety and slowly finding his way back — part personal story, part reflection on mental illness, and part reassurance, addressed to anyone in the dark, that things can and do get better.

Sybil Van Antwerp has spent her life on paper. A retired legal professional in her seventies, sharp, exacting, and fiercely private, she conducts her most important relationships through letters — to her brother, her old friends, her estranged neighbour, and even to the authors whose books have marked her, from Joan Didion to Larry McMurtry. Her correspondence is where she is most fully herself, and where she keeps the world at a manageable distance. Told entirely through those letters, the novel gradually reveals the grief and guilt Sybil has organised her life around, including a loss she has never fully faced. When a figure from her past re-enters her orbit, she is forced to reckon with an old wound, to track down a letter she never sent or received, and to consider whether forgiveness — of others and of herself — is still possible so late in life. Virginia Evans's debut, The Correspondent, is a warm, quietly moving epistolary novel about ageing, memory, and the things we can only say in writing. It builds, letter by letter, into a portrait of a difficult, deeply human woman learning to reopen the doors she has spent years carefully closing.

• epistolary

Lori Gottlieb is a practicing psychotherapist whose days are spent helping other people untangle their lives. Then her own long-term relationship collapses without warning, and she finds herself doing something she has spent her career recommending to others: sitting on the other side of the room, in a state of crisis, seeing a therapist of her own. The book braids Gottlieb's sessions with her wry, unsparing therapist, Wendell, together with the stories of four of her own patients. There is John, an abrasive Hollywood producer convinced everyone around him is an idiot; Julie, a young newlywed forced to reckon with a devastating diagnosis; Rita, approaching seventy and haunted by regret; and Charlotte, a twenty-something caught in self-defeating patterns. As their lives unfold, the line between healer and patient blurs, and Gottlieb turns the same searching attention on herself. Funny, humane, and quietly profound, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a memoir about the strange intimacy of therapy and a wide-ranging meditation on change, mortality, and meaning. It demystifies what actually happens in the consulting room and makes a persuasive case that self-examination, however uncomfortable, is where real change begins.

Kahlil Gibran's beloved 1923 book of prose poetry. As the prophet Almustafa prepares to sail home from the city of Orphalese, its people ask him to share his wisdom. In twenty-six poetic sermons he speaks on love, marriage, work, joy and sorrow, freedom, and death — a touchstone of modern spiritual literature.

Tina Fey turns her comic eye on her own life — an awkward Pennsylvania childhood, improv in Chicago, becoming Saturday Night Live's first female head writer, impersonating Sarah Palin, and running 30 Rock while raising a daughter. Written in her signature deadpan, it mixes memoir with sharp, funny commentary on women in comedy, show business, and working motherhood.

Kahlil Gibran's beloved 1923 book of prose poetry. As the prophet Almustafa prepares to sail home from the city of Orphalese, its people ask him to share his wisdom. In twenty-six poetic sermons he speaks on love, marriage, work, joy and sorrow, freedom, and death — a touchstone of modern spiritual literature.

Jessie Stephens's debut work of narrative nonfiction follows three real people through the aftermath of heartbreak. Claire returns to her Australian hometown to find something wrong in her relationship; Patrick, a lonely student, falls for a classmate who may not feel the same; and Ana, happily married with three children, unexpectedly falls in love with someone else. Reported with a novelist's eye, it is a tender, precise look at how loving and losing changes us.

In the late 1960s, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen agreed, after a brief consultation with a doctor she had never met, to enter McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric institution outside Boston. She would remain there for nearly two years, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. In this spare, piercing memoir, Kaysen reconstructs that time from her own memories and from her recovered hospital records: the strange, suspended life of the ward, the other young women she lived among, the rituals and cruelties of institutional care, and the ever-shifting line between sanity and madness. She probes how a life can be diverted by a single decision, and how society decides which minds to lock away — especially those of young women. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, "Girl, Interrupted" is a landmark account of mental illness and confinement.

This novel follows a young protagonist navigating the complexities of life in Great Britain. As they mature, they confront challenges that shape their understanding of the world and their place within it. The story explores themes of personal growth and the possibility of making amends.

Rupi Kaur's third collection is a journey inward, moving through the past, present, and future as it explores the relationship each of us has with our own body and mind. Written in her signature spare free verse with accompanying line drawings, the poems take up mental health, trauma and recovery, self-love, rest, sexuality, and empowerment. Kaur turns her attention from romantic love toward the harder, quieter work of coming home to oneself — accepting the body, tending to the mind, and finding worth from within rather than without. Reflective and affirming, "home body" reads as an invitation to slow down, heal, and root yourself in self-acceptance.

A landmark collection of fifteen short stories by the Tunisian satirist Ali al-Du'aji, gathered from old newspapers and magazines and published in 1969. With a wry, affectionate, and biting eye, al-Du'aji turns everyday Tunisian life into sharp, humorous social observation.

Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner turn economic tools loose on everyday puzzles—cheating sumo wrestlers, the finances of a crack gang, what really matters in parenting, and why crime fell in the 1990s. A playful, data-driven, myth-busting look at the hidden incentives that shape human behavior.

Anne Lamott shares her unique perspective on the art and demanding work of writing. Drawing from personal anecdotes, including a memorable family story about tackling an overwhelming task "bird by bird," she offers guidance to aspiring and seasoned writers alike. This book serves as a compassionate and humorous companion for anyone navigating the creative process.

Sylvia Plath's second poetry collection, published posthumously in 1965. Written mostly in the final months of her life, these fierce, formally daring poems — including "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and the title poem — confront death, rage, motherhood, and self-transformation with unflinching intensity. A landmark of confessional poetry.

After a stroke left him with locked-in syndrome — fully conscious but able to move only his left eyelid — Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle, composed this memoir by blinking out each letter as an assistant recited the alphabet. He describes the "diving bell" of his paralysed body and the "butterfly" of his still-free imagination, with grief, wit, and no self-pity. A luminous meditation on consciousness and the human spirit.

Adapted from her celebrated TEDx talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short essay makes a warm, clear-eyed case for feminism as the simple belief that everyone should be treated equally. Drawing on her life in Nigeria and beyond, she examines how gender expectations shape us from childhood — an accessible, quotable primer that has become a touchstone of modern conversations about equality.

The conclusion of Dana Schwartz's Anatomy duology. Summoned to London to treat the ailing Princess Charlotte, Hazel Sinnett is drawn into a secretive circle of physicians and aristocrats guarding an impossible secret about life and death — and must decide how far she will go, and what she is willing to become. Gothic historical romance with a macabre edge.

• forbidden love
• court intrigue