My Personal Literary Canon

The books that raised me, shaped me, and made me a reader.

Jul 02, 2026

This is a list of my all time favorite books, presented in no particular order because rankings give me anxiety. Let me be clear – this is not a list of the BEST BOOKS OF ALL TIME. Because I haven’t read every book in the world, and furthermore, I think reading taste, like most things, is a deeply personal matter. I can think of plenty of books that Bookstagram and Booktok LOVED that I couldn’t stand (The Secret History, for one…).

Instead, this is a list of the books that have stuck with me, shaped my life or worldview, or just really entertained me. They will span genres and reading levels and I’m sure some will be cliche or cringe or old news, but if you have similar taste as me, then I hope you find some new treasures here—or just feel like you know me a little bit better.

And along the way, please enjoy a smattering of vintage Bookstagram photos circa 2014-2017, back when you could post a single square photo of a single book and get 500 likes, easy.

The Books That Raised Me (Ages 5-14)

The first book I can remember reading by myself was Fox in Socks, when I was four or five. It was love at first “sound-it-out” and I was instantly a voracious reader. Like, on a first-name basis with the elementary school librarian level.

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

I know, no one wants to talk about Harry Potter nowadays (for good reason, JKR is a ghoul). But, like many millennials, this is kinda where it all starts for me. I already loved reading by the time I first became aware of Harry Potter, but most of what I read was nonfiction from the school library. I was six, in first grade (yes I was one of those ~gifted~ kids who was reading at a high school level in elementary school) and the first movie was about to come out.

My grandma, who I love but who had interesting ideas about religion, told me that it was of the devil and I should never read or watch them. I dutifully told my mom this and she said something along the lines of “that’s ridiculous, it’s a children’s book and I’m your mother, you can read it if you want to!” So I did, and it was, for lack of a better world, magical. This kicked off a two-and-a-half-decade-long love affair with fiction, fantasy, and yes, sorry Grandma, witchcraft.

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

I credit Lemony Snicket primarily for my stint as regional spelling bee champion and my brief foray into the Reader’s Digest Word Power Challenge. I also credit him for getting me into weird, creepy, gothic literature. I love these books so much. I loved the terrible movie they made. I loved the much much better Netflix series they made. All of it.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Anne Shirley was the OG maladaptive daydreamer girlie, and I found so much of myself in her when I first read this classic. Years later in high school, our theatre company did a stage version of the story, which only cemented my love. I did not, tragically, get to be Anne, because I was only an underclassman. (I played Jane Andrews, a generic school chum that I’m not even sure was actually named in the book).

The Gemma Doyle Trilogy by Libba Bray

I think this series is largely to blame for my outsized fascination with witchcraft, the occult, and feminism. I loved these books so much. I read and re-read them endlessly. If Lemony Snicket kicked off a curiosity for gothic-leaning lit, the Gemma Doyle trilogy cemented it. Side note, they’ve redesigned the covers in the intervening two decades and they’re hideous.

The Chemical Garden Trilogy by Lauren DeStefano

Justice for this series!!!!! It deserved to be turned into a third-rate CW series or a film trilogy starring a former Disney girl. Anyways, I remember I found this book by strolling into a suburban Barnes & Noble with a birthday gift card and picking a few books purely by cover vibes and blurbs. Anyways it’s a classic dystopian future story where some virus or something has limited lifespans to 20 years for women and 25 for men. As you can imagine, that causes a whole host of issues. I kind of want to re-read these to see if they hold up, even though I’m not much for YA anymore, because I remember them being haunting and beautiful.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I mean. Was it good? No. Was it a deeply formative early experience of fandom culture? Yeah. Did I make my entire family go see the movie at 10pm in Chicago because our vacation coincided with the opening night? Yeah. Did I wear a replica of Alice’s necklace from Hot Topic every day for the better part of a year? Yeah. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Confessions of Georgia Nicolson Series by Louise Rennison

You may be familiar with the 2008 film adaptation Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging. I’m here to tell you that, delightful though it may be, it pales in comparison to this insane, hilarious book series that it’s based on (and the book’s proper title is Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, but that was deemed a bit too inappropriate). Anyways, I was something of a budding anglophile already in my younger years, even before Doctor Who and BBC Sherlock got involved in the 2010s, so this series about British teen Georgia Nicholson and her insane family, friends, and cats, was utterly delightful. Also I read some of them again a few years ago—still hilarious! Even my mom thought they were insanely funny at the time. (Anyways, for me it was always Dave the Laugh. Robbie was boring.)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I selected this book for my term project in College Prep English my freshman year of high school because, you guessed it, it’s Bella’s favorite book in Twilight. What a weirdo. Anyways, I absolutely loved it. And putting together this list really has me realizing how much I have always loved gothic lit. You can imagine that the recent Wuthering Heights movie discourse was excruciating for me.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

I think I was maybe the only person ever who read this entire series and somehow remained blissfully unaware of the thinly-veiled religious undertones. Seriously? How? Anyways, I adore Lucy Pevensie (and yes I did play her in a stage version of LWW in high school 😇).

My Coming of Age Stories (Ages 15-19)

My teenage years consisted of melodramatic manic pixie dream girl novels and classic lit-girl titles like The Bell Jar, The Virgin Suicides, and The Lover.

Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

THE seminal text. I know it got memed into oblivion when the (excellent) film came out in 2012, but this book is so, so dear to me. Reading it as a sixteen-year-old felt like that first time you really feel seen and understood by someone or something. I know a lot of that is simply adolescence, but I think the enduring fact that we all sort of feel roughly the same around the same age in life is a beautiful thing about human beings.

“I know these will all be stories one day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We’ll all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I can see it. The one moment you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive.”

Looking for Alaska by John Green

For better or worse, this book kicked off a fascination with drinking Boone’s Farm (it’s terrible) and chain-smoking (only made it through about a pack and a half, and this was in college). It broke my heart, which to this day is often how I measure new favorite works of literature and film. I was also a staunch John Green defender when everyone was claiming he wrote flimsy, one-dimension female characters (that was the whole POINT!!!!!).

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Our Town was the spring play my freshman year of high school. I wasn’t in it, being a freshman and all, but I remember sitting in the nearly-empty auditorium during dress rehearsal absolutely weeping once they got to Emily’s final monologue. It really sums up a lot of how I feel about life.

Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama! […] But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s really look at one another! …I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye, good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking... and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?

The Lover by Marguerite Dumas

I think about the first line of this book SO often: “Very early in my life, it was too late.” I read this book as part of a literature course I took my freshman year of college. A lot of what we read wasn’t my taste, but I remember really loving this one. A lot of the details have faded but that one line in particular really stuck out to me.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Reading this as a teenager and being like, “guys I think something might be wrong with our society if we don’t intervene soon” is like a seminal budding-feminist experience, I think. And the Hulu show was good until it wasn’t. C’est la vie.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I read this fairly young, as a self-selected summer project for my advanced English classes. I’m pretty sure I chose it for the vibes and aesthetic, since I was deep in my brooding goth-adjacent phase. But I ended up really loving it. I really need to re-read it as an adult, because so much of the detail is fuzzy now, except for how I felt about it. And I do distinctly remember sitting in bed well past midnight on a hot muggy summer night when I first read the infamous fig tree passage, and feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach. Ironic, that the quote resonated so much already at the tender age of FIFTEEN, but I’ve always been prone to melancholy and nostalgia.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

My Twenties (Ages 20-29)

Six of Crows Duology by Leigh Bardugo

My best friend kept pestering me to read these books back when they came out, and I was not convinced. High fantasy with maps in the front is not usually my type of thing, but finally I decided to pick up Six of Crows and oh my GOD. I truly will (and have) read anything Leigh Bardugo publishes, because she’s pure magic. And her writing and characterizations managed to suck me into a YA fantasy novel series well past its intended age bracket. (Well maybe not… I was only about 23 come to think of it).

Faithful Place by Tana French

I maintain that Tana French is one of the greatest crime writers, certainly the best one living currently. A bold stance, to be sure, but I’ve tried to read some of her contemporaries and … woof. Anyways, I love LOVE her entire Dublin Murder Squad series, some of the only books I’ve re-read in recent years. This book in particular, the third in the series, just utterly breaks my heart.

Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion

Okay, this is an essay, not a book, but whatever. It’s my literary canon, I’ll cry if I want to. I think about this quote constantly. I’ve got a lot more Joan to read, but I know she’s a kindred spirit (well, me and every other former gifted kid on this app, let’s be real).

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

I think everyone collectively owes Lena Dunham an apology for their behavior towards her in 2014. I love love loved this book, and read it constantly. Yes she’s a privileged nepo-baby who is often out of touch in this book. But also, some feelings (like those experienced in one’s early twenties) are kind of universal and damn if she didn’t nail it.

“If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defenses. I might have a basic understanding of European history or economics. More abstractly, I might feel I had truly been somewhere, open and porous and hungry to learn.”

My Thirties (Ages 30-Now)

This category is something of a work in progress, since I’m only 32 as we speak, but already I’ve found a handful of works that I can’t get out of my head, that have shaped my ever-evolving worldview even further.

Penance by Eliza Clark

I think this book might be almost single-handedly responsible for ending my tenure as a certified “true crime girly.” Now, do I love mysteries and still get interested in true crime content? Yes. But the True Crime Industrial Complex freaks me out so bad now. The thought that I spent so many years listening to podcasts where, despite what fans would have you believe, the hosts are essentially making jokes about and riffing off of heinous crimes, is deeply upsetting to me.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

I read Normal People and didn’t really love it as much as I wanted to. But I decided to give this one a try, I think because I really wanted to be the type of person that liked Sally Rooney. When I came across this quote, I immediately pasted it into my notes app for easy access, because I knew I’d be getting a lot of mileage out of it.

“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

This book was just so cathartic, reading the thoughts of what feels like my entire generation, but also seeing how the characters grow and evolve despite it all feeling like the end of the world. It was simultaneously validating and healing, I think.

Beach Read by Emily Henry

The book that put me back in touch with my rom-com-loving roots. I’ve talked a lot here about how I had certain preconceptions and ideas about romance as a genre and how it wasn’t for me. Until something finally hit me: hey, dummy, all your favorite movies are rom-coms from the 90s & 00s, why wouldn’t you like romance novels? And to be fair, I was under the assumption that “romance novel” automatically meant “bodice-ripper” which is definitely not my vibe. But I’ve since found such a wealth of wonderful, heartwarming, beautifully-written books in the romance genre. Thanks EmHen!

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