Here are 56 books that Bookmarked fans have personally recommended once you finish the Bookmarked series.
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I'm addicted to memoirs. I love to peek inside another person's life, especially when the author embraces radical transparency, and I can’t resist being swept into the heart and mind of a courageous midlife woman. I admire writers who take risks, who remind me that sometimes our decisions, our humanness, take us down difficult roads. I'm a Professor of Communication Studies, and I author a Substack called Life Talk, which explores human connection—with others and with ourselves. The books on this list reflect both personal and professional passion: I'm endlessly drawn to self-reflexive inquiry, to stories that help me understand identity, resilience, and the courage it takes to transform.
I adore writers willing to show me their soft underbelly, who make themselves truly vulnerable, and Frangello does this with intensity.
Reading this memoir made me want to strive for deeper honesty in my own writing. It made me feel less alone with secrets from my past, the experiences and youthful decisions that caused me shame in adulthood. I have also enjoyed talking with others about Frangello's willingness to go there in print.
In fact, this memoir facilitated the best book club discussion I've had in years! My book club members had incredibly diverse opinions, but one thing we all agreed on: none of us had read anyone braver.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month
"A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped,…
Over a long lifetime, I’ve been intrigued to observe many variations on the themes of marriage, widowhood, divorce, and adultery among my friends, patients, and clients. The majority of marriages are probably happy, but these are not usually very interesting to write about, so marriages in fiction often involve some kind of conflict which leads to a more or less satisfactory resolution. I am a retired doctor, originally from England, and now living in New Zealand with my second husband, to whom I have been married for over 40 years.
This book, published in the 1870s, is sometimes considered the best English novel ever written.
It is a monumental work, and while I found it very impressive, I have to admit that reading the long and detailed text felt heavy going at times.
Set in a provincial town with a large cast of characters, it depicts a middle-class way of life very different from that of today, and addresses various social and political questions of the time. One major theme is the psychology of marriage as analysed through the relationships between two ill-matched couples.
Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece…
I’ve loved short stories since I was a young girl introduced to Edgar Allen Poe. There’s something especially exciting about a complete story in few words, and once I had to balance work, children, and personal relationships, stories became all the more cherished for short takes. I especially like tales about and by women, relating to our real challenges, and I review them often so other busy women discover better writers and interesting tales. There is nothing like a short story any time of day, especially in the evening, to soothe the soul.
Each one of these stories is a mini-novel, which are the sort of stories I love. Black never leaves you hanging, like some writers do, and you will feel like you’re right in there watching the story unfold. The writing has been called pitch-perfect and I agree. Every word is right, every moment fits and every character is trying to make sense of the world as we all do, every day. She deftly explores the emotional DNA passed from generations before and what that means for each of our lives going forward. So you get a great tale well told. and a lot to think about at the same time. Exactly what I love to read and what smart modern women are drawn to.
Heralding the arrival of a stunning new voice in American fiction, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This takes readers into the minds and hearts of people navigating the unsettling transitions that life presents to us all: A father struggles to forge an independent identity as his blind daughter prepares for college. A mother comes to terms with her adult daughter’s infidelity. An artist mourns the end of a romance while painting the portrait of a dying man. Brilliant, hopeful, and fearlessly honest, If I…
I'm addicted to memoirs. I love to peek inside another person's life, especially when the author embraces radical transparency, and I can’t resist being swept into the heart and mind of a courageous midlife woman. I admire writers who take risks, who remind me that sometimes our decisions, our humanness, take us down difficult roads. I'm a Professor of Communication Studies, and I author a Substack called Life Talk, which explores human connection—with others and with ourselves. The books on this list reflect both personal and professional passion: I'm endlessly drawn to self-reflexive inquiry, to stories that help me understand identity, resilience, and the courage it takes to transform.
Burden's honesty shook me—especially the disbelief she captures when she realizes the love of her life has become a complete stranger. As someone who has lived through a rough divorce and who has taught interpersonal communication for decades, I was fascinated by her inquiry into how intimacy unravels and people change.
This book is a wonderful mix of juicy story and relatable emotion. I found myself thinking of Burden's insights—the ways we can support our friends and family—just weeks later when someone I love told me her marriage was over.
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Burden’s searing, probing memoir explores . . . what she learned about intimacy and her own spirit.”—People
“A beautifully written instant classic. Strangers is gripping and heartbreaking and a must-read for every wife—and husband.”—Graydon Carter
“Asks us to examine life’s most perplexing questions: Can we see the invisible fault lines in a marriage or truly know the people closest to us?”—Lori Gottlieb
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
Sometimes, I’m in the mood for dystopias and want to imagine where the trends that Birkerts describes may take us. So I was pleasingly horrified by Shteyngart’s story of a near future where books are smelly embarrassments, people’s credit ratings are displayed on signs as they walk by, and Internet deprivation is grounds for suicide.
Oh, and I won’t be signing up for high-tech life extension procedures after seeing where that goes …
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
Birkerts’ essays make me beautifully sad and newly defiant. Like me, he’s an analog native living in a digital world who has felt his ability to concentrate on the written word erode over the years.
But boy, can he write: “Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another thin layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum.” To the typewriter, I go!
Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating technological innovation
In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art―the very cultural activities that make us human. After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others―the distraction…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I could use some hope for the future, and this story by a polymath and “deindustrial” sci-fi writer made me hope. It’s an actual utopia, not the much more popular dystopian genre. Greer lets me imagine how a low-tech, 1950s-ish economy could provide a more sustainable and meaningful life for all. He makes sensible points that cut across our usual political divisions.
After reading Retrotopia, I walked through a 19th-century neighborhood in Cincinnati, admired the small businesses and streetcars, and felt that this is the way things ought to be.
FORWARD TO THE PAST The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries. Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums—but one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes. Now Peter Carr, an emissary from the newly elected administration in the Atlantic Republic, boards a…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I’ve tried my hand at street poetry with a typewriter and been surprised by the hugs and tears my little efforts sometimes provoke. This book shows me why: people are hungry for someone to listen and care. And something about a mechanical intermediary promotes attention, while digital tech pushes us apart.
I was absorbed by Sonia-Wallace’s stories and jealous of his chance to be Amtrak’s writer-in-residence, typing poems on a train across America.
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are.
Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.
I’ve always been sensitive to my material environment, discerning the spiritual and emotional effects of light, color, and sound in everyday life, like our clothes and homes and also in nature. However, for years, I lived in my head. I’d relegated my body and intuition to the sidelines. For two decades, I built a career in visual art, but it took the mid-life collapse of everything I’d wanted to find my way back to the authenticity of those early sensibilities, charting an artist’s way home. The creative life is not just for artists. It sustains our humanity in times of darkness and is the source of our brightest future.
This book's investment in objects of art and the everyday deepened my relationship with the most mundane aspects of my daily life. I began to see the world around me as a lens for self-knowledge.
The book's intimate reflections ignited in me a day-to-day creativity that has transformed the would-be-ordinary into the beautiful. Here the material world is a gateway to our humanity. I read this book for the first time over twenty years ago and it has stayed present and relevant for me ever since.
Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.
I'm addicted to memoirs. I love to peek inside another person's life, especially when the author embraces radical transparency, and I can’t resist being swept into the heart and mind of a courageous midlife woman. I admire writers who take risks, who remind me that sometimes our decisions, our humanness, take us down difficult roads. I'm a Professor of Communication Studies, and I author a Substack called Life Talk, which explores human connection—with others and with ourselves. The books on this list reflect both personal and professional passion: I'm endlessly drawn to self-reflexive inquiry, to stories that help me understand identity, resilience, and the courage it takes to transform.
I love this book because it reminded me that we are more than our worst mistake.
Good, smart people do bad, dumb things—and sometimes end up in prison. I heard stories like this every day when I ran a program for formerly incarcerated students on my college campus, but never told as eloquently as the one Love Hardin writes.
Her story is raw, and her transformation feels earned rather than tidy. Plus, she offers an important insider's view of the criminal justice system, one that left me fired up about how the system could do better.
I returned to Love Hardin’s examples of resilience when I advised my own students—when I encouraged them to strive for success. Her memoir filled me with hope and compassion.
“Once you start reading, be prepared, because you won’t want to stop.” —Oprah Winfrey
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • New York Times bestselling author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir.
No one expects the police to knock on the door of the million-dollar two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. …
