They say that your 20s is the ultimate time when you yearn and search for higher concepts like the meaning of life, what it means to fail or your true calling.They also say the books that you read matter as much as when you read them. That means that timing can influence a book's effect on you. If these two statements are indeed correct, here's a list of literary treasures that just might make your 20s bearable, if not beautiful:
1. Never Let Me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The story of three friends raised at an exclusive, idyllic private school who must eventually come to terms with their own existence.
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love.
3. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
No one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers of food and cashiers with six-inch fingernails.
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing.
5. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
The journey of a young man who gave up everything he had and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. This is his story.
6. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational.
7. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
White Teeth is the story of two North London families. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.
8. Oh The Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss
Set off into the world to see what life will bring you while encountering all sorts of crazy adventures along the way.
9. Generation X by Douglas Coupland
Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society priced beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fall-out of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation - Generation X.
10. Bossypants by Tina Fey
Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.
11. I'm With The Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres
The stylish, exuberant, and remarkably sweet confession of one of the most famous groupies of the 1960s and 70s.
12. Dear Diary by Lesley Arfin
A collection of a girl's funniest diary entries from 12 to 25 years old. She updates each entry by tracking down the people involved and asking awkward questions like, "Do you remember when I tried to beat you up?"
13. The Collected Poems by Kenneth Koch
Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections-from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962, to A Possible World, published in 2002, the year of the poet's death-are gathered in one volume.
14. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature.
15. The Catcher In The Rye by J.D Salinger
Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists.
16. One Day by David Nicholls
Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows?
17. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, the screwed-up residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the Enfield Tennis Academy search for the master copy of a movie so dangerously entertaining that its viewers die in a state of catatonic bliss.
18. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny
The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs, fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts.
19. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. 20. What She Saw... by Lucy Rosenfeld
Plagued with weird parents, an underdeveloped body, and a mind on the verge of self-deconstruction, Phoebe Fine feels ill-equipped for a journey through the hardening chambers of the late twentieth-century heart. Phoebe trudges defiantly through guyland, armed with a tart tongue, and propelled by an insatiable desire to be loved.
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