Bookseller One Grand Books has asked celebrities to name the ten titles they’d take to a desert island, and it’s shared the results with Vulture. Today, author Samantha Irby, whose new essay collection, Wow, No Thank You, is out now, shares her list.
One of my friends gave me a hard time for liking this book when she saw my battered, much-loved copy out on the dining-room table, but I don’t give a shit: This book bangs.
Cracks my heart wide open every time I read it, which I’ve done multiple times. The way he writes about music is straight-up beautiful. Do you know who can move you to tears over fucking Fall Out Boy??? Hanif.
This book is so funny, like gasping-and-crying funny, and I feel like if I was stuck on a desert island, I would want to spend the time I wasn’t sobbing in despair laughing hysterically.
Terrifying. Horrifying. So good. I love Detroit so much, and thankfully I had my opinion solidly in place before reading this.
This book is just the best. The best. Brit is incredible. You ride the emotional waves of this story right alongside her perfectly flawed and genuine characters.
Exhilarating science fiction, which is a wild thing for me to say because I am way too dumb to understand most science fiction. I love it so much and blew through it, which is also bananas because I can hardly read!
I love YA, and I really love books about sad and/or complicated, moody teens, especially when there is romance involved. All I ever want is to go back to being consumed by every last one of my adolescent emotions.
I am really into thrillers/mysteries because they are propulsive and go down easy, but I am especially into the ones where you get sucked into the personal lives of the crime solver. Like, yes, I want this guy to find these missing girls, but also: Can his broken heart ever be mended??? Anyway, I would read Louisa Luna’s grocery lists if she published them.
This is relatively new, but I read it when it came out, and I’m currently watching the HBO series, which is creepy and great. And honestly, you could stick any Stephen King book in here and I’d probably be happy. It’s not news that he’s a master storyteller and so good at what he does. Although I do wish he’d tweet less — damn.
You can’t come of age in ’90s Chicagoland without falling in love with Lynda Barry vis-à-vis her weekly comic in The Reader. I have every single one of her books (I mean, duh, come on!), but this one is my favorite.
