the book you like most essay

Essay on The Book I Like Most

Students are often asked to write an essay on The Book I Like Most in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on The Book I Like Most

Introduction.

The book I like most is “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling.

Why I Like It

This book takes me into a magical world. It’s full of adventure, friendship, and courage.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron are my favorite characters. They’re brave and kind.

Reading this book is always a joy. It’s my most cherished book.

250 Words Essay on The Book I Like Most

Books are the repositories of wisdom, offering us a window into the minds of great thinkers from different eras and cultures. Among the vast array of books I have read, one that has profoundly influenced me is “1984” by George Orwell.

Conceptual Brilliance

Orwell’s dystopian world, where Big Brother incessantly watches over citizens, is a chilling exploration of totalitarianism. The book’s conceptual brilliance lies in its depiction of a society where individuality is obliterated, and conformity is enforced through psychological manipulation. The concept of “Newspeak” – a language designed to limit free thought – is a stark reminder of the power of language in shaping perceptions.

Characterization

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is an embodiment of rebellion in the face of oppression. His futile resistance against the Party’s tyranny is both heartbreaking and inspiring. His relationship with Julia serves as a beacon of hope amidst the pervasive gloom, further underscoring the human spirit’s resilience.

Relevance Today

“1984” is not just a work of fiction; it’s a prophetic commentary on the dangers of absolute power and the erosion of privacy. In today’s digital age, where surveillance is ubiquitous, Orwell’s vision seems eerily prescient. The book urges us to safeguard our freedom and be vigilant against any form of totalitarian control.

In conclusion, “1984” is a book I cherish for its profound insights into human nature, society, and power dynamics. It’s a timeless masterpiece that has not only enriched my understanding of literature but also shaped my perspective on the world around me.

500 Words Essay on The Book I Like Most

The realm of literature is vast, encompassing countless books that have shaped minds, influenced cultures, and altered perceptions. Among such a diverse range, the book I appreciate most is George Orwell’s “1984.” This dystopian novel is a profound exploration of totalitarianism, individuality, and the power of language, which resonates deeply with me.

The Resonance of Dystopia

The dystopian setting of “1984” is a grim projection of a totalitarian society, a world that Orwell envisioned could emerge in the aftermath of World War II. This dystopia is not merely a backdrop for the narrative but a character in its own right, embodying the oppressive regime that seeks to control every aspect of individual life. The chilling vision of a society where privacy is non-existent, history is manipulated, and free thought is punishable, serves as a stark reminder of the perils of unchecked power. This dystopian portrayal resonates with me as it underscores the value of freedom and the importance of vigilance against the potential abuse of power.

The Struggle for Individuality

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a cog in the machine of this oppressive regime, yet he yearns for individuality and personal freedom. His struggle against the system, his pursuit of truth, and his yearning for love, all represent the human spirit’s resilience in the face of adversity. Winston’s journey is a testament to the indomitable human spirit, a theme that resonates with me. It encourages introspection about the value we place on our individuality and freedom, and the lengths we are willing to go to preserve them.

The Power of Language

Orwell’s “1984” also delves into the power of language and its manipulation for political ends. The concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed by the regime to limit free thought, is a potent symbol of linguistic control. This exploration of language and its potential for manipulation is particularly relevant in today’s era of misinformation and propaganda. It encourages critical thinking about the information we consume and the importance of linguistic precision.

In conclusion, “1984” stands out to me due to its exploration of pertinent themes such as totalitarianism, individuality, and the power of language. It serves as a stark reminder of the perils of unchecked power, the value of individual freedom, and the potential manipulation of language. This timeless piece of literature continues to resonate with me, offering insights that are as relevant today as they were when Orwell penned them. It is a book that I believe every individual, especially those shaping their worldview, should read and ponder upon.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Our today’s session is going to be focused on writing short essays on the topic of ‘The Book I Like The Most.’ There will be three sets of short essays on the same topic covering different word limits.

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Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 100 Words

Out of all the books that I have read, the one I like the most is Ramayana. Ramayana is a Hindu epic that tells the story of Lord Rama. The story starts with Rama’s father, Dasharatha, who was the King of Ayodhya and his three wives. Later Lord Rama is born and the story follows him as he grows up, gets married, is exiled and has to fight various demons and evil creatures.

The main part of the story is where Lord Rama fights the Demon King, Ravana and defeats him. He then returns to his kingdom and rules over the people as a moral and just ruler. This sacred epic written in ancient times teaches us a lot about life.

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 200 Words

Books have the power to fuel our imagination, provide us with knowledge about the outside world and improve our intellect. I love to read books. Reading books also boosts our memory and improves our reading, writing and speaking skills. I have read many fictional and non-fictional books, but the book I like the most is our former president, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s autobiography, ‘Wings of fire’. The book covers his life story before he became the president of India.

In the book, Dr Kalam talks about his childhood, his early life, his family and the struggles they had to go through to make ends meet. He talks about his journey from being a small village boy in Tamil Nadu to becoming a leading scientist in Indian space research, nuclear and missile development programs.

His story is indeed inspiring and proves that one can achieve all their dreams if one is sincere and are determined to work hard and persevere. The book also highlights the importance of family in the life of a person and how their support can help one realize even their seemingly impossible dreams.

I have read the book multiple times and it has always left me feeling motivated and filled with determination to chase my dreams. It is indeed an amazing book.

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 400 Words

Books are often referred to as a man’s best friend. They are loyal companions capable of uplifting our moods and providing us with a safe space. Books contain a vast amount of knowledge and information and have helped us evolve in many ways.

Books have the power to fuel our imagination, provide us with knowledge about almost everything and improve our intellect. Reading books also boosts our memory and improves our reading, writing and speaking skills. That is why children are always encouraged to read from a young age.

I love to read books and I grew up reading a variety of books, some fiction and others non-fictional. Fairy tales were my favourite. Reading about the different types of fairies, fairy godmothers, kind princesses, evil queens, witches and wizards was magical in itself. I also liked to read mythological books and found the tales from Greek and Roman mythologies pretty interesting.

As I grew up, my interest shifted to non-fictional books like biographies and autobiographies of famous people as well as memoirs and scientific journals. However, throughout the years, there is one series of books that has remained my favourite and that is the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.

When I was eight years old, I received the first book of the Harry Potter series, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone’, as a birthday present from my aunt. I was delighted. That book introduced me to a whole new world – a world full of magical beings. As I read the book, my mind conjured up images of what that world might look like and my imagination exploded.

The book made me feel a range of emotions. I cried reading about Harry’s suffering. I smiled when Hagrid saved Harry. I felt so happy when Harry, Ron and Hermione became friends and I sat there holding my breath as the end approached.

After I finished the first book, I couldn’t wait to buy the following ones. However, even to this day, the first book holds a special place in my heart. Harry Potter books introduced us to the wizarding world and its workings. They taught us about friendship, about having fun as well as working hard. They also taught us that no matter how strong the evil force is, the good always wins in the end.

I also have many other books that I like. Some of them are ‘Wings of fire’ and ‘Ignited minds’ by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, ‘Gitanjali’ by Rabindranath Tagore, “To kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte.

I have adopted a very simplistic approach to writing these essays for a better understanding of all kinds of students. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, post them in the comment section below. Join our Telegram channel to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you for being with us,

10 Paragraphs: My Favourite Book

Writing a paragraph about your favorite book allows you to express your personal connection and admiration for a literary work that has left a lasting impact on you. Whether it’s a captivating novel, an inspiring non-fiction book, or a thought-provoking piece of poetry, conveying your thoughts and feelings effectively is essential.

Table of Contents

Tips On Writing A Paragraph On My Favourite Book

Start with a Captivating Opening: Begin your paragraph with an engaging and attention-grabbing statement that entices readers to continue reading. This could be a compelling quote from the book, a thought-provoking question, or a brief overview of the book’s plot or central theme. The opening should create intrigue and set the tone for the rest of the paragraph.

Provide Essential Information: Include key details about the book, such as the title, author, and genre. This information helps readers identify the book and provides context for your discussion. Briefly introduce the author and their background if relevant, highlighting any notable achievements or contributions to the literary world.

Express Your Personal Connection: Share why this book is your favorite and how it has impacted you. Discuss the emotions it evoked, the insights gained, or the lessons learned. Explain how the book resonated with you on a deep level and why it holds a special place in your heart. Be sincere and authentic in expressing your personal connection to the book.

Highlight Standout Qualities: Identify and discuss the standout qualities of the book that make it unique and exceptional. This could include the writing style, character development, plot structure, thematic depth, or any other elements that significantly contributed to your enjoyment and appreciation of the book. Focus on specific aspects that made the book memorable and compelling to you.

Conclude with a Strong Closing: Wrap up your paragraph by summarizing your thoughts and feelings about the book. You can reiterate why it is your favorite and the impact it has had on you. Consider ending with a thought-provoking statement or a reflection on how the book has influenced your perspective, inspired you, or enriched your life. A strong closing leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

Paragraph 1

My favorite book is “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. Set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the 1930s, this classic novel explores themes of racial injustice, morality, and the loss of innocence. Through the eyes of Scout Finch, a young girl growing up in a racially divided society, the book offers a poignant and thought-provoking examination of social issues. The beautifully crafted characters, compelling storytelling, and powerful messages of compassion and empathy have made “To Kill a Mockingbird” a timeless masterpiece that continues to resonate with readers of all ages.

Paragraph 2

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite book. Set in the glitzy and glamorous 1920s Jazz Age, this novel delves into the elusive American Dream and the dark underbelly of wealth and excess. Through the enigmatic Jay Gatsby and the narrator Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald paints a vivid portrait of love, longing, and the disillusionment of an era. The lyrical prose, rich symbolism, and exploration of themes such as social class and the pursuit of happiness make “The Great Gatsby” a literary gem that has captivated readers for generations.

Paragraph 3

I hold “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen close to my heart as my favorite book. This beloved novel takes us into the world of the Bennet family in 19th-century England, where romance, societal expectations, and the complexities of human relationships intertwine. Austen’s wit, sharp social commentary, and unforgettable characters, particularly the spirited Elizabeth Bennet and the enigmatic Mr. Darcy, make this tale of love, misunderstandings, and personal growth a timeless and enchanting read.

Paragraph 4

“1984” by George Orwell is my favorite book for its chilling portrayal of a dystopian society. Set in a totalitarian regime ruled by Big Brother, the novel explores themes of government surveillance, thought control, and the erosion of individual freedom. Orwell’s masterful world-building, prophetic vision, and searing critique of authoritarianism make “1984” a powerful and cautionary tale that continues to resonate in our modern society.

Paragraph 5

“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho holds a special place in my heart. This philosophical and spiritual novel follows the journey of a young shepherd named Santiago as he embarks on a quest to discover his personal legend. Through vivid storytelling and profound insights, Coelho explores the themes of destiny, self-discovery, and the pursuit of one’s dreams. The book’s timeless wisdom and inspirational messages of following one’s heart have made it a cherished favorite among readers worldwide.

Paragraph 6

I find immense joy in reading “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling. This enchanting tale introduces us to the magical world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and follows the adventures of the young wizard Harry Potter. Rowling’s imaginative storytelling, richly developed characters, and themes of friendship, bravery, and the battle between good and evil have captivated readers of all ages. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is the beginning of an extraordinary journey that has left an indelible mark on the hearts of millions of readers.

Paragraph 7

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger is my favorite book, known for its distinctive narrative voice and exploration of teenage angst and alienation. Through the rebellious and introspective character of Holden Caulfield, Salinger delves into themes of identity, authenticity, and the loss of innocence. The raw emotions, honest portrayal of adolescence, and Salinger’s unique writing style have made “The Catcher in the Rye” a timeless coming-of-age novel that continues to resonate with readers.

Paragraph 8

“Beloved” by Toni Morrison is a profound and haunting book that has left a lasting impact on me. Set in post-Civil War America, the novel explores the legacy of slavery and its enduring effects on individuals and communities. Morrison’s lyrical prose, vivid imagery, and exploration of themes such as memory, trauma, and the search for identity create a deeply moving and unforgettable reading experience. “Beloved” is a testament to Morrison’s literary genius and her ability to shed light on the darkest corners of history.

Paragraph 9

“The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite book, an epic fantasy that transports readers to the enchanting realm of Middle-earth. This tale of adventure, fellowship, and the battle against dark forces captivates with its richly imagined world, intricate mythology, and unforgettable characters such as Frodo Baggins and Gandalf the Grey. Tolkien’s mastery of storytelling, the depth of his world-building, and the timeless themes of heroism and sacrifice make “The Lord of the Rings” a literary masterpiece that continues to inspire readers worldwide.

Paragraph 10

“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a literary masterpiece that holds a special place in my heart. Set in 19th-century Russia, this psychological novel delves into the mind of its protagonist, Raskolnikov, a poor ex-student who commits a heinous crime and grapples with his guilt and the consequences of his actions. Dostoevsky’s exploration of morality, redemption, and the complexities of the human psyche is both profound and thought-provoking. The book’s deep character development, moral dilemmas, and philosophical musings make “Crime and Punishment” a gripping and introspective read that has stood the test of time.

About Mr. Greg

Mr. Greg is an English teacher from Edinburgh, Scotland, currently based in Hong Kong. He has over 5 years teaching experience and recently completed his PGCE at the University of Essex Online. In 2013, he graduated from Edinburgh Napier University with a BEng(Hons) in Computing, with a focus on social media.

Mr. Greg’s English Cloud was created in 2020 during the pandemic, aiming to provide students and parents with resources to help facilitate their learning at home.

Whatsapp: +85259609792

[email protected]

Essay on “The Book I Like The Most ” for Kids and Students, English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 for College and Competitive Exams.

The Book I Like The Most

Life for most of us is pretty hectic. Nothing exciting or adventurous ever seems to happen. The solution to this is to read books.

Books are an important medium, suitable for all age groups. Even elders read books to escape from their hectic schedule sometimes.

A book that makes a person smile and relieves the boredom and dullness is worth reading. Today it is said that books are not about reading alone, but also for gaining some useful knowledge from them.

Some days back, the Book Fair was held in Pragati Maidan. I, along with a few of my friends went to purchase books. Although I purchased many books the book I liked most was in English by Mrs. Gaskell. It was a fiction book- Ruth. It has been published by J.M. Dents and Sons Ltd. It was first published in the year 1967, and since then it has been republished every year.

Since I had heard so much about Mrs. Gaskell’s work. I knew that Ruth would not disappoint me which was true enough.

Ruth, the heroine of the book deals with a love affair at fifteen which brings humiliation and a life of secrecy for the little girl as she is reduced by the man of upper class society.

This story also reflects that the classes appear in every country be it India or any other country. It is one of the world’s most familiar stories, but the author has treated a very sober theme with freshness and with considerable courage having regard to the time (the time of England revolution) and the theme (An unwed girl with a child).

It not only used to happen then, but now also it continues i.e., the exploitation of the weaker class by the upper class.

After reading this book, I have decided that I will work for the rights of women.

So, I can say that this book has changed my whole outlook towards the life.

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Essay on My Favourite Book for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on My Favourite Book

Essay on My Favourite Book: Books are friends who never leave your side. I find this saying to be very true as books have always been there for me. I enjoy reading books . They have the power to help us travel through worlds without moving from our places. In addition, books also enhance our imagination. Growing up, my parents and teachers always encouraged me to read. They taught me the importance of reading. Subsequently, I have read several books. However, one boom that will always be my favourite is Harry Potter. It is one of the most intriguing reads of my life. I have read all the books of this series, yet I read them again as I never get bored of it.

Harry Potter Series

Harry Potter was a series of books authored by one of the most eminent writers of our generation, J.K. Rowling. These books showcase the wizarding world and its workings. J.K. Rowling has been so successful at weaving a picture of this world, that it feels real. Although the series contains seven books, I have a particular favourite. My favourite book from the series is The Goblet of fire.

When I started reading the book, it caught my attention instantly. Even though I had read all the previous parts, none of the books caught my attention as this one did. It gave a larger perspective into the wizarding world. One of the things which excite me the most about this book is the introduction of the other wizard schools. The concept of the Tri-wizard tournament is one of the most brilliant pieces I have come across in the Harry Potter series.

In addition, this book also contains some of my favourite characters. The moment I read about Victor Krum’s entry, I was star struck. The aura and personality of that character described by Rowling are simply brilliant. Further, it made me become a greater fan of the series.

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What Harry Potter Series Taught Me?

Even though the books are about the world of wizards and magic, the Harry Potter series contains a lot of lessons for young people to learn. Firstly, it teaches us the importance of friendship. I have read many books but never come across a friendship like that of Harry, Hermoine, and Ron. These three musketeers stuck together throughout the books and never gave up. It taught me the value of a good friend.

Further, the series of Harry Potter taught me that no one is perfect. Everyone has good and evil inside them. We are the ones who choose what we wish to be. This helped me in making better choices and becoming a better human being. We see how the most flawed characters like Snape had goodness inside them. Similarly, how the nicest ones like Dumbledore had some bad traits. This changed my perspective towards people and made me more considerate.

Finally, these books gave me hope. They taught me the meaning of hope and how there is light at the end of the tunnel. It gave me the strength to cling on to hope in the most desperate times just like Harry did all his life. These are some of the most essential things I learned from Harry Potter.

In conclusion, while there were many movies made in the books. Nothing beats the essence and originality of the books. The details and inclusiveness of books cannot be replaced by any form of media. Therefore, the Goblet of Fire remains to be my favourite book.

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more.

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Essay on My Favourite Book in 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 Words

We all need to make a habit of book reading. Here are a few essays on My Favourite Book in 200, 300, 400, 500, and 600 Words. These are very easy and simple to learn for all students. You can find a useful one for yourself.

In This Blog We Will Discuss

Essay on My Favourite Book in 200 Words

The book is the best friend of humans. It never leaves us. It always helps us to get better by heart and knowledge. The best place to get the knowledge is a book. Because of encouragement from my teachers and my parents , I have been a huge book lover.

I love reading books. I have a big collection of books. I mostly love to read books based on science. It is my favorite topic. I have read lots of science fiction. My favorite book is ‘Frankenstein’ and it’s science fiction.

When I read this book for the first time, I was amazed and stunned. The writer Mary Shelley had an amazing imagination power. This book tells the story of a scientist named Victor Frankenstein, who created a hideous sapient creature by his unorthodox experiment.

The entire story is based on that ‘creature’. This book is full of suspense and thrill. I have read it three times and watched the movie too. It is amazing and mind-blowing. This book was published in 1818.

The author Mary Shelley is an astonishing writer who has written tons of beautiful books. I suggest this book to everyone. You should read it if you have not. I am sure you will love this.

Essay on My Favourite Book in 300 Words

Introduction:

Book reading is a very good habit that everyone should build. It helps to build confidence, gain inspiration, and motivation. I am a book lover and I read books. I have a small library in my home . I suggest everyone read more and more books.

It is the best way to learn something new. We can travel the entire world through words written in the books. There are a few books that I really like, Harry Potter is one of them. Actually it is my most favorite book ever.

My Favorite Book:

Harry Potter is a fictional story series authored by British writer J. K. Rowling. She is an excellent writer. I am really surprised to see her imagination level. I have seen the movie series of this book too. That was mind-blowing.

The story is fictional and different. It’s all about a wizard world. Hermione Granger and Ron Weasly are my most favorite characters in this book. I love the ‘Goblet of Fire’ most. This chapter is amazing. I love other chapters too, but this one seems special to me.

Overall I have been a huge fan of J. K. Rowling after reading this book. This fictional fantasy book has earned a huge amount of money. This book was loved by young people mostly.

Conclusion:

You should read Harry Potter if you have not yet. This is an amazing novel to read. I suggest this to everyone. If you love reading fictional stories, then you will become a fan of this series. Though there are not so many educational things in this book it was entertaining.

Essay on My Favourite Book in 400 Words

I am a book lover and I love reading books. My favorite genre is Motivation. I have read tons of books that have motivational content. Among them some books are amazing. And today I am going to talk about a book that I really like. This book’s name is ‘The Magic of Thinking Big’.

My Favourite Book:

The Magic of Thinking Big has been authored by David J. Schwartz. He is an amazing writer and wrote an amazing piece of the book. Before starting any business, you must read this book to grow your mentality.

This book taught me lots of lessons and that’s why I love it so much. I have read a few other books too authored by the same writer but I found this one the best.

Motivation is a highly important thing in our life to get success and this book will take your motivation on a peak and you will get lots of inspiration to start something new and fresh.

Reasons Why It is My Favorite Book:

Let’s talk about the reasons why it is my favorite book. There are some important lessons that this book teaches me, that’s why it is my favorite book. The first reason is, it creates a belief inside you that you will start believing that you will get success for sure.

This is a huge mindset for any entrepreneur who is in an early stage. There are so many excuses that we make before doing anything. When you will read this book properly you will stop making these nonsense excuses.

You will become a more dedicated person to your work. Hopefully, it will destroy all of your fear and will give you lots of confidence to do something new. Creativity is a huge asset for doing something. You will get better creativity power and will be able to visualize all of your plans in front of your eyes.

You will learn how to manage the environment around you and you are exactly that person who you think you are. I think these are some amazing lessons that a person can get in his life. And it will help to grow better in a positive way.

I am suggesting this book to read for everyone. People of any age level can read and understand this amazing book. It helped me to make my confidence level high.

Essay on My Favourite Book Quran in 500 Words

People read books to feed their mind that is hungry for knowledge. I am a book lover and I love reading lots of books. I have a list of my favorite books. But one book is very special for me and it’s a holy book in the religion of Islam.

I hope you can guess it’s the Quran. That book has been life-changing for me. And today I will tell you why it is my favorite book and what you can learn from this.

My Favourite Book Quran:

As a Muslim, I was taught the Quran at a young age. But we are not native Arabic speakers that language is being used in the Quran. But when I grew up, I bought English translated Quran for me. I read the whole book within two days and it was a huge breakthrough in my life.

It changed my vision, my perspective, and my motive of life. Let me tell you how all that happened. First of let’s talk about how this holy book came to us. It was almost 1450 years ago, it came to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

Allah sent it to his part by part. This book is unchanged and still carrying the same content. The most surprising thing is that it still can be a guide for the ultimate good life after 14 hundreds of years. That’s why Islamic scholars tell ‘the Quran is the perfect solution for life’. Whatever we need to learn, solve, or think everything has been discussed in the Quran.

There was an open challenge for mankind if they make a similar chapter of the Quran. But it’s not possible to write. Because this book has come directly from the Almighty Allah. It wasn’t written by any human.

Why is the Quran My Favourite Book?

Everything that we need to survive in the world has been discussed in the Holy Quran. If you need to find a solution to any too complex problem, you can find a proper solution in this book. You need to have the proper knowledge to research that.

There are lots of Islamic countries in the world that are operating their laws based on the Quran. It is very easy, useful, and great for mankind. Allah said that a person who reads the Quran regularly fills his heart with blessings.

We can earn lots of rewards for the afterlife by reading the Quran. It’s a huge threat to the heart. When we feel sick inside, it helps us to heal it. The Quran has talked about education, medication, science, and different inventions.

There are some surprising things that have been discussed in the Quran and the current science has proved them now. The scientists took the help of the Quran to make the world a better place by inventing new things.

Conclusion:

Overall the Quran is the solution for a complete life. I am sure you will love it if you read it. It should be one of your most-read books.

Essay on My Favourite Book in 600 Words

Books are our best friend and they never leave us. That’s a huge truth that I can realize. I am a passionate book reader and I love to read lots of books every week. We have a family library and my father helps me to collect and buy books.

I have read tons of amazing books, but there are some special books which have taken my heart away. Today I am going to talk about my most favorite books ‘Robinson Crusoe’. This book has always been a different thing for me and I am still reading it again and again. There are lots of lessons to learn from this amazing novel.

My Favourite Book:

My favorite book Robinson Crusoe was written by Daniel Defoe and it first published on 25 April 1719. A very important thing to note is that this book is 300 years old, but the content and storyline are still feeling amazing to the new generation of readers.

This book contains a story named a person ‘Robinson’ who lived on an island for 28 years. He fell in a ship accident and lost everything. Then he found a boat to drive to the nearest island. It was a huge island.

He made his own kingdom there. He collected his food by taming animals and growing some crops. He became a permanent member of the island. Some day he faced something brutal and different. He found a man was naked brought to the island by some cannibals.

He rescued the person and gave him the name ‘Friday’. Friday became his partner but he was also a member of cannibals. That’s why Robinson kept him outside of his tent.

Then Friday became the partner of Robinson and they both made the island an amazing place for themselves. In the end, a ship came to their island and there was lots of adventure and stories that will make you feel thrilled.

Why Do I Like This Book?

There are so many reasons that are why I like this book. The first reason is it teaches me about life and reality. I get very serious when I read this book. I have read it almost 4 times and am still reading it again.

What Did This Book Teach Me?

This book is a huge learning for me. For the first 20 years, Robinson was living there all alone. And that time he managed to survive because of his intelligence, courage, and dedication. That’s a huge learning for me.

It teaches how to keep yourself focused when you are alone and under lots of problems. This story is about how a man creates his own reality. When Robinson found Friday and he became the best companion for him.

He taught him language, religion, and overall civilization. Including all these things this book is like a teacher to me. It helps me to understand lots of harsh reality.

My Hobby Book Reading:

I have made reading my hobby. I never waste time. I love to read books when I am free or spending leisure time. I think everyone should get this habit. It is very important and essential to building a better knowledge base.

We can learn different types of things by reading books. My hobby is reading and I always read books. I have a huge collection of different types of books.

Book reading is a huge thing that we all should be up to. It helps us to travel through words by staying in the same place. We all need to build book reading habits to make our imagination power stronger.

10 Lines Essay on My Favourite Book

1. Book reading is a very good habit because it helps us to improve our personality and make us mature.

2. Some books are priceless and they teach us some amazing lessons.

3. My favorite book name is ‘Robinson Crusoe’. This is a world-famous book written by Daniel Defoe.

4. This book was written 300 years ago, but still now people read it with the same love and interest.

5. It has so many lessons to learn. The patience of Robinson is amazing.

6. It teaches us how to survive when none is around you and you are alone.

7. This book could be a life guide for yourself.

8. Robinson spent 28 years on an island all alone.

9. It is a story about how a man struggles against all the odd things in life.

10. I love reading this book again and again. If you have not read this book yet, then you should read it today.

How do I write an essay about my favorite book?

Make a shortlist of your favorite books first. It’s better to pick top 10 books first. And then write which book has what types of impact of your real life and on your thinking. That’s how you will come with your favorite book. And then write what this book taught you and be able to teach the same someone else.

Why is Harry Potter My Favourite book?

It is a very amazing fiction that was loved by millions of young people in the world. There is a movie series too based on this story. I love this book because of its mind-blowing story and few interesting characters.

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20 Must-Read Best Essay Collections of 2019

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

Calling all essay fans! For your reading pleasure, I’ve rounded up the best essay collections of 2019. It was a fabulous year for essays (although I say that about most years, to be honest). We’ve had some stellar anthologies of writing about disability, feminism, and the immigrant experience. We’ve had important collections about race, mental health, the environment, and media. And we’ve had collections of personal essays to entertain us and make us feel less alone. There should be something in this list for just about any reading mood or interest.

These books span the entire year, and in cases where the book isn’t published yet, I’ve given you the publication date so you can preorder it or add it to your library list.

I hope this list of the best essay collections of 2019 helps you find new books you love!

About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times , edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

This book emerged from a New York Times series of personal essays on living with a disability. Each piece was written by a person in the disabled community, and the volume contains an introduction by Andrew Solomon. The topics cover romance, shame, ambition, childbearing, parenting, aging, and much more. The authors offer a wide range of perspectives on living in a world not built for them.

Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine by Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard’s essays are about her experiences of race. She writes about life as a black woman in Vermont, her family’s history in Alabama and Nashville, her job as a professor who teaches African American literature, and her adoption of twin girls from Ethiopia. It begins with the story of a stabbing in New Haven and uses that as a springboard to write about what it means to live in a black body.

Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger , edited by Lilly Dancyger (Seal Press, October 8)

Women’s anger has been the source of some important and powerful writing lately (see Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her ). This collection brings together a diverse group of writers to further explore the subject. The book’s 22 writers include Leslie Jamison, Melissa Febos, Evette Dionne, and more.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of essays on mental and chronic illness. Wang combines research with her personal knowledge of illness to explore misconceptions about schizophrenia and disagreements in the medical community about definitions and treatments. She tells moving, honest personal stories about living with mental illness.

The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections by Eliane Brum, Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Graywolf, October 15)

This volume collects work from two of Brum’s books, and includes investigative pieces and profiles about Brazil and its people. She focuses on underrepresented communities such as indigenous midwives from the Amazon and people in the favelas of São Paulo. Her book captures the lives and voices of people not often written about.

Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams (Sarah Crichton Books, October 8)

This volume collects essays written between 2016 and 2018 covering the topic she has always written so beautifully about: the natural world. The essays focus on the concept of erosion, including the erosion of land and of the self. They are her response to the often-overwhelming challenges we face in the political and the natural world.

The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America , edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman

This volume brings together an amazing group of writers including Chigozie Obioma, Jenny Zhang, Fatimah Asghar, Alexander Chee, and many more. The essayists are first and second generation immigrants who describe their personal experiences and struggles with finding their place in the U.S. The pieces connect first-person stories with broader cultural and political issues to paint an important picture of the U.S. today.

Good Things Happen to People You Hate: Essays by Rebecca Fishbein (William Morrow, October 15)

In the tradition of Samantha Irby and Sloane Crosley, this collection is a humorous look at life’s unfairness. Fishbein writes about trouble with jobs, bedbugs, fires, and cyber bullying. She covers struggles with alcohol, depression, anxiety, and failed relationships. She is honest and hilarious both, wittily capturing experiences shared by many.

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum

This book contains new and previously published essays by New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum. The pieces include reviews and profiles. They also argue for a new type of criticism that can accommodate the ambition and complexity of contemporary television. She makes a case for opening art criticism up to new forms and voices.

I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying by Bassey Ikpi

Bassey Ikpi’s essay collection is about her personal experiences dealing with Bipolar II and anxiety. She writes about struggling with mental health even while her career as a spoken word artist was flourishing. She looks at the ways our mental health is intertwined with every aspect of our lives. It’s an honest look at identity, health, and illness.

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (Little, Brown and Company, November 5)

These pieces are humorous, whimsical essays about things that are on Jenny Slate’s mind. As she—an actress and stand-up comedian as well as writer—describes it, “I looked into my brain and found a book. Here it is.” With a light touch, she tells us honestly what it’s like to be her and how she sees the world, one little, weird piece of it at a time.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Here is Jamison’s follow-up essay collection to the bestselling Empathy Exams . This one is divided into three sections, “Longing,” “Looking,” and “Dwelling,” each with pieces that combine memoir and journalism. Her subjects include the Sri Lankan civil war, the online world Second Life, the whale 52 Blue, eloping in Las Vegas, giving birth, and many more.

My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education by Jennine Capó Crucet

Crucet grew up in Miami, the daughter of Cuban refugees. Here she explores her family’s attempts to fit into American culture and her feeling of being a stranger in her own country. She considers her relationship to the so-called “American Dream” and what it means to live in a place that doesn’t always recognize your right to be there.

Notes to Self: Essays by Emilie Pine

Emilie Pine is an Irish writer, and this book is a bestseller in Ireland. These six personal essays touch on addiction, sexual assault, infertility, and more. She captures women’s experiences that often remain hidden. She writes about bodies and emotions from rage to grief to joy with honesty, clarity, and nuance.

Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World by Zahra Hankir (Editor) and Christiane Amanpour (Foreword)

This collection gathers together 19 writers discussing their experiences as journalists working in their home countries. These women risk their lives reporting on war and face sexual harassment and difficulties traveling alone, but they also are able to talk to women and get stories their male counterpoints can’t. Their first person accounts offer new perspectives on women’s lives and current events in the Middle East.

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

Picking this up is a fitting way to pay tribute to the great Toni Morrison, who just passed away last summer. This book is a collection of essays, speeches, and meditations from the past four decades. Topics include the role of the artist, African Americans in American literature, the power of language, and discussions of her own work and that of other writers and artists.

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and nature writer. These essays combine travel, memoir, and history to look at a world rapidly changing because of our warming climate. She ranges from thawing tundra in Alaska to the preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland and also examines her own experiences with change as her children grow and her father dies.

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

As of this writing, Thick was just longlisted for a National Book Award in nonfiction. McMillan Cottom’s essays look at culture and personal experience from a sociological perspective. It’s an indispensable collection for those who want to think about race and society, who like a mix of personal and academic writing, and who want some complex, challenging ideas to chew on.

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row

White Flights is an examination of how race gets written about in American fiction, particularly by white writers creating mostly white spaces in their books. Row looks at writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and more to consider the role that whiteness has played in the American literary imagination.

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West (Hachette Books, November 5)

The Witches Are Coming is Lindy West’s follow-up to her wonderful, best-selling book Shrill . She’s back with more of her incisive cultural critiques, writing essays on feminism and the misogyny that is (still) embedded in every part of our culture. She brings humor, wit, and much-needed clarity to the gender dynamics at play in media and culture.

There you have it—the best collections of 2019! This was a great year for essays, but so were the two years before. Check out my round-ups of the best essay collections from 2018 and 2017 .

8 of the Best New Graphic Novels and Comics Out in May 2024

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Write an essay on The book you like most in about 150 words.

The Book You Like Most I like the Gita most because the Gita does not belong to a particular epoch or school or time. It is the book of a human nature based on reason. It is the preachings of Lord Krishna to Arjuna. The another name of the Gita is the Bhagvad Gita. There is a description of the great battle of Kurukshetra fought between Pandavas and Kaurvas. Firstly Arjun refused to fight against his kins. But Lord Krishna told him not to fight against kins but to fight against vices and evils doers. At this Arjun was enlightened and happily began to fight. Through the preachings of Lord Krishna Arjun was convinced of need of the fight. The Gita is a symbol of Indian philosophy. It is read not only in India but almost in every part of the world. It has been translated into all the major languages of the world. It shows the real path of life. It always inspires me to do my duty and not to bother about the result. I would like to read the Gita time and again.

The Book I Enjoyed The Most (Essay Sample)

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The Book I enjoyed the most

Introduction.

Reading your favorite book promotes a relaxation method to overcome stress and anxiety. The reason behind is that it seeks to make you calmer as you read the details of the book’s content that satisfies your interest. The chosen book that I enjoy reading is Cinderella, which is a fairy tale themed book that presents about a person who met her love interest that changed her life permanently. This is the book that I enjoyed the most that has been able to ensure that it significantly fulfill one’s desire to allow their dreams to have a temporary relief. This is because every person has the tendency to utilize their fantasy in order to satisfy their dreams in a temporary way. This is the reason why I enjoy reading the book that seeks to measure my interest as well as to improve the way I perceive things in life.

I love the book, which is why I consider enjoying it because there is significance from the plot of the story that can relate to my personal life. There is a reflective interest applied by the book that enhances my knowledge and belief that I will be able to relate my personal issues with the book’s scenes. This is because the context is focused on a person’s childhood interest wherein it presents who a child struggles with their childhood challenges. It reflects the chance to know the logical way of improving your cognition in order to accomplish a certain task. All throughout the book’s storyline, it seeks to enhance the advantage of measuring the way that you could cope up with several stressful activities that makes your life better (Rowling, 1997).

One thing that is interesting is when you are going to establish friendship with your enemies. With the combination of fantasies through magical presentation, the context stimulates your senses and promotes your intellectual understanding. The reason behind for this action is to know the strengths and weaknesses as you are learning more about their behavior and character. This is comparable in real life when a person engages a relationship with other individuals to know their real character. Discovering your real friends is important because you will know who will you trust and cooperate. However, the thing that seems inappropriate is the issue regarding violent crashes between the main character and the antagonist of the film. This is the reason why the movie version restricted the audiences by preventing children aged 13 and below not to watch it because it stimulates violence against other individuals.

Why I enjoyed reading it? This is because it helps me bring back my childhood memories and learn new things. The lesson learned from the book I enjoyed reading the most is all about knowing you should choose as your company. The reason behind is that trust is very valuable to every relationship that you establish with other individual or group. When trust is broken, your friendship or relationship could no longer make sense towards a certain individual who betrayed you while establishing friendship. The book I enjoyed the most is recommended to other readers because they can learn more about balancing their friendships with other individuals. In addition, it is important to explore new things because learning helps a person to improve skills and knowledge whenever there are ideas that are fresh.

Rowling, J.K. (1997). Harry Potter: The Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury.

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Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77

The writer of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 – known for his stylised postmodernist fiction – has died from complications of lung cancer

‘A literary voice for the ages’: Paul Auster remembered by Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates and more

Paul Auster – a life in quotes

Paul Auster – a life in pictures

Paul Auster, the author of 34 books including the acclaimed New York Trilogy, has died aged 77.

The author died on Tuesday due to complications from lung cancer, the Guardian has been told.

Auster became known for his “highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting,” the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in 2010.

His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from early novels appearing again in later ones.

“Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature,” wrote critic Michael Dirda in 2008. “His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear.”

The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight when he missed out on getting an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his parents had carried a pencil to the game. From then on, he took a pencil everywhere. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay .

While hiking during a summer camp aged 14, Auster witnessed a boy inches away from him getting struck by lightning and dying instantly – an event that he said “absolutely changed” his life and that he thought about “every day”. Chance, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” wrote the critic Laura Miller in 2017. A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1: one of the book’s four versions of protagonist Archie Ferguson runs under a tree at a summer camp and is killed by a falling branch when lightning strikes.

Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked a variety of jobs, including translation, and lived with his “on-again off-again” girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met while at college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly afterwards.

Auster and Siri Hustvedt at home in Brooklyn in 2020.

In January 1979, Auster’s father, Samuel, died, and the event became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. In it, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother, who was acquitted on grounds of insanity. “A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man,” Auster wrote in reference to his father, with whom he described himself having an “un-movable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall”.

Auster’s breakthrough came with the 1985 publication of City of Glass, the first novel in his New York trilogy. While the books are ostensibly mystery stories, Auster wielded the form to ask existential questions about identity. “The more [Auster’s detectives] stalk their eccentric quarry, the more they seem actually to be stalking the Big Questions – the implications of authorship, the enigmas of epistemology, the veils and masks of language,” wrote the critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff in 1987.

Auster published regularly throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, writing more than a dozen novels including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003). He also became involved in film, writing the screenplay for Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, for which he won the Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay in 1995.

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In 1981, Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt and they married the following year. In 1987 they had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor. Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, features a character called Iris Vegan, who is the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

Auster was better known in Europe than in his native United States: “Merely a bestselling author in these parts,” read a 2007 New York magazine article , “Auster is a rock star in Paris.” In 2006, he was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias prize for literature, and in 1993 he was given the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He was also a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In April 2022, Auster and Davis’s son, Daniel, died from a drug overdose. In March 2023, Hustvedt revealed that Auster was being treated for cancer after having been diagnosed the previous December. His final novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed septuagenarian writer, was published in October.

Auster is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.

Paul Auster

More on this story

Paul Auster obituary

‘I remember Paul Auster’: a tribute by Jonathan Lethem to his friend

‘Getting a book idea feels like a buzz in the head’: Paul Auster – a life in quotes

Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation

‘This might be the last thing I ever write’: Paul Auster on cancer, connection and the fallacy of closure

Paul Auster: ‘The gun that killed my grandfather was the same gun that ruined my father’s life’

Baumgartner by Paul Auster review – love, ageing and loss

Paul Auster: ‘It’s distress that generates art’

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A Culture Warrior Takes a Late Swing

The editor and essayist Joseph Epstein looks back on his life and career in two new books.

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A photograph of a man riding a unicycle down the hallway of a home. He is wearing a blue button-down shirt, a dark tie and khakis.

By Dwight Garner

NEVER SAY YOU’VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life , by Joseph Epstein

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT: New and Selected Essays , by Joseph Epstein

When Tammy Wynette was asked to write a memoir in her mid-30s, she initially declined, she said in an interview, because “I didn’t think my life was over yet.” The publisher responded: Has it occurred to you that in 15 years no one might care? She wrote the book. “Stand by Your Man: An Autobiography” (1979) was a hit.

The essayist and editor Joseph Epstein — whose memoir “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life,” is out now, alongside a greatest-hits collection titled “Familiarity Breeds Content” — has probably never heard Wynette sing except by accident. (In a 1993 essay, he wrote that he wished he didn’t know who Willie Nelson was, because it was a sign of a compromised intellect.) But his memoir illustrates another reason not to wait too long to commit your life to print.

There is no indication that Epstein, who is in his late 80s, has lost a step. His prose is as genial and bland, if comparison to his earlier work is any indication, as it ever was. But there’s a softness to his memories of people, perhaps because it was all so long ago. This is the sort of memoir that insists someone was funny, or erudite, or charismatic, while rarely providing the crucial details.

Epstein aw-shucks his way into “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” — pretending to be self-effacing while not being so in the least is one of his salient qualities as a writer — by warning readers, “I may not have had a sufficiently interesting life to merit an autobiography.” This is because he “did little, saw nothing notably historic, and endured not much out of the ordinary of anguish or trouble or exaltation.” Quickly, however, he concludes that his life is indeed worth relating, in part because “over the years I have acquired the literary skill to recount that life well.”

Here he is wrong in both directions. His story is interesting enough to warrant this memoir. His personal life has taken complicated turns. And as the longtime editor of the quarterly magazine The American Scholar, and a notably literate conservative culture warrior, he’s been in the thick of things.

He does lack the skill to tell his own story, though, if by “skill” we mean not well-scrubbed Strunk and White sentences but close and penetrating observation. Epstein favors tasseled loafers and bow ties, and most of his sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie.

He grew up in Chicago, where his father manufactured costume jewelry. The young Epstein was popular and, in high school, lettered in tennis. His title refers to being lucky, and a big part of that luck, in his estimation, was to grow up back when kids could be kids, before “the therapeutic culture” took over.

This complaint sets the tone of the book. His own story is set next to a rolling series of cultural grievances. He’s against casual dress, the prohibition of the word “Negro,” grade inflation, the Beat Generation, most of what occurred during the 1960s, standards slipping everywhere, de-Westernizing college curriculums, D.E.I. programs, you name it. His politics aren’t the problem. We can argue about those. American culture needs more well-read conservatives. The problem is that in his search for teachable moments, his memoir acquires the cardboard tone of a middling opinion column.

His youth was not all tennis lessons and root beer floats. He and his friends regularly visited brothels because, he writes, sex was not as easy to come by in the 1950s. He was kicked out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for his role in the selling of a stolen accounting exam to other students.

He was lucky to find a place at the University of Chicago, a place of high seriousness. The school changed him. He began to reassess his values. He began to read writers like Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and felt his politics pull to the right.

After college, he was drafted into the Army and ended up in Little Rock, Ark., where he met his first wife. At the time, she was a waitress at a bar and restaurant called the Gar Hole. Here Epstein’s memoir briefly threatens to acquire genuine weight.

She had lost custody of her two sons after a divorce. Together they got them back, and she and Epstein had two sons of their own. After their divorce, Epstein took all four of the boys. This is grist for an entire memoir, but Epstein passes over it quickly. One never gets much of a sense of what his boys were like, or what it was like to raise them. He later tells us that he has all but lost touch with his stepsons and has not seen them for decades.

He worked for the magazine The New Leader and the Encyclopaedia Britannica before becoming the editor of The American Scholar in 1975. It was a position he would hold for 22 years. He also taught at Northwestern University for nearly three decades.

At The American Scholar he began to write a long personal essay in each issue, under the pseudonym Aristides. He wrote 92 of these, on topics such as smoking and envy and reading and height. Most ran to 6,500 words, or about 4,000 words longer than they should have been.

Many magazine editors like to write every so often, to keep a hand in. But there is something unseemly about an editor chewing up acres of space in his own publication on a regular basis. Editorially, it’s a droit du seigneur imposition.

A selection of these essays, as well as some new ones, can now be found in “Familiarity Breeds Content.” In his introduction to this book, Christopher Buckley overpraises Epstein, leaving the reader no choice but to start mentally pushing back.

Buckley calls Epstein “the most entertaining living essayist in the English language.” (Not while Michael Kinsley, Lorrie Moore, Calvin Trillin, Sloane Crosley and Geoff Dyer, among many others, walk the earth.) He repurposes Martin Amis’s comment about Saul Bellow: “One doesn’t read Saul Bellow. One can only reread him.” To this he adds, “Ditto Epstein.” (Epstein is no Saul Bellow.) Buckley says, “Joe Epstein is incapable of writing a boring sentence.”

Well. How about this one, from an essay about cats?

A cat, I realize, cannot be everyone’s cup of fur.

Or this one, from an essay about sports and other obsessions:

I have been told there are people who wig out on pasta.

Or this one, about … guess:

When I was a boy, it occurs to me now, I always had one or another kind of hat.

Juggling today appears to be undergoing a small renaissance.

If one is looking to save on fuel bills, politics is likely to heat up a room quicker than just about anything else.

In tennis I was most notable for flipping and catching my racket in various snappy routines.

The essays are, by and large, as tweedy and self-satisfied as these lines make them sound. There are no wild hairs in them, no sudden deepenings of tone. Nothing is at stake. We are stranded with him on the putt-putt course.

Epstein fills his essays with quotation after quotation, as ballast. I am a fan of well-deployed, free-range quotations. So many of Epstein’s are musty and reek of Bartlett’s. They are from figures like Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary Montagu and Sir Herbert Grierson and Tocqueville and Walpole and Carlyle. You can feel the moths escaping from the display case in real time.

To be fair, I circled a few sentences in “Familiarity Breeds Content” happily. I’m with him on his distrust of “fun couples.” He writes, “A cowboy without a hat is suitable only for bartending.” I liked his observation, which he borrowed from someone else, that a career has five stages:

(1) Who is Joseph Epstein? (2) Get me Joseph Epstein. (3) We need someone like Joseph Epstein. (4) What we need is a young Joseph Epstein. (5) Who is Joseph Epstein?

It’s no fun to trip up a writer on what might have been a late-career victory lap. Epstein doesn’t need me to like his work. He’s published more than 30 books, and you can’t do that unless you’ve made a lot of readers happy.

NEVER SAY YOU’VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE : Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life | By Joseph Epstein | Free Press | 287 pp. | $29.99

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT : New and Selected Essays | By Joseph Epstein | Simon & Schuster | 441 pp. | Paperback, $20.99

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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The complicated, generous life of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

‘The Idea of You’: Biggest Differences Between Book & Movie, Explained

The Idea of You

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Idea of You .]

The Idea of You is the rom-com movie of the spring. The Prime Video film, out now, is based on Robinne Lee’s bestselling novel that follows single mom Solène ( Anne Hathaway ) and her relationship with the much younger boy band megastar Hayes Campbell ( Nicholas Galitzine ).

The film adaptation stays mostly true to the source material, but there are several key changes — especially the ending . Scroll down to find out the most notable book-to-screen differences.

Hayes’ age

In the book, Hayes is just 20 years old and Solène is 39. Hayes is aged up to 24 in the movie. Producer Cathy Schulman explains to TV Insider why Hayes’ age was changed in the film.

“Well, it was actually in reaction to Nick himself,” she says. “We were meeting young men of various different ages, and it just didn’t seem believable [for Hayes to be 20]. We felt he was the right guy, but we also didn’t believe that he could play 20. It just felt like we would be straining credulity a little bit, so we just leaned into the natural age group he was in.”

Hayes and Solène’s first meeting

The Coachella meet-cute never happens in the book. Hayes and Solène first cross paths at an August Moon meet-and-greet at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas before a concert. After mistakenly thinking Solène is her daughter’s older sister, Hayes invites Solène and Izzy’s crew backstage.

Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes Campbell in 'The Idea of You'

In the film, Hayes and Solène meet at Coachella, where his band August Moon is headlining. Solène accidentally stumbles into Hayes’ trailer, which she thinks is a bathroom. They see each other again at the August Moon meet-and-greet when Izzy ( Ella Rubin ) and her friends get a chance to meet the band. The rest is history!

Izzy’s age

Like Hayes, Izzy’s age is different in the book. In Lee’s novel, Izzy is 12 years old. She’s a huge August Moon fan and loves Hayes. Solène and Hayes’ relationship has a larger emotional impact on the preteen Izzy. When Izzy learns about the romance, she’s devastated. Izzy tries to accept her mom’s new relationship, but Solène’s romance with her ultimate crush causes a rift.

In the Prime Video adaptation, Izzy is 16. She’s mostly outgrown her August Moon phase, but she still gets starstruck by them at the meet-and-greet. Her favorite band member is Rory (Dakota Adan), not Hayes. When Izzy discovers her mom’s relationship with Hayes, she’s furious over the sexist and ageist reactions from the public. She’s the one who pushes Solène to go after her own happiness and be with Hayes.

The book and the film both have Solène ultimately putting her daughter first. She ends her relationship with Hayes because of how the relationship is affecting Izzy’s everyday life.

Schulman reveals the reasoning behind the changes regarding Izzy in the movie. “I think that we felt that it was going to be enormously valuable if Solene had someone she could speak to on a level that could have a little bit more depth,” she explains. “And just aging the child up a little bit created a possibility where the kid could have more empathy but could also question some of the very things that Solene was struggling with as a woman. We thought it would be fun to put some of the feminism into the mouth of the younger characters, which we did. It was a little bit of a push if she was still 12 or 13.”

The Oliver situation

Oliver has a bigger role in the book than in the movie. Hayes’ August Moon bandmate repeatedly tries to flirt with Solène and frequently brings up how Hayes has a thing for older women. Solène mostly ignores Oliver’s behavior.

Oliver and Hayes’ relationship is rife with tension because Hayes lost his virginity to Oliver’s older sister. Oliver’s grudge against Hayes boils over, and he ends up breaking Hayes’ nose when they get into a fight just before a concert.

The film doesn’t include any of this tension, but Oliver ( Raymond Cham Jr. ) does help facilitate Hayes and Solène’s first breakup. While in the South of France, Solène gushes over how Hayes dedicated the song “Closer” to her at Coachella. Oliver mentions that Hayes has done this before and it’s just a “bit.” Solène is understandably upset and quickly pushes Hayes away, but they eventually reconcile.

Lee’s novel ends in a drastically different way than the movie. In the book, Solène does break up with Hayes, and he shows up at her door saying he’s quit August Moon. They hook up once last time, but she’s adamant that they can’t be together. Hayes calls and texts Solène every day for months until one day he stops. It’s a heartbreaking end for Solène and Hayes.

The film gives viewers hope that Solène and Hayes will get back together. Solène and Hayes end their relationship, and he asks her to reconsider things in five years. A time jump reveals that Solène still has her successful art gallery, while Hayes has gone solo. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show , Hayes says he’s taking a break and heading back to Los Angeles to see someone.

'The Idea of You' Director Responds to the Movie's Age-Gap Criticism

While watching Hayes on the talk show, Solène thinks Hayes must be referring to a new girlfriend. She’s still wearing his watch after all these years, a sign that she’s still not over him. Then, Hayes shows up at her art gallery after arriving in Los Angeles.

Director Michael Showalter tells TV Insider why the book’s ending was changed for the movie. “There’s a very long history in romantic movies of changing the ending so that the two main characters are together at the end. There’s a bit of a pragmatic answer to this, which is that movie audiences just want to see at least that there’s some hope for these two characters at the end of the movie,” he says. “We don’t have to tell the audience exactly how it ended. We’re not telling the audience exactly where things wound up. But we are at least giving the audience an opportunity to try to fill it in for themselves. As a fan of the genre, I love a romantic story that ends with the two main characters getting coffee because that tells me there’s hope.”

How do you feel about the changes? Let us know your thoughts about the movie in the comments below.

The Idea of You , Streaming Now, Prime Video

The Idea of You where to stream

Anne Hathaway

Cathy schulman, michael showalter, nicholas galitzine, raymond cham jr..

Davis and Aza looking at each other while standing in front of a spiraling Raymond Pettibon painting

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Forget what you think you know about John Green and watch Turtles All the Way Down

In director Hannah Marks’ hands, Green’s most personal novel turns into a wonderful movie

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At the height of John Green’s popularity, most people knew the YA author for a very specific genre: sad teen books, usually about shy-yet-pretentious boys in love with spirited yet emotionally available girls. That was always a derogatory oversimplification of Green’s novels, which often deconstruct common YA tropes more than they give into them. But years of warped online perspectives on Green’s work, heightened by aesthetic Tumblr posts and Pinterest mood boards , meant that when the 2014 movie adaptation of Green’s tragic teen romance The Fault in Our Stars came out, the were calcified, preconceived notions of what a John Green Book™ was. (Never mind that The Fault in Our Stars flipped the gender roles, with a reserved girl and a vivacious boy.)

As with many figures who get very popular — especially those whose niche fandom blows up into mainstream success — John Green and his assumed conventions became very uncool to like. And when the movie adaptation of Green’s book Paper Towns released in 2015, detractors began harassing and bullying him online to such a degree that Green left social media . The vitriol against Green has since died down, though his work and the many adaptations based on his novels still inspire shallow readings based on a specific internet era.

But Turtles All the Way Down , a Max adaptation of Green’s 2017 novel, steps away from those previous conventions — which is interesting, considering Green has stated this is his most personal book . It goes to show that what he’s become known for doesn’t actually speak to the power of his work. The coming-of-age drama follows a 16-year-old named Aza Holmes (played by Isabela Merced in the movie) grappling with OCD, and Green poured a lot of his own personal experience with the disorder into the novel.

[ Ed. note: This post contains setup spoilers for Turtles All the Way Down .]

Like many John Green stories, this one starts with a funky hook. Aza’s best friend Daisy (Cree from Big Sky ) finds out that the son of a fugitive billionaire is actually Aza’s childhood crush, and urges them to reconnect, hoping she and Aza can find the missing billionaire and earn the FBI’s $100 million reward. It’s a hooky set up, much like that in Green’s other works like Paper Towns (a popular girl going missing before graduation) or An Abundance of Katherines (a former childhood prodigy trying to create an algorithm to predict romantic success).

But the key difference is that Turtles ’ quirky hook fades into the background once Aza reunites with her crush Davis (Felix Mallard). Sparks fly, and she’s confronted with the possibility of a romantic relationship for the first time in her life. She starts thinking about her future and grappling with her disorder, and how it plays into every aspect of her life. The missing-father mystery fades into the background. (Davis isn’t particularly concerned about his father, who he describes as a “shitbag.”) The novel is deeply internal — it focuses so much on Aza’s thoughts and anxieties that Green himself doubted it could be translated to film .

And yet director Hannah Marks ( Don’t Make Me Go ) pulls it off. She and screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker do a fantastic job of conveying Aza’s thought spirals : When Aza’s anxieties overwhelm her, her inner monologue slowly overtakes the dialogue, and the present scene starts getting interrupted with flashing images of Aza’s worries, usually involving bacteria and microbes. Translating this kind of internality from page to screen isn’t easy, but instead of forgoing it completely, Marks uses sound and visuals to enhance Aza’s inner dialogue. The result is achingly raw.

Aza looking haunted in Turtles All the Way Down

Unlike past John Green movies, particularly The Fault in Our Stars , Turtles All the Way Down limits the romance plot to a scant thread. It’s probably the weakest point of the movie, partially because Mallard is a little too suave to play the dorky yet endearing Davis. We get a sense that Felix and Aza shared a connection when they met years ago at a camp for bereaved kids, but their instant attraction to each other as teenagers is a little hard to buy. That’s OK because Turtles All the Way Down isn’t really a romance story.

What really drives the book and movie is how Aza struggles with OCD, the thread most personal to Green. Marks’ team adds a little more external plot to give the film shape, including a brief side quest to Northwestern University to meet a professor Aza idolizes. But the heart of the movie all comes back to Aza’s internal life. Merced portrays her fantastically: her anxieties, her awkwardness, her desperation to be normal and to be taken seriously. Cree also does a phenomenal job as Daisy, the fanfic-writing best friend who tries her best to root for Aza, but can’t always handle Aza’s more difficult moments. (I’ll almost forgive Daisy’s fanfic site for having a large image of her face on it, because she’s such a great character; but c’mon, who puts their real name and face on fic?)

It’s actually another common John Green-ism to have a quirky best friend who gets a little sidelined in the story to make way for the main romance, but Aza and Daisy’s friendship is the biggest driving force here. They have realistic banter and a solid friendship, but the movie shines when that friendship is tested. One of the most chilling scenes is a fight they have while driving, which escalates into the movie’s climax. Their friendship must literally be broken apart in order to be repaired.

In a way, Max’s Turtles All the Way Down is an anti-John Green adaptation — at least, it’s anti preconceived notions of John Green. He’s been trying from his very first novel to deconstruct the tropes he accidentally became known for. But sometimes it takes an outside hand to free a story from judgment and give it a new form, so it can shine without an author’s (however ill-attributed) reputation on it. Marks crafts a fulfilling coming-of-age story from Green’s book. Turtles has familiar John Green touchpoints — a gimmicky story setup, a teen romance, a quirky best friend — but it turns the story inward and pulls off a fantastic character exploration, one that feels like a gut-punch in its best moments.

Turtles All the Way Down is now streaming on Max.

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