Must-Read
Best Books to Read in Your 30s
Your 30s is when novels about parents start hitting different, when historical fiction stops being homework and starts being context, and when memoir gets its claws into you. These are the eight books we recommend most often to readers who are out of the formation decade and into the consequence one.
8 books on this list.
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
5.0“Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 2017 review. Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan. The Apple TV+ adaptation source and one of the canonical contemporary Korean-American literary novels.”
Belovedby Toni Morrison
5.0“Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.”
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugoby Taylor Jenkins Reid
5.0“The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 2017 review. An aging Hollywood icon agrees to tell the true story of her career and her seven marriages, but only to an unknown journalist. The TikTok-era literary fiction novel that defined contemporary Hollywood-memoir-fiction.”
A Promised Landby Barack Obama
5.0“A Promised Land by Barack Obama 2020 review. The first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoirs, covering his early political life through the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. The most thoroughly written contemporary presidential memoir in modern American letters.”
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankindby Yuval Noah Harari
4.0“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari 2014 review. A single-volume history of Homo sapiens from cognitive revolution to the present. The popular-history bestseller that defined the 2010s book-club shelf, with the trade-offs that ambition requires.”
Bring Up the Bodiesby Hilary Mantel
5.0“Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.”
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Storeby James McBride
5.0“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 2023 review. A 1972 skeleton found at the bottom of a Pottstown, Pennsylvania well sends the novel back to a 1930s neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and immigrant families lived alongside each other. The most important American novel of 2023.”
Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro
5.0“Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 review. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, a special English boarding school. As adults, they begin to understand what Hailsham was for. The novel that defined the contemporary literary-SF register.”