@aaronoleary I picked up the Bell Jar on the day I moved to NYC and I cannot put into words how much I, 60 years after publication, from a completely different background, in a different era, utterly related to almost everything Esther Greenwood was feeling. We were roughly the same age and her terse, sharp, and absurdist but never self-parodying prose was so good and timeless, I still refer to it as "The book Lena Dunham would've liked to produce into a movie and ruin for our generation." (Bourdain was of course also excellent, a completely different experience though) Paying it forward: Fortress Besieged (围城) by Qian Zhongshu: It's arguably one of the last great novels published in China during what was both a brutal occupation replete with atrocities and a surprising if short-lived revival of literature. It's nihilist, it's dark, it's self-aware in a matter-of-fact way and yet still comedic in the old sense (humorous was a loanword from English, after all), it's like a Nabokov novel except while Nabokov spelled things out and people read past it, Qian wrote past things and everyone understood. He also manages to make the same pun work in multiple languages (with Chinese always one of them). Under-read masterpiece of the 20th Century.

@sandeeptalukdar @hannahsuyun Ahh! What are your other favourites?

@danielamoitinho Some of these are on my shelf right now :) My supervisor also always recommends "Sprint"!

@lior_barak @hannahsuyun Let me know what you think about them, I think that some mainstream books are nice, but sometimes you need to also explorer things other don't usually put on their reading list to find out the value in going against the stream :-)