Trick Mirror — Jia Tolentino

“The choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional — to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.”

This exquisite, razor-sharp collection by Jia Tolentino examines everything from the double-edged sword of contemporary feminism to the dark side of online culture to the evolution of scam culture. It’s a fearless and incisive examination of the systems that we’re complicit in — whether consciously or not — and an incredible debut by one of our greatest cultural critics.

A few other great essay collections I enjoyed this year: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu, Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison

Normal People - Sally Rooney

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”

The kind of heart-punching book you can read in a single gulp, Normal People tracks the brutal evolution of a not-quite relationship through high school and university. Written with evocative psychological precision, Sally Rooney’s follow-up to Conversations with Friends is an unsentimental - sometimes magnetic, sometimes frustrating - supercut of an intense first love.