For The Girlies Who Annotate Every Line

1. Normal People by Sally Rooney — Follows the evolving relationship between two Irish teens navigating love, class, and identity from high school through university. With spare, emotionally precise prose, Sally Rooney explores how deeply people can affect each other without ever fully understanding themselves.

2. Bluets by Maggie Nelson — A poetic meditation on desire, grief, and the color blue.

3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong—This poetic novel, written as a letter from a son to his mother, is packed with lines you’ll be thinking about long after you finish the story.

4. The Idiot by Elif Batuman — Deadpan, intellectual, and hilariously awkward, this semi-autobiographical novel about a Harvard freshman is perfect for annotators who love layered meaning and dry humor.

5. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner — A profoundly moving memoir about food, family, and loss that plays around with sensory detail.

6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston — This story follows Janie Crawford’s journey toward self-discovery, love, and independence in the early 20th-century American South. Written in rich, poetic prose, the novel explores Black womanhood, voice, and the search for freedom.

7. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke — Nine letters packed with wisdom on creativity, solitude, and authentic living.

8. The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector — A haunting, introspective novel about a woman’s psychological unraveling after a surreal encounter with a cockroach. 

9. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng—When the seemingly perfect daughter of a Chinese American family is found dead, long-buried secrets begin to surface. The book is a portrait of a family shaped by silence, expectations, and everything left unsaid.

10. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang — A powerful collection of essays that explores the complexities of living with schizoaffective disorder.