An American Marriage

Written by: Tayari Jones

First line: There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home and those who don't.

Why you should read this book: Roy and Celestial, a young, professional, newlywed couple, have suffered a few setbacks in their first year of marriage, but when Roy is falsely accused and convicted of rape and sentenced to twelve years in prison for being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time, their prospects appear truly bleak. The genius in this book, I think, is the author's use of voice: three separate character are portrayed through the use of first person narrative, with Roy and Celestial's voice changing and maturing over time, and an epistolary chapter comprising Roy's correspondence with his wife and family while incarcerated. In many ways it's an emotionally difficult story, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the payoff at the end, but it's incredibly well-written, provocative and realistic and heartbreaking.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't understand why anyone would ever leave home.

James and the Giant Peach

Written by: Roald Dahl

First line: Here is James Henry Trotter when he was about four years old.

Why you should read this book: Rollicking good fun for kids, this story is a tiny bit gentler than some of Dahl's other novels for young readers, full of invention and a touch of danger and just enough transformation to create a fairy tale sensibility. Orphaned at a young age, James escapes his abusive guardians with the help of a bag of magic, which he clumsily spills into the roots of a decrepit tree. Traveling in a giant peach, with the companionship of a group of giant, friendly insects, a little boy with no friends finds his way to a world with no lack of them.

Why you should read this book: Aside from a little sizeism directed at the terrible, abusive guardians, this book stands up pretty well for its age.

Ready Player One

Written by: Ernest Cline

First line: Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.

Why you should read this book: In a future so bleak that everyone prefers to spend the vast majority of their lives jacked in to the virtual reality world known as the OASIS, the only beacon of hope for many young people is the contest set up by the OASIS's creator: solve a series of puzzles based on '80s pop culture knowledge and become the heir to the creator's tremendous fortune. Five years after the announcement, no one's solved a single puzzle, but Wade, impoverished and with very few of the resources needed to explore the OASIS, finally gets lucky. What follows is a break-neck journey through landscapes real, imaginary, and remembered, as Wade, his online friends, and an evil corporation race to reach the end of the quest and learn who will control the OASIS.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Oh, my god, the exposition. So. Much. Exposition.

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Written by: Dorothy Allison

First line: "Let me tell you a story," I used to whisper to my sister, hiding with them behind the red-dirt bean hills and row on row of strawberries.

Why you should read this book: This is a book about taking ownership of your own narrative, of accepting that the past is where you come from but not who you are. It's also a book about growing up affected by generation of poverty, violence, and sexual abuse, but, the author promises, everyone has the choice to transcend this history and create their own story. Short and fast-paced, this is a powerful memoir that feels like poetry although it's written in prose.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Trigger for childhood incest and abuse.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

Written by: Zora Neale Hurston

First line: I was summer when I went to talk with Cudjo so his door was standing wide open.

Why you should read this book: This fascinating book, an interview turned on its head by the subject's desire to share his story in his own way, was an early work of a then relatively-unknown Hurston, who masterfully turned a series of conversations into the shape of a book that was then considered unpublishable, as Hurston insisted on retaining her subject's use of dialect; it has only been released now, nearly sixty years after the author's death (and even longer after the subject's). One of the few slave narrative recounting the middle passage, Barracoon follows the life of a young African man, plucked from the continent on a dare long after the transport of Africans to America on slave ships had been outlawed. The story covers traditional life in the village where Cudjo (originally know as Kossula) grew up, his kidnapping, sale, transport across the ocean, years as a slave, and years as a free man after the Civil War.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Don't care about history, hope to repeat it.

The Power

Written by: Naomi Alderman

First line: Dear Naomi, I've finished the bloody book.

Why you should read this book: Inventive, inspiration, and fast-paced, this speculative-realism novel proposes a world in which all girls and most women spontaneously develop the ability to generate and transmit electricity from their hands, effectively putting an end to most forms of male-on-female violence along with the patriarchy. We follow a handful of international characters: the foster kid who founds her own religion based on the power, the wealthy kid who launches a journalism career covering the phenomenon, the politician hiding her own power even as she works to regulate the paradigm shift. It's just a tremendously interesting story that plays with convention and rewrites reality.

Why you shouldn't read this book: I'll echo other critics with the assessment that the only thing that's wrong with this book is that it's not non-fiction. But I guess if you're a misogynist who already fears the ladies, this might not be the story for you.