With the pandemic raging and social distancing orders in place, people are spending far more time at home. And, in spite of our 21^st century technological dependencies, it is the old world habits that have brought us the most comfort. From baking and cooking to reading, we’ve rediscovered the joy of slowing down.

Another habit that can provide a temporary escape from the dystopian conflicts we’re experiencing right now — reading.

Far too often, people associate reading with homework: the late night assignments, annotating textbooks, digesting information and regurgitating it for exams. Those anxiety-leaden memories can keep people, especially students, from reading for the sheer pleasure of it.

It’s also true that many of the greatest, most celebrated works of fiction are actually pretty bleak. Most of our favorite novels explore big questions: free will versus fate, morality, heartbreak and suffering, death and destruction.

And yet exploring these ideas, the fundamental nature of humanity, helps us.

So when my graduating seniors asked for book recommendations, so that they could continue reading – for fun – I wondered what to recommend. Novels or nonfiction, classics or contemporary literature?

I decided on all of the above.

There are many lists of classics that everyone should read or of the 100 best books of the last 100 years. This is not that kind of list.

I polled friends and colleagues and even posted the question on Twitter. I loved the

response, and encourage everyone to look through the thread and reply with their own suggestions here.

There are great suggestions on this list, ranging from young adult novels and contemporary fiction to well-established canonical works. Most importantly, it’s a glimpse at what people are reading and thinking and the enthusiasm that we share for great stories.

Here is the curated list — including classics and newer works, both fiction and non-fiction.­­­

1984 by George Orwell

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Go Tell it On the Mountain by James Baldwin

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Stranger by Albert Camus

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Revolutionary Road Richard Yates

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This is definitely not an exhaustive list and, surely, there will be titles here that some will disagree with. Please scroll through the suggestions on Twitter and add your own.