Deepali Agarwal has a Master’s in literary linguistics, which means that every person she’s ever known has, at some point, asked her to ‘edit a thing’ for them-- ‘just see if it reads okay?’ She doesn’t mind, because she believes that the world can be fixed one oxford comma at a time. Deepali lives in Delhi, the capital of India, where cows are sacred, but authors and poets exist and write brilliant things. She works as an editor with OUP India’s School ELT division, where she moves apostrophes, looks up pictures of cats, and talks about children’s books for eight hours. The rest of her day is spent reading, thinking about Parks and Recreation, and wondering if there exist jobs for English majors that pay more than peanuts.
Twitter: @DeepaliAgarwal_
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Bring out your turtlenecks and combat boots, and join us in reading our way down the 1990s!
(If you, like me, are a ’90s kid, you can pick a book from this list to tick off an item on our Read Harder Challenge 2016.)
Some notes: I have tried to avoid series like Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire, YA like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and novels like Fight Club and Infinite Jest: these are books that readers everywhere already know about; we’ve either already read them and watched the TV/movie adaptations, or never plan to. This is not to say that Rowling and Chuck Palahniuk’s contributions to the literature of the ’90s is not valuable, but so as to leave space for other brilliant works from the decade–to discover something new. I have also avoided the repetition of authors.
Since this list is not genre-specific, I have tried to tag each book with the shortest possible description after listing it: an indication to its genre, and whether it is fiction or non-fiction; a novel, play, or short story collection. Poetry anthologies and comics are listed separately.
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (novel, historical literary fiction)
A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer (YA novel, historical fiction)
A Girl Named Disaster
Blindness by José Saramago (novel, dystopian science fiction)
Delhi by Khushwant Singh (novel, contemporary fiction)
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (novel, contemporary fiction)
Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz (novel, fiction, horror)
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (novel, children’s fiction/YA)
Shiloh by Phyllis Naylor (novel, children’s fiction/YA)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (novel, historical/literary fiction)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt (novel, fiction, inverted detective story)
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech (YA novel, fiction)
Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (edited by Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman)
Astro City, Vol. 1: Life in the Big City by Kurt Busiek, art by Brent Anderson
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Supergirl by Peter David, art by Gary Frank, Cam Smith, Karl Story, Terry Dodson
