An Unconventional Decade: 10 Books to Read in Your 30s

In one’s 20s, the trend can be to create distance from one’s parents in the play for independence. In one’s 30s, relationships with parents can shift again, especially if you’re growing your family with partners and/or children. All the Answers is a riveting graphic memoir by a man whose father was a child star on a radio quiz show. The novel traces the author’s efforts to understand his father’s story as he struggles with dementia toward the end of his life. The book poses a deeply puzzling question: what parts of a parent’s past does a child have the right to know? Many people in their 30s are simultaneously parenting while still being parented, so it’s a good question to ponder in multiple directions. See also: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

I picked this book because it’s poetry and also Afrofuturism. Both are incredibly vital to incorporate into one’s reading diet. What I love about Electric Arches is how it ties childhood to visions of the future. Whether you’re thinking about the children of today or trying to honor your own inner child, keeping a childlike sense of imagination when it comes to future possibilities is one way to stave off hopelessness and dread, even in the face of big struggles. Also recommended: Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead.

Given my own gothic inclinations, I’m always up for a book that stares into the void. Grief is not a process beginning in one’s 30s by any means, but my experience of it certainly ramped up during that time. This book is so much more than a grief memoir. One helpful way of thinking about grief is the recognition that traces of deceased people, their words and their impact, flow into us and drift onward through time in different forms. H is for Hawk underscored that truth for me. This book, about grief and falconry and also the writer T.H. White, is not afraid to let itself be a little obsessed, and that’s also what I loved about it. It’s precise, emotional, spellbinding, and ambitious. Also recommended: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

If you’ve upended a childhood fave, get ready to level up. Genre-bending memoirs like Why Fish Don’t Exist are some of my favorite kinds of books because I get to learn and feel at the same time. They’re the Reese’s peanut butter cups of books: two great tastes! I think this is a book best entered cold, so I will simply say that it’s about a woman’s journey to understand a biologist’s life and work. In the end, it’s about what in life we should hold onto tightly, and what deserves a gentler grip. This kind of consideration is perfect to undertake in one’s thirties, because sometimes we find ourselves metaphorically barreling down some road we turned onto years or decades ago, gripping the steering wheel like grim death, when we could use a chance to slow down and maybe look at a map. Why Fish Don’t Exist feels like a map. Also try: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

How Louise Erdrich wrote a pandemic novel while we’re all still in the thick of it, I’ll never know. Books on this list that engage with the past and the future, but of course we have to live in the now. The Sentence is a ghost story, about Flora, who’s haunting the bookstore where Tookie, who survived prison by reading books, works. What’s beautiful about ghost stories is how palpable they make the need to confront history. There’s always overlap between past and present. But if there’s a ghost, you literally have a problem from the past you need to solve right now! In The Sentence’s case, racism and the brutal history of the treatment of Indigenous people in the U.S. can’t be ignored, especially not during a pandemic that hits some communities harder than others. It’s a multilayered, absolutely essential book. Also read: There There by Tommy Orange.

If you haven’t expanded your family with partners or children by the time you’re 30, you might still be considering what a family will look like for you. I love books that get imaginative with what families can be. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is creative in that regard, with a ragtag crew of a spaceship called the Wayfarer. Chambers envisions fascinating ways for her characters to exist and relate to each other. The plot is not the point of this book, and thank goodness for that. It’s leisurely and episodic, like a season of Star Trek more than anything else. It’s a great book if you’re looking to be inspired by found family feelings. Also try: Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes.

A cool thing about being in your 30s is recognizing how far you’ve come, and how much you can still accomplish. Everyone says “life is short.” But epics — and my above recommended classic War and Peace — remind us that life is also long and full of adventure. They’re perfect books to read in your 30s. She Who Became the Sun is a reimagining of Ming Dynasty history. It tells of a foundling orphaned girl who assumes her brother’s identity to enter a monastery and claim her own fate. With thought-provoking unpacking of gender, tumultuous love stories, complex characters, and all-out war, this is the book that will raise the stakes and make you feel the weight of your own destiny. Also read: The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang.