The very first book I ever read was The Little Prince, and now libraries make for some of my favorite places in the whole world—especially Burton Barr in Downtown Phoenix, Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Ciudad de México, and my grandpa's personal library back home.
Here is an inconclusive list of books I've loved. In alphabetical order, not preference order.
Truth
A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History Jeanne Theoharis with Kim Staunton
All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister
All You Can Ever Know, Nichole Chung
Begin Again, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, Debbie Millman
Design for Real Life, Eric A. Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Design: The Invention of Desire, Jessica Helfand
Educated, Tara Westover
Good Talk, Mira Jacobs
How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, Alexander Chee
How We Fight For Our Lives, Saeed Jones
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay
I Don't Want to Die Poor, Michael Arcenaux
Looking for Lorraine, Imani Perry
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bess Kalb
Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World, Faris Yakob
Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, Ellen Pao
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
The Yellow House, Sara M. Broom
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund
Women, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis
Wow, No Thank You., Samantha Irby
You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Tom Vanderbilt
The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, Edited by Roxane Gay
79 Short Essays on Design, Michael Bierut
Fiction
All the Names They Used for God, Anjali Sachdeva
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
Another Country, James Baldwin
Circe, Madeline Miller
Halsey Street, Naima Coster
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang
If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold, Bolu Babalola
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams
Real Life, Brandon Taylor
Red, White & Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston
Sabrina & Corina: Stories, Kali Fajardo-Anstine
The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin
The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
The Wedding Party, Jasmine Guillory
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
There There, Tommy Orange
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah