Be honest: when you think of the word ‘essay’, the drudgery of academia threatens to take over, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be… boring. In fact, essays have a sempiternal quality and brim with multitudes that elevate your dynamicity, all while quenching your thirst for knowledge.
Don’t believe it?
Wait, The Bombay Circle Press is here to shower you with recommendations of essay collections that will prove you are a versatile reader and hopefully make you fall in love with the term.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
What happens when a writer observes the world closely enough? A masterpiece is born.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion turns her famously precise gaze towards capturing the dislocation of the 1960s: the disorientation of the USA shredding itself apart with social change. This book collects essays Didion wrote between 1961 and 1968. They’re grouped into three sections: “Lifestyles in the golden land”, all about California, “Personals”, which are reflections on relatively intimate thoughts, and “Seven places of the mind”, which looks at seven different physical places as psychological landscapes.
The result is a collection that feels both intensely rooted in its time and uncannily contemporary. To immerse you in her words, here’s a quotation:
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss”
Pick this one up if you like your essays sharp-eyed, atmospheric and just a little unsettling. Didion might even make you look at your own surroundings differently.
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
Life is most precious for those who can bask in the ordinary. But in our turbocharged world, slowing down is a sin, which means the hustle-bustle of our workaday only expounds our alienation from the self and society.
To cure this loneliness, read These Precious Days wherein Ann Patchett reflects on the unpredictability of life as she shares intimate portraits of her fathers, her choice to remain childless, alongside musings on childhood, loss, marriage and her writing journey. Patchett’s narrative feels like a heartfelt conversation, reminding readers of life’s fragility and the joy found in everyday moments.
At the heart of the collection is a deep awareness of impermanence. People leave, relationships change and seemingly insignificant moments become precious precisely because they cannot last forever.
To immerse you in her words, here’s a quotation:
“As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.”
Read this when you want something warm, thoughtful and deeply human. And perhaps call someone you love when you finish.
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Sometimes the most ordinary or unexpected subjects can reveal something much deeper about who we are.
Through Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan explores music, American culture, religion, race, history and the strange realities of contemporary life. From Michael Jackson and Axl Rose to Christian rock festivals, reality television, Bob Marley’s Jamaica, Disney World and the American South, Sullivan turns seemingly niche subjects into reflections on identity, belief, belonging and the American spirit itself.
Sullivan’s remarkable ability to look without immediately judging is what draws us in. He enters unfamiliar worlds with openness and emerges with a deeper understanding of their peculiarities and meaning. In many ways, the book becomes a project of redemption, an effort to discover and salvage something meaningful from the culture around him.
To immerse you in his words, here’s a quotation:
“I’m just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.”
Pick this up when you want to follow a writer down a rabbit hole. You might arrive somewhere completely unexpected and have a great time getting there.
From Didion’s piercing observations to Patchett’s intimacy, and Sullivan’s cultural curiosity these collections show just how much an essay can contain. So, if you’ve been looking for proof that you’re a versatile reader, consider this your reading list. Pick a subject, follow a thought, change your mind halfway through.
For more recommendations that will keep your reading life pleasantly unpredictable, follow The Bombay Circle Press Bulletin.