Lauren Groff's 40 Books That Make up Her Brain

Lauren Groff, the famed novelist and short story author widely known for her works The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Florida, is celebrating her fortieth birthday today and, in honor of the reunion of her birth, she took to the Twittersphere to release into the winds a list of forty books that makeup her incredibly vast, brilliant, and talented brain.

I’m 40 today, which is fine!, just a number!, except that I have a problem with thresholds. So I’m going to make myself feel less bummed out by listing 40 of the books that make up my brain, in no particular order:

— Lauren Groff (@legroff) July 23, 2018

Groff has gained notoriety as one of the masters of contemporary fiction, and it’s no wonder why. Her works are bold, cutting, strange, crude, and poetic; she has a way of turning the mundane into something uniquely stunning in all of it’s simplistic beauty:

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. —Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

She is someone who will no doubt go down in history as one of the leading novelists of the modern era, and getting to take a small glimpse at the inner workings of her mind and the pieces of writing that have helped to influence and inspire her is so, insanely exciting.

Thanks to Groff I officially have a new summer reading list so grab a pen, jot these down, and we can journey through these works together!

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

2. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

3. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

4. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

5. Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos

6. The Lover by Marguerite Duras

7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

8. Paradise Lost by John Milton

9. Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

10. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

11. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore