BOOKS WE WISH WE COULD READ FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN

You know those books you finish and immediately wish you could erase from your memory, just so you could experience them all over again? These are ours. Five books that made us fall in love, ugly cry, rethink a few things and, in some cases, stare at a wall for a while after the final page.

No spoilers, obviously.

01. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

André Aciman

A summer in Italy. A beautiful old house. Long lunches. Bike rides. Peaches. And a love story that somehow manages to make you nostalgic for a life you've never lived.

Call Me by Your Name is one of those books where almost nothing and absolutely everything seems to happen at the same time. It's intimate, sensual, sometimes uncomfortable and painfully good at capturing what it's like to want someone when you don't quite know what to do with all that wanting.

And then you reach the final pages.

Yeah.

Read it when: it's summer, preferably somewhere in Italy.
Side effect: an unreasonable desire to book a one-way ticket to the Italian countryside.

02. WAITING FOR BOJANGLES

Olivier Bourdeaut

This one starts like a party.

A wonderfully eccentric couple dances around their apartment, drinks cocktails, ignores the mail and raises their son in a world where ordinary rules don't seem to apply. Their pet is a crane called Mademoiselle Superfétatoire. That should tell you enough.

It's funny and absurd and completely charming. Until it isn't.

Underneath all the dancing is a story about love and mental illness that becomes progressively more heartbreaking. It's short enough to read in an afternoon and memorable enough to stay with you considerably longer.

Read it when: you want something beautiful, strange and bittersweet.
Side effect: wanting to dance around your kitchen followed by emotional devastation.

03. THE CHOICE

Dr. Edith Eva Eger

At sixteen, Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Decades later, she became a psychologist. That alone tells you this isn't going to be an ordinary book.

The Choice moves between Eger's experiences during the Holocaust and the life and career she built afterwards. But what stayed with us most isn't simply what happened to her. It's what she has to say about everything that came after.

About trauma. Anger. Forgiveness. The stories we continue to carry. And the difference between surviving something and actually allowing yourself to live again.

Some books entertain you. Some quietly change the way you look at your own life. This is the second kind.

Read it when: you need perspective.
Side effect: underlining half the book.

04. A LITTLE LIFE

Hanya Yanagihara

We should probably begin with a warning. This book will hurt you.

A Little Life follows four friends through decades of friendship, careers, relationships and adulthood in New York, but at its centre is Jude, whose past slowly reveals itself as the story unfolds.
It's long. It's intense. It's deeply uncomfortable in places. And it contains subject matter that genuinely isn't for everyone. But it's also an extraordinary book about friendship, love, loyalty and the complicated question of whether loving someone can ever be enough to save them. Finishing it feels less like finishing a novel and more like emerging from something.

Would we willingly put ourselves through it again? Apparently yes.

Read it when: you're emotionally stable and have approximately 700 tissues nearby.
Side effect: staring into the middle distance for several business days.

05. FRESH WATER FOR FLOWERS

Valérie Perrin

Violette Toussaint lives in a cemetery. And somehow, this is the warmest book on the list.

She tends the graves, looks after the flowers and welcomes visitors into her little house for coffee or something stronger. Slowly, her own story begins to unfold alongside those of the people buried around her.

It's about grief, love, loneliness, friendship and starting over, but there's something incredibly comforting about it.
Quiet rather than dramatic. Tender rather than sentimental. The kind of book that makes an ordinary life feel very beautiful.

Read it when: you want to disappear into someone else's world for a while.
Side effect: wanting a garden, a tiny French house and considerably more flowers in your life.

YOUR TURN, BADDIE

There are good books. And then there are the books you carry around with you long after you've put them back on the shelf. These are five of ours.

What book would you give anything to read for the first time again?

Tell us. Our nightstand has room for one more. 💕