You're known as a voracious reader, so someone asks you for reading recommendations. Don't take it literally: that person probably has no real intention of getting the book you suggest. At best they'll pick it up, start it, and hate it.

Mostly, people bring up books to connect and to kick off a pleasant conversation about your passion. Let's be honest: most people don't read. With attention spans shortened by invasive technology, reading has become as daunting as running your first marathon.

Once you recognize the real motivation behind that kind of question, you'll free yourself from expectations—expectations that are almost always disappointed. Instead you'll be available for a friendly conversation with someone who's curious about you.

One caveat: if the chat veers into "the movie based on the book," you have every right to invent any excuse and leave.

Still, for the 1% who are short on reading ideas, I recommend two contemporary novels that will flip your intellectual circuit breaker and one travel narrative so gripping it's almost certain you'll read it to the last page.

For me, the first criterion for recommending a book is having read it to the end—and quickly. A book so compelling you devour it to the last page. So pleasurable you return to it regularly.

Alfred Lansing (1959), "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage"

The ship named Endurance was a three-masted vessel built in Norway at the Framnæs shipyard in 1912. On November 21, 1915, the ship sank in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica.

To know what happened—how explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, navigator Frank Worsley, roughly twenty crew members, a dozen sled dogs on board, and the ship's cat survived—you need to read the 353-page book.

Bret Easton Ellis (1985), "Less Than Zero"

If you're currently dealing with mood problems, anxiety, or panic, I urge you NOT to read this book.

"Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, this cooly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation. They have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, and lived in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money."

It's an immersion into the social world of upper-class young adults in 1980s Los Angeles. They have no internet, no artificial intelligence, no smartphones, yet drugs, sex, and existential emptiness are omnipresent.

Seated in a gonzo style that matches the protagonist's voice, the novel follows Clay as he returns home from his university in New Hampshire for the holidays. What you see inside his head is disturbing for how neutral and flat it is—a lack of meaning and thought. He experiences troubling events with an alarming detachment. His mind is so bland it's like a heart that stops beating.

Reading this book is like being able to eat raw chicken without fear of getting sick and dying.

Jonathan Ames (1998), "The Extra Man"

Another gonzo-style novel in which the reader is inside the protagonist Louis Ives's head. An intellectual and a lost artist living in New York City with a colorful roommate: retired actor Henry Harrison, an eccentric whose life is guided by hilarious idiosyncrasies.

"Here is Louis Ives: neat, romantic, and as captivating as an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero. Except this hero has a penchant for women's clothes, and he lost his teaching position at the Pretty Brook Day School of Princeton University after an unfortunate incident involving a colleague's bra."

Personally, I'd recommend any work by Jonathan Ames. Much like David Sedaris, he weaves his rich personality into his characters, and each new book takes readers where the last one left off. The Extra Man, with the misadventures caused by the roommate, is a reliable way into his world.

Comfort food for the reader with a nose for it.

translated from french by GPT-5 mini