The Books We Read Too Late—And That You Should Read Now

Sometimes, a book falls into a reader’s hands at the wrong time. Think of one you’ve put aside because you were too busy to tackle an ambitious project; perhaps there’s another you ignored after misjudging its contents by its cover. Maybe a novel was inaccessible or hadn’t yet been published at the precise stage in your life when it would have resonated most. But these connections can still be made later: In fact, one of the great, bittersweet pleasures of life is finishing a title and thinking about how it might have affected you—if only you’d found it sooner. From our vantage in the present, we can’t truly know if, or how, a single piece of literature would have changed things for us. But we can appreciate its power, and we can recommend it to others. Below are seven novels our staffers wish they’d read when they were younger.

Black Thunder, by Arna Bontemps

During the summer of 2020, I picked up a collection of letters theIt’s a fictionalized account of Gabriel’s Rebellion, a thwarted revolt of enslaved people in Virginia in 1800; it lyrically examines masculinity as well as the links between oppression and uprising. I spent a large chunk of my younger years trying to figure out what I was most interested in, and it wasn’t until late in my college career that I realized that the answer was history. When I picked up , the depths of Bontemps’s historical research leapt off the page, but so too did the engaging subplots and robust characters. It was a marriage of my loves for fiction, for understanding the past, and for matter-of-fact prose. I wish I’d gotten to it sooner.