'We Should All Be Feminists' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Here's a literary question: Are there some great novels that everyone should read before the age of 21?

It’s a query that the New York Times posed to actor and comedian Ian Michael Black in its “By the Book” feature and he had an intriguing answer and a couple of terrific recommendations.

Black said he believed that being in your 20s in America was often about “that taut feeling of wanting to do something all the time but not always knowing exactly what.” And I’ll add, not always knowing exactly why.

It’s often a time of restlessness and ambition and, paradoxically, a feeling that time is running out. I remember how urgent it seemed to get that next job, to go to that far-off place — now — to achieve that next milestone.

There are wonderful books that capture that edginess. Black chose for his “two books everyone should read before 21” the novel “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” a collaboration between journalist Alex Haley and Malcolm X.

Today, I’m adding two more “under 21” books by women: Read all four of Elena Ferrante’s exceptional “Neapolitan” series but, for my money, the second novel, “The Story of a New Name” is the one that reveals what tangled, loving, competitive, ferocious, enduring friendship looks like between two girls.

Although I was tempted to make “Jane Eyre” my second choice here, I simply cannot leave Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s slim but fierce book “We Should All Be Feminists” off this list. A mere 63 pages, it pulses with gentle, inescapable feminist logic: “‘Because you are a girl’ is never a reason for anything;” “never speak of marriage as an achievement;” and teach your girls to love and revere books. I wish I could put this book in the hands of every middle grade teacher in America!

My two books that I think everyone should read before the age of 21 are: “We Should All be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of a New Name.”

—  Kerri Miller | MPR News