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" Are you an introspective, renegade thinker with a taste for alternative music and a tendency toward the blues? Be careful \u2014 you might be the hero of one of these &amp;#039;90s books. After we published our recommendations by &amp;#039;80s birth year, many readers requested a &amp;#039;90s list as well. Not a problem! Again, I left off no-brainers like Harry Potter and Girl, Interrupted, because I figure the books and movies are pretty much a rite of passage, and focused on the books you may not have read \u2014 or at least haven&amp;#039;t read in a while. The biggest &amp;#039;90s fictional trend? The outsider. From High Fidelity to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, &amp;#039;90s literature proves that nothing is cooler than dancing to the beat of your own homemade musical instrument. 1990 Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton I didn&amp;#039;t get around to reading Jurassic Park (or seeing the movie) until I was an adult, which is a major bummer \u2014 I have no doubt my 16-year-old self would have loved Crichton&amp;#039;s Frankenstein-by-way-of-dinosaurs story of what happens when scientists play god. Possession, A.S. Byatt Somehow, A.S. Byatt makes a slow-moving love affair between academics chasing a paper trail sigh-out-loud sexy. As two glasses-clad professors unearth more evidence about a romantic relationship between two very dead and very famous Victorian poets, their own love affair flourishes. It&amp;#039;s a heady, intellectual read, and A.S. Byatt is proof that satisfying romance can be brainy. The Witching Hour, Anne Rice Because who doesn&amp;#039;t love 1,000-plus page novels about witches? The Witching Hour is the first book in Rice&amp;#039;s Mayfair Witches series, a three-book sequence that follows the rise and fall of the wealthy Mayfair witch dynasty. Set in atmospheric turn-of-the-century New Orleans, this steamy read feels much shorter than it weighs. 1991 Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh Instead of underfunded and marginally successful D.A.R.E. (Drugs and Alcohol Resistance Education) programs, public schools should consider forcing teenagers to read Irvine Welsh&amp;#039;s stomach-turning collection of stories starring heroin junkies in Edinburgh, Scotland. There&amp;#039;s nothing glamorous about the drugs in Trainspotting, or the people who use them \u2014 these portraits of addiction and its aftermath are more upsetting than the most graphic episode of Intervention you&amp;#039;ve ever seen. Trainspotting is practically a horror story, with immense literary and sociopolitical value. Sophie&amp;#039;s World, Jostein Gaardner Can you think of a better vessel for a comprehensive survey of Western philosophy than an angsty teenage girl with a semi-absent father? I can&amp;#039;t. After 14-year-old Sophie receives a letter that asks only &amp;quot;Who are you?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Where does the world come from?&amp;quot; she sets off on a Socratic expedition led by her (older, male) tutor. This philosophy tutorial dressed up like Alice in Wonderland is one of the most popular books to come out of Norway \u2014 it has sold more than a million copies and has even been adapted into a computer game. 1992 Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan Terry McMillan was a household name in the late &amp;#039;80s and &amp;#039;90s. Waiting to Exhale follows four successful African-American women searching for love (or escaping the wreckage of it). Their funny, tender friendship is the book&amp;#039;s heart. By the time Waiting to Exhale was adapted into a tearjerker starring the breathtaking Whitney Houston, it had sold 3 million copies. The Secret History, Donna Tartt Donna Tartt&amp;#039;s newest novel, The Goldfinch, came out a few months ago and has made it onto every best-of list this year. (Ours too!) But The Secret History, Tartt&amp;#039;s first book, is the reason the whole world drops everything when she publishes a novel. Set on Hampden College&amp;#039;s elite campus, this murder mystery is less about piecing together the clues to find the villain than it is an exploration of how far people go to belong. Narrator Richard Papen is, of course, a compelling and obsessive outsider. Special bonus? Loads of Greek mythology. Just read it. I dare you to not like it. Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison Bone Boatwright, the illegitimate daughter of Anney Boatwright, starts her story by narrating the moments leading up to her birth, as if she alone is in control of her destiny. It&amp;#039;s an empowering declaration of Bone&amp;#039;s strength, especially considering the plot of her short life \u2014 over the course of this novel, she&amp;#039;ll be raped and beaten by her stepfather and will have to face her mother&amp;#039;s insufficiencies head-on. Yes, this is a difficult tale of a girl in difficult circumstances, but it&amp;#039;s also inspiring, funny, and just as important as Catcher and the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird \u2014 two more famous books it&amp;#039;s often compared to. 1993 The Giver, Lois Lowry Though you probably read Lois Lowry&amp;#039;s dystopian young adult novel in middle school, it&amp;#039;s worth reading again as an adult. The story is set in a future world where adults have been stripped of memories of the past and every person acts as a cog in society&amp;#039;s well-oiled machine. While this eliminates hunger and certain kinds of pain, it also eradicates life&amp;#039;s beauty. The moment where Jonas sees the color red for the first time is so much more beautiful with a little life experience under your belt. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides Not even  this travesty can keep me from being a bona fide Eugenides fangirl. Yeah, The Marriage Plot let me down \u2014 Cosmo writer Anna Breslaw sums up my feelings  at The Hairpin \u2014 but that&amp;#039;s partly because The Virgin Suicidesis so good. The novel is narrated by a group of boys who are fascinated by their neighbors, the gorgeous Lisbon sisters, who commit suicide one by one. &amp;quot;On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide \u2014 it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese \u2014 the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the sleeping pills were, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.&amp;quot; 1994 The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami Murakami&amp;#039;s puzzle box of a novel is addictive and strange, the kind of writing that alters your dreams. It follows Toru Okada, a thirtysomething Japanese man whose life, on the surface, is as mundane as they come. But after the disappearance of Toru&amp;#039;s cat, increasingly odd things (which may or may not be real) begin to happen. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, Elizabeth Wurtzel After Elizabeth Wurtzel published this memoir of her struggle with depression throughout college and young adulthood, she became the lit world&amp;#039;s Kate Moss. Prozac Nation is an early and influential look at the pharmaceutical treatment of depression. Wurtzel&amp;#039;s attempt to explain how an attractive, talented, privileged woman can also be very, very depressed is a &amp;#039;90s touchstone. 1995 Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace It&amp;#039;s pretty much impossible to sum up David Foster Wallace&amp;#039;s humungous, annotated novel in two or three sentences. Thankfully, the Internet is full of cultish fans who&amp;#039;ve made helpful study guides, like this diagram explaining the connections between characters, this Decemberists music video inspired by the fictional Enfield Tennis Academy (where part of the novel takes place), and this plot map. This tome is your birthright, 95-ers. Plus, if you get through it, you can claim eternal bragging rights for having read the closest thing to Joyce&amp;#039;s Ulysses written since, well, Joyce&amp;#039;s Ulysses. The Golden Compass, His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman I&amp;#039;ve said this on the Internet before, so apologies for self-stealing, but I adored this book so much that I made a childhood vow to name my first daughter after Lyra Belacqua, the protagonist of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra is a liar, fiercely independent and fiercely loyal, and she&amp;#039;s one of the most fully realized \u2014 and admirable \u2014 young adult heroines in literature. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby Nick Hornby&amp;#039;s lovable novel about a record-store owner who revisits his five worst breakups after his girlfriend, Laura, leaves him, is an ode to the mixed tape as much as it&amp;#039;s an ode to love and heartbreak. 1996 Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk The first rule of reading Fight Club is stop thinking about Brad Pitt. The second rule is clear your schedule \u2014 once you start this short, kinetic book, you won&amp;#039;t stop reading until you&amp;#039;re done. Fight Club might be the one novel that every guy I&amp;#039;ve ever dated has unanimously read and loved. Angela&amp;#039;s Ashes, Frank McCourt My mom wouldn&amp;#039;t let me read Angela&amp;#039;s Ashes the year of its publication because I was 10 and because the memoir contains explicit sex, a scene in which Frank McCourt briefly contemplates intercourse with a sheep, and lots and lots of Irish alcoholism. So I waited until she left the house and then snuck the book from its hiding spot in her pajama drawer. All told, it probably took two months of my mom&amp;#039;s trips to the grocery store for me to finish the saga of McCourt&amp;#039;s gruesome childhood. 1997 Naked, David Sedaris David Sedaris can make anything hilarious. This essay collection is as irreverent as they come (especially when addressing darker, sadder topics, like the death of Sedaris&amp;#039;s mother), and full of anecdotes from Sedaris&amp;#039;s weird childhood and drug-addled college years. So funny you won&amp;#039;t be able to stop yourself from reading sections to everyone you know. Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell If you&amp;#039;re like me and my girls, the SATC dynamic is such a profound part of your worldview that you subconsciously diagnose everyone you meet as a Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, or Samantha. Candace Bushnell&amp;#039;s anthology of New York Observer columns details the lives of her and her friends. These intimate snapshots are the birthplace of the four women who taught the world the power of BFFs. Why haven&amp;#039;t you read it yet? Underworld, Don DeLillo In 2006, Underworld was the runner-up for a New York Times survey that asked critics to vote on the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years. It lost to Toni Morrison&amp;#039;s Beloved, which, yeah, fair enough. Underworld is a highly political novel, anchored by memorable depictions of historic figures like Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover. 1998 The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano This challenging book secured Chilean writer Roberto Bolano&amp;#039;s place on American bookshelves. This nonlinear narrative focuses on a group of poets and bohemians who make up an art movement called Visceral Realism. Don&amp;#039;t let that sentence fool you into thinking The Savage Detectives is a snooze. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists,&amp;quot; Bolano writes. &amp;quot;As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.&amp;quot; Ghost World, Daniel Clowes Recent high school graduates Enid Coleslaw (really) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer think they&amp;#039;re too smart for their boring town and are eager to hurl cynical judgments at everyone who crosses their path \u2014 from parents to service workers to old classmates. But you forgive them because this summer will be Becky and Enid&amp;#039;s last before they drift apart into adulthood and all the crap that comes with it. Ghost World, with its blue-toned illustrations, captures that on-the-precipice-of-growing-up feeling so well you&amp;#039;ll be walloped with nostalgia for your own lost summers \u2014 and that girlfriend you never talk to anymore. 1999 The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky Charlie&amp;#039;s having a rough time. He&amp;#039;s just embarked on his freshman year of high school, his best friend, Michael, recently committed suicide, and he&amp;#039;s got an agonizing secret crush. The book is written as a letter to an unidentified person (I always like to think it&amp;#039;s Michael), and it&amp;#039;s as intimate as a note slid into your locker. Chbosky has said that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is for anyone who&amp;#039;s felt like an outcast. So basically everyone. Vice: New &amp;amp;amp; Selected Poems, Ai Ai&amp;#039;s collection of dramatic monologues written as poems won the National Book Award for poetry in 1999. Ai proudly calls herself a mutt, and in tribute to her mixed heritage (Japanese, African-American, Comanche, to name a few), her poems are a cacophony of voices \u2014 all of them distinct and unforgettably real. Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson Melinda Sordino stops using her voice after she&amp;#039;s raped. &amp;quot;Shut your trap, button your lip, can it,&amp;quot; Anderson writes. &amp;quot;All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.&amp;quot; Melinda alienates herself from high school as she struggles to face what happened to her \u2014 and to work up the courage to speak the truth. Follow Julie on Twitter. Photo Credit: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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