ButterReads
No. 01Character fit
How Should a Person Be?
Sheila Heti
The platonic ideal of a book Hannah would buy three copies of and lend to none of them.
CitationCharacter-fit
Bookshelf · TV HeroinesPreview
Hannah Horvath.
Girls · 2012–2017
The voice of a generation reads the voice of a generation. Hannah’s Brooklyn paperbacks: confessional essays, MFA fiction, and bad memoirs she swears are good.
The bookshelf was always more honest than she was.
3 booksCurated · cited · cross-referenced
The shelf, decoded
Why this list.
Hannah Horvath, aspiring essayist and Iowa Writers’ Workshop cautionary tale, reads the way 2010s Brooklyn read: confessional, autofictional, female, and very recently published. The list below tracks her literary heroes — the writers Lena Dunham has named in interviews, the books that show up in the apartment, and the ones Hannah quotes badly at parties.
The reading list
3 books for Hannah.
No. 02Creator citedThe Liars’ Club
Mary Karr
The memoir Hannah cites in workshop and misquotes in voiceover. Karr is the form Hannah is trying to inhabit.
CitationCreator-cited
No. 03Character fitJust Kids
Patti Smith
Hannah pretends to have read it. She has read parts. They are her favourite parts.
CitationCharacter-fit
Closing note
Hannah reads to become a writer. The list is what she is becoming, in the books she leaves face-down on the kitchen counter.
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Rory Gilmore
339 books pass through Rory’s hands across seven seasons. The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge has been a cult ritual for two decades.
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Carrie Bradshaw
A columnist in Manolos with a Smith Corona. Carrie’s shelves run from Didion to Dominick Dunne — late-90s downtown literary New York, distilled.
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Fleabag
The fourth wall is broken; the bookshelf is messier still. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s reading list is grief, sex, theology, and Mary Oliver.
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