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Cheryl Strayed's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Cheryl Strayed recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Cheryl Strayed's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

Everything is Figureoutable book cover1

Everything is Figureoutable

Marie Forleo

4.4
Do you ever have trouble finishing what you start? Do amazing ideas come to you all the time but after the initial excitement wanes you struggle to follow through? If you're creative and ambitious, the answer is likely yes.

The problem isn't you. It's not that you're not hardworking, intelligent or deserving, but that you haven't yet installed the one key belief that will change everything: Everyth
2

On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard

Jennifer Pastiloff

4.3
An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff’s years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how deafness taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness.

Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person
Citizen: An American Lyric book cover3

Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine

4.4
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the cl
4

Johnny Got His Gun

Dalton Trumbo, Ron Kovic

4.3
This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives...

This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome... but so is war
5

Lives of Girls and Women

Alice Munro

3.9
The only novel from Alice Munro -- award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman -- is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough y
New and Selected Poems, Volume One book cover6

New and Selected Poems, Volume One

Mary Oliver

4.7
Features previously published and new poems that explore the natural world and how it is connected to human beings and spirituality.