A friend of mine recommend this book to me as I was pondering why I just didn’t understand the female orgasm. I mean, I am an adult woman of childbearing age, surely I’ve figured it out by now? I was happy to stumble across this exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works, based on groundbreaking research.

This book makes clear the differences in male and female orgasms. Nagoski describes how your brain and your life work together to create desire, and how to experience more pleasure and confidence within your relationships, and, most importantly, with sex. In the last few years, scientists have learned more about how women’s sexuality works. This book is about self acceptance, having patience with yourself, and recognizing the ways culture and media influence our body and sexual ideals.

So, this is mainly on here because I have a frightening obsession with Phoebe. She’s actual LOL hilarz (you’ll get this joke once you read the book), yet poignant in her presentation of feminist and race issues.

Robinson has been dubbed “the Black friend” for most of her life, being questioned about her love of Billy Joel and obsession with U2. She talks about what it is like growing up Black and the societal pressures put on her because of her skin color and gender. And yes, she’s sick of people asking to touch her hair. She writes with humor and provides comedic relief as she takes you on her feminist journey.

Solint, you goddamn brilliant woman. She focuses on masculine fragility and male agression in history, literature, social media, pop culture, and more. She somehow always has this power to hook me from the moment I read the essay titles.

“Who would I be if I lived in a world that didn’t hate women?”

Jessica Valenti’s Twitter is worth living for. While her essay collection is more biography than social commentary, I ate the whole book up.

She explores the toll that sexism takes on women’s lives and liberates herself, and her readers, throughout the process. She regales stories of subway gropings, imposter syndrome, sexual awakenings, and motherhood throughout her adolescence and young adulthood in New York City.

If you’ve ever wondered why Black women feel less than enthusiastic about the women’s movement, ponder no more. Intersectionality is often overlooked within feminism. Does your idea of feminism address ALL women? Specifically Black women?

Food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. This book is important and a humbling read for white women. Kendall doesn’t feel the need to make you comfortable with politeness. A jarring collection of essays, and an essential piece of literature within the feminism movement.

Emily Witt addresses the conditions that sexually active young women find themselves challenged with facing. In vivid detail, she takes us on a journey of her personal experiences with orgasmic meditation and BDSM, while also guiding readers through sexual online encounters where women on camera get paid to perform naked yoga routines.

Roxane Gay is another Twitter favorite. She is known for her New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist.

In Difficult Women, she shows her fierce stance against violence towards women. It is a collection of short stories that cover a wide range of modern women.

The women in her stories live lives of privilege and poverty, are in loving and forbidden marriages. She writes about a woman married to a twin who pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer.

Kim Addonizio is a fantastic writer, but I just love the title and imagery (I love to hate to secretly, moderately admire Bukowski). Addonizio, a poet, writes about her love affair with writing itself.

“The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can’t count on it to be there just because you’ve made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear….If writing were a person, you would be in an abusive relationship. The healthy thing to do would be to get a restraining order and shut it right out of your heart,” she writes.

This selection, like art in a museum, is a poignant peek into the disparaging culture of women in demanding jobs from the 1960s to 1980s.

Berlin writes about everyday life for women, revealing moments in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.

Need a succinct starter book on Black queer feminism? For anyone who wants to know how to be in movement and a leader, this is your book.

This book challenges you to engage in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more queer and feminist. Your go-to guide on how to be an effective activist, drawing on the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and cross-group alliances.

From Rupi Kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Milk and Honey, is her second collection of poetry. This is a great bedside table read for quick bits of digestible literacy. A poetic journey about growth and healing from sexual trauma, and exploring her Ancestry.

Divided into five chapters and illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms.

Marina Keegan’s graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker.

Tragically, five days after graduation, she died in a car crash at the age of twenty-two. The Opposite of Loneliness is one last assem­blage of her essays and stories. This is a very hope-filled read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. “What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over,” she writes.

Miranda July gives me strong hipster vibes. She is an award-winning filmmaker and performing artist. The book is a series of essays that let you be a fly on the wall to the lonely, disconnected characters who try to find connection with others, often by acting out in bizarre ways.