- As Meat Loves Salt.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/271487.As_Meat_Loves_Salt?from_search=true&search_version=service
The top review by Madeline summarizes it well.
My reading of it coincided with learning about Cromwell's New Model Army and the English Civil War, and it definitely painted a very different perspective on that part of history. It was written by a teacher and meticulously researched for historical accuracy, but it's not pedantic. It's steamy, punchy, intense, but beautiful in many ways, too. I couldn't read it in public because it always made me cry.
- Dora: a Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch. We briefly studied Sigmund Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, and through that I learned about this modern book which is sort of a satire of it. It's unflinchingly original, and in a way its weirdness can be annoying and disturbing, but it's also endearing and empowering. It's about a wounded but incredibly strong, creative, determined, and clever teenage girl with depression from a dysfunctional family who struggles with mental illness herself. She uses art to express herself. Palahniuk wrote the introduction and has described it as a girls' Fight Club, and it kinda is. Some people have sorta dismissed it as edgy YA mainly because the protagonist is a teen, but it doesn't fit the YA genre at all and isn't marketed for teens. I liked it. I also felt like it gave me insight on mental illness.
- The Chronology of Water, also by Yukanavitch. You can literally judge the book by its cover and decide it isn't for you if you want a "clean" book because it has a bare breast. The breast isn't there because a smutty book; it's because it's raw and exposed. It's a memoir that deals with intense sexual abuse and grief, and it's lurid, has deliberately provocative language almost every page, and yet is such a beautiful, poetic, funny, captivating book. I really like that art is such a source of healing for this writer in both books I've read of hers.
- She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb. It captures the life of a ruined teenage girl who recedes into herself, finding comfort and TV and food and ignoring the outside world, and emerges into adulthood socially inept and severely overweight. Eventually she starts living her life. There's a lot of cruelty and crudeness, and it's a book with conflicting opinions. Some loathe it, some love it. I don't regret reading it at all.
- I Know This Much is True, also by Wally Lamb. It was on the "shelf" my English teacher created on Shelfari for our class, and so I decided to read it. It's incredibly long and there's a lot of gut-punches and "unclean" passages but it's so worth the read.