Nicole Flattery: Three Books to Read at College

How To Do nothing

by Jenny Odell

A thoughtful, substantial look at social media and the attention economy. Rather than lecturing or hectoring, Odell instead points out the disappointing facets of social media; how we essentially deserve better. The world is starting to feel like a 24/7 workplace, and we’re constantly thinking up new ways to improve and advertise ourselves. It’s an exhausting and damaging process. This is the first book that broke the spell for me. Odell insists you stop fidgeting for five minutes and instead focus on nature, your environment and community/reality. You will feel renewed, but he’s also a genuinely original thinker, so it’s hardly self-help. A rare book that succeeds in making you see the world differently.

Young Skins

by Colin Barrett

A collection of six short stories and a novella that has firmly earned its place in the Irish canon. Set entirely in a fictional small Irish town and containing familiar landscapes – petrol stations, motorways, carpeted nightclubs. I urge you to read this instead of another campus novel, because it’s too easy to be swept up in the world immediately around you, to dismiss those who have not had similar intellectual experiences, to feel sudden, snobbish disdain towards the carpeted nightclub. Barrett is also adept at conjuring a strange, pervasive air of melancholy, without ever being sentimental. It helps that the prose is, line-by-line, of a criminally high standard.

Changing My Mind + Feel Free

by Zadie Smith

Chances are you will encounter a lot of literary theory in college and, if I remember correctly, that will make you never want to read a book again. Consider these two essay collections by Zadie Smith to be an antidote. They aren’t particularly challenging, but they will remind you why you read, why you go to the cinema. A sweet review of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha Of Suburbia in Feel Free is a charming, full-hearted tribute to a book that influenced her. Her essay ‘Dead Man Laughing’ in Changing My Mind, which is about comedy but more truly about class, is one of the few essays that has ever made me cry (I’m very tough).

Nicole Flattery's debut short story collection, Show Them A Good Time, is out now via Stinging Fly Press.