Rainesford Stauffer is a writer I beyond admire. Reading her work feels effortless, and yet it shouldn’t escape you how much work and thought she puts into every single word, how painstaking her reporting is. While the internet is littered with her triumphs, a must-read is her new book—An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional—a work which explores the intense pressure facing young adults today to live their “best lives,” and is in many ways, an intensely well-thought out postscript to Meg Jay’s revolutionary The Defining Decade.
An Ordinary Age
I recently had the chance to speak with Stauffer about her book, and five others she’d like to recommend. She said that “After realizing it’d be nearly impossible to narrow down every book that’s shaped my life, I landed on a theme condensed to 2021: five books that made me think bigger in 2021. It is, admittedly, quite broad, because thinking bigger could be about anything, and they’re all books I’ve read in the past several months.”
“But these books have common threads that run between them,” Stauffer added. “They reshaped what I thought I understood about something, be it ballet or imagination or my own chronic illness; they reignited a vigorous curiosity in figuring out what else I don’t know; they taught me things I didn’t even know that I didn’t know.”
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