Bring out your turtlenecks and combat boots, and join us in reading our way down the 1990s!

(If you, like me, are a ’90s kid, you can pick a book from this list to tick off an item on our Read Harder Challenge 2016.)

Some notes: I have tried to avoid series like Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire, YA like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and novels like Fight Club and Infinite Jest: these are books that readers everywhere already know about; we’ve either already read them and watched the TV/movie adaptations, or never plan to. This is not to say that Rowling and Chuck Palahniuk’s contributions to the literature of the ’90s is not valuable, but so as to leave space for other brilliant works from the decade–to discover something new. I have also avoided the repetition of authors.

Since this list is not genre-specific, I have tried to tag each book with the shortest possible description after listing it: an indication to its genre, and whether it is fiction or non-fiction; a novel, play, or short story collection. Poetry anthologies and comics are listed separately.