What's on Default Friend's Bedside Table?

Katherine Dee, known to most as @default_friend, is an internet culture reporter and contributor to the Mars Review of Books. Below, our very own Default Friend shares a taste of her current reads.

Read Katherine’s piece, “Reflections on Hookup Culture.”

I am living in New York for the summer, and it’s beyond me how any of these books ended up in my possession. But these are the books that I wake up to each morning…

Jewish Self Hate, Theodor Lessing

I haven’t opened this book. The spine is pristine. I found it on the ground, and the title was too much to ignore… 

Sex Under the Swastika, Tim Heath

I think this book went viral on Twitter recently, if for no other reason than the bananas title. A follower sent it to me after that. I’ve read half of it. It seems like Tim Heath couldn’t find an editor, but the description of Weimar sexuality was… something else. Yeah, let’s say that. 

Women, Charles Bukowski

Recommended to me by the writer Stephen Elliott. If you like Delicious Tacos, you’ll like Bukowski’s Women more. 

Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen

I loved this book, and think it works best in this day and age as an allegory for the Internet. Really—from the first page—it reads like a description of being Too Online, just as much as it reads as a memoir of being in McLean, a famous Massachusetts mental hospital.