Oh Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna, we've missed you. As Girls returns for its third season this weekend, the ladies of the series continue to make being young, confused, broke, and reckless look utterly exhilarating. Judging from trailers for the new season, Hannah has new problems but is inching ever closer to fulfilling her self-prophecy of being the voice of her generation. Marnie still lacks a career and stable relationship, but her hair looks more amazing than ever. Shoshanna is leaving the naïve virgin act farther in the dust, thank God, and Jessa is continuing to simultaneously bewitch and enrage all she meets.

We see the gals dancing, eating, crying, and hiding under the covers, but, at least in the trailers, we don’t see them reading much. Perhaps their terribly difficult early adulthoods would be eased by the knowledge that they are far from the first to experience such pain and confusion. Here’s a list of books for each girl (and one boy.)

For Hannah: The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron

Girls creator and star Lena Dunham has made no secret of her abiding crush on writer Nora Ephron, who she befriended before Ephron died last year. But Hannah so far seems to have not intuited the wisdom of the essayist and screenwriter, though it would do her a world of good. In this compendium we get Ephron’s early essays about being flatchested, her dating disasters, and her relationships with food, friends, and popular culture, all subjects close to Hannah’s heart. The book also includes her stage and screenplays, her autobiographical novel Heartburn, her political blog posts, and her pieces about aging, written shortly before her death, all of which should remind Hannah how much writing is actually required before one can call oneself a "voice" of anything.

For Adam: Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

When Broyard lived in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s, the neighborhood was cheap, sometimes dangerous, and a haven for artists, writers, philosophers, and other would-be intellectuals. In other words, Hannah’s on-again off-again boyfriend Adam would fit right in. As it is 2014, not 1946, Adam lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but he’d surely feel a psychic kinship with Broyard, who writes about his mercurial girlfriend, the abstract painter Sheri Donatti, and his quest to drink deeply of experience as he tries to become a writer and an intellectual in a neighborhood that inspired him daily.

For Marnie: Sweet Judy Blue Eyes by Judy Collins

Poor Marnie. Everything that was going so well -- her job, her relationship, her sense of herself as a competent adult -- has crumbled in the past seasons, and season three finds her trying to reinvent herself as a singer. She might take solace in this extraordinarily candid (and gossip-filled) memoir by folk singer Judy Collins, who went through no shortage of ups and downs over the decades. Collins has the appropriate "it’s all material for the music" attitude that might help Marnie in the uncertain times ahead, and her tales of meeting Janice Joplin, David Crosby, and Joan Baez will give Marnie some perspective on what it’s like to have truly challenging friendships.

For Shoshanna: Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell

An obvious choice for Shoshanna. If she hasn't read the book, which is a compilation of Bushnell’s columns for the New York Observer, she needs to go to the source material right away. Before the movies, before the TV series, there was Bushnell’s tales of the cold, cutthroat world of New York dating, where romance is for amateurs. Though Mr. Big does appear towards the end of the book, mostly these columns have unhappy endings, which may make Shoshanna rethink her ambition to emulate the show, and also may make her appreciate her decent-hearted suitor, Ray.

For Jessa: A Story Lately Told by Anjelica Huston

If Jessa doesn’t wind up some sort of famous model-actress hybrid it will surprise everyone, most of all Jessa herself. To prepare for stardom, she should study Huston’s memoir, in which the actress writes about growing up in the Irish countryside, hanging out with rock stars in 1960s London, and posing for (and dating) famous photographers including Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson. Along the way she became an actress, and, finally, a writer. From Huston, Jessa could learn a thing or two about preserving her dignity and finding her true passion even as she leads the glamorous life.