Books

A Lesson Before Dying Ernest J. Gaines Ernest Gaines's novel set in 1940s Louisiana follows a teacher asked to help a wrongly condemned young man face death with dignity. 1 recommender A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist Randy Barnett The memoir of the law professor who built the constitutional case that nearly killed Obamacare. 1 recommender L.A. Weather María Amparo Escandón A year with a Mexican American family in Los Angeles, told through drought, fire and a marriage quietly ending. 1 recommender Lady Tremaine Rachel Hochhauser The Cinderella story told by the stepmother, and the arithmetic of a widow with two daughters and no money. 1 recommender Land Where I Flee Prajwal Parajuly Three siblings return to Gangtok for their grandmother's birthday, all of them lying. 1 recommender Late Migrations Margaret Renkl A backyard natural history and a family's deaths, braided in short chapters until they are one subject. 1 recommender Leaders Eat Last Simon Sinek The best leaders sacrifice their own comfort for their people, the way a commander eats after the troops: trust as biology Leadership Strategy and Tactics Jocko Willink The questions leaders actually ask, answered directly: how to take charge, when to push, when to shut up. Lean Thinking James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones The foundational guide to lean production and stripping waste out of how organizations work. 1 recommender Leave the World Behind Rumaan Alam Something has happened in the city, nobody can find out what, and the not-knowing does the damage. 1 recommender Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds Brandon Sanderson All three Legion novellas in one volume, including the concluding Lies of the Beholder, where Stephen's aspects start to unravel. Leonardo da Vinci Walter Isaacson From thousands of pages of Leonardo's notebooks, a case that his art and his science were the same relentless curiosity Less: A Novel Andrew Sean Greer A minor novelist accepts every literary invitation on earth to avoid attending his ex's wedding. 1 recommender Lessons from Surah al-Kahf Yasir Qadhi The chapter Muslims read every Friday, opened up through its four strange narratives and what each one asks of the reader. Lessons from Surah Yusuf Yasir Qadhi The one Qur'anic story told start to finish in a single chapter, read as a study of patience under sustained injustice. Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season Forough Farrokhzad Frank verse about desire scandalised Tehran, and a car crash ended it at thirty-three. Iran most important woman poet, gathered and translated into English. 1 recommender Let Us Descend Jesmyn Ward Jesmyn Ward's novel follows an enslaved girl sold south, guided by spirits, on a harrowing journey through the antebellum South. 1 recommender Letters Oliver Sacks Thousands of letters across fifty years, showing the obscurity, the motorcycles and a warmth Sacks kept out of his published work. 1 recommender Letters of Note: Grief Shaun Usher Four centuries of letters written in the face of loss, resisting consolation-by-formula and gathering the strange, furious, tender things people actually write when someone dies. 1 recommender Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary Rainer Maria Rilke Ten letters to a nineteen-year-old officer cadet who asked whether his poems were any good, answered with advice about solitude, patience and living the questions. 1 recommender Letters to Olga Vaclav Havel Written from prison under rules forbidding humour, foreign words and corrections, and within those constraints Havel built a sustained philosophy of responsibility and being. 1 recommender Liar’s Poker Michael Lewis An insider's account of a 1980s bond desk, written as a warning and read by a generation as a career advertisement. Liberace Darden Asbury Pyron The sequinned showman taken seriously as an American original rather than a punchline. 1 recommender Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism Vikash Yadav Hayek reread for an age in which states and capital have grown comfortable together. 1 recommender Liberty Defined Ron Paul Fifty short essays, from abortion to Zionism, applying Paul's libertarian principles to concrete issues, often against both parties' orthodoxy. Lies and Sorcery Elsa Morante Three generations of Sicilian women, narrated by a descendant who says at the outset that the family stories are lies. Published 1948, unabridged in English at last. 1 recommender Lies the Government Told You Andrew Napolitano Two centuries of official claims set against the record, in a judge's format. Life 3.0 Max Tegmark MIT physicist Max Tegmark's wide-angle look at how artificial intelligence could reshape work, war, justice, and what it means to be human, and how to steer it toward the best outcomes. 1 recommender Life and Fate Vasily Grossman Stalingrad seen whole, by a war correspondent who put Nazism and Stalinism in the same frame. 1 recommender Life Before Man Margaret Atwood Three people circle each other after a suicide, in a museum that keeps reminding them how briefly any of it will register. Life Force Tony Robbins Robbins tours the frontier of regenerative medicine, from gene therapy to stem cells, for what is actually available now Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain Twain's memoir of piloting steamboats on the pre-war Mississippi, and returning to a river transformed, the source-world of his great novels. Light in August William Faulkner William Faulkner's novel weaves together a pregnant wanderer, a haunted drifter, and a disgraced minister in the Deep South. 1 recommender Like a Sky Inside Jakuta Alikavazovic A night locked inside the Louvre, and the father who once asked how she would steal the Mona Lisa. 1 recommender Like a Virgin Richard Branson Branson answers the real questions entrepreneurs ask, funding, hiring, marketing cheap, in short contrarian chapters that argue against the MBA playbook. Like Silicon from Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI Michael M. Rosen What the rabbis said about golems, creation and moral agency, brought to bear on artificial intelligence. 1 recommender