Books

O Pioneers! Willa Cather 1 recommender Oathbringer Brandon Sanderson Dalinar Kholin confronts the past he has spent a lifetime not remembering, just as the Everstorm breaks and humanity's coalition begins to fracture. Obliquity John Kay Why the most profitable companies do not aim at profit, and other lessons in reaching goals indirectly. Obvious in Hindsight Bradley Tusk A novel about flying cars, written by the venture capitalist who spent years fighting regulators. Odd Girl Out Rachel Simmons Why aggression between girls so often takes the form of gossip and exclusion, and what adults can do about it. 1 recommender Oedipus Rex Sophocles 1 recommender Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham Maugham's 1915 novel of an orphan with a club foot who tries art, then medicine, and loves a woman who does not love him. 1 recommender Of Woman Born Adrienne Rich The poet separates motherhood as lived experience from motherhood as an institution shaped by men. 1 recommender Office Politics Oliver James How to recognise the manipulators at work and hold your own without becoming one of them. Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War Alessandro Sanna An Italian illustrator set out to draw wartime poets, could not shake the images, and made a wordless book in which colour and sequence carry what language dropped. 1 recommender Old Filth Jane Gardam A retired judge, raised as a Raj orphan and shipped to Wales at five, reckons late in life with everything he never said. 1 recommender Old Maid Suzanne Finnamore She gets engaged and panics, and narrates the whole thing in a voice dry enough to quote aloud. 1 recommender Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout Thirteen linked stories set in a small Maine town, with a difficult, perceptive retired schoolteacher at their heart. 1 recommender Olive, Again Elizabeth Strout Elizabeth Strout returns to the prickly, unforgettable Olive Kitteridge in linked stories of a small Maine town. 1 recommender Omaha Beach and Beyond John Robert Slaughter Nineteen years old in the first wave at Omaha, and still going months later in Germany 1 recommender On Anxiety Renata Salecl What our anxieties reveal about modern life, in a brief book by a Slovene philosopher. On Becoming a Person Carl R. Rogers The 1961 papers where client-centred therapy began, arguing that people change when met with unconditional regard rather than diagnosis. Includes his lecture on listening. 1 recommender On Becoming Fearless Arianna Huffington Written partly for her daughters, Huffington maps the fears that hold women back, from the body to money to speaking up, and how to move past them. On Being Ill Virginia Woolf, Julia Stephen Virginia Woolf asks why illness, as common as love or war, has so rarely been a subject for literature, and what it does to the mind. 1 recommender On Consolation Michael Ignatieff Job, Cicero, Primo Levi and Akhmatova, all read for what consolation used to mean before grief became something to be managed. 1 recommender On Dublin Street Samantha Young An American with a buried past rents a room in Edinburgh from the wrong man's sister. 1 recommender On Fire Naomi Klein A decade of Klein's climate essays, gathered to argue that a Green New Deal is the scale of response the crisis now demands. On Getting Better Adam Phillips A psychoanalyst asks whether the modern demand to improve yourself has quietly become a way of declining to live at all. 1 recommender On Human Nature Edward O. Wilson Wilson turns sociobiology on our own species, asking what in human behaviour is inherited. 1 recommender On Immunity Eula Biss An essayist becomes a mother, meets the fear around vaccination, and traces what immunity means to us as a metaphor. 1 recommender On Lighthouses Jazmina Barrera Jazmina Barrera's essays on lighthouses, translated by Christina MacSweeney for Two Lines Press. On Looking Lia Purpura A poet treats looking as a moral discipline, turning it on a dead deer, a body on a slab, a heap of coal. Unsettling in the best way. 1 recommender On Materialism Sebastiano Timpanaro An Italian Marxist's case that biology and the body shape human life as much as culture does. 1 recommender On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us Partha Dasgupta The economist who put a price on nature, on why leaving it out of the accounts guarantees we spend it. 1 recommender On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays Emily Ogden Essays that begin in ordinary confusion about love, parenting and ambition, then refuse the tidy resolution, treating uncertainty as a position rather than a failure of nerve. 1 recommender On Press Matthew Pressman How America's leading newspapers remade their values in the 1960s and 1970s, and why those choices still shape the news. 1 recommender On the Calculation of Volume Solvej Balle Tara Selter wakes every morning on the eighteenth of November. Balle takes a premise that could be a joke and follows its physics and its marriage entirely seriously. 3 recommenders On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin One long argument, built from pigeons and barnacles, for descent with modification and against the need for a designer. 2 recommenders On the Road Jack Kerouac The book that taught American prose to move at the speed of a car with nowhere particular to be. 2 recommenders On the Rooftop Margaret Wilkerson Sexton A mother drills her three daughters toward stardom in 1950s San Francisco, as their Black neighbourhood is razed. 1 recommender On Writing Stephen King Half autobiography, half toolkit, written either side of the van that nearly killed him. 1 recommender