Books

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens Charles Dickens's novel of the French Revolution braids love and sacrifice through the terror of London and Paris. 1 recommender A Thief of Time Tony Hillerman Leaphorn hunts a missing archaeologist through Anasazi ruins and a whitewater canyon. 1 recommender A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini Two women a generation apart, forced into one household, across thirty years of Afghan history. 1 recommender A Treatise on Liberal Critiques of Ridda Mohammed Hijab An examination of apostasy in Islamic law and its liberal critics. Taking a Stand Rand Paul Paul's 2016 campaign manifesto and memoir, arguing for a more libertarian Republican Party on criminal justice, privacy, surveillance, and foreign restraint. Tales from the Perilous Realm J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien's shorter fiction from outside Middle-earth, closing with the essay arguing that fairy tales were never meant for children alone. 1 recommender Talking to Strangers Malcolm Gladwell We are terrible at reading people we have never met, and the consequences reach from the courtroom to the traffic stop. Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu The ancient Chinese classic of Taoism: eighty-one short poems on humility, non-action, and living in harmony with the Tao, the force behind everything. 1 recommender Tara Road Maeve Binchy Maeve Binchy's novel follows two women, one in Dublin and one in New York, who swap houses and lives for a transforming summer. 1 recommender Taxocracy: What You Don’t Know About Taxes and How They Rule Your Daily Life Scott Hodge Tax incentives quietly decide what gets built, bought and borrowed, and almost nobody notices. 1 recommender Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer Simon Morrison Morrison puts Tchaikovsky inside the imperial court that paid for and constrained him, and gives the music as much attention as the life, including the death myths. 1 recommender Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom Bell Hooks hooks makes the case for the classroom as shared risk rather than transmission, drawing on segregated schooling and what it cost her to become a professor. 1 recommender Tears for Water Alicia Keys Poems and lyrics from the notebooks Alicia Keys kept long before she was famous. Telephone Tales Gianni Rodari A travelling salesman phones his daughter each night with a story, kept short because calls cost money. Sixty absurd, political, quietly subversive tales. 1 recommender Tell Me Everything Elizabeth Strout Elizabeth Strout gathers Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and lawyer Bob Burgess in a small Maine town around a local mystery. 1 recommender Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World Fareed Zakaria Written in the thick of COVID-19, Zakaria draws ten lessons about markets, government, inequality, and globalization, arguing the pandemic accelerated changes already underway. Thank You, Everything Icinori Icinori build a picture book from gratitude for rain, bread and worn-out tools, drawing on the Japanese belief that objects acquire a spirit after a century of service. 1 recommender That Bird Has My Wings Jarvis Jay Masters Jarvis Jay Masters's memoir recounts a brutal childhood, a wrongful path to San Quentin's death row, and his turn toward Buddhism. 1 recommender The Tea Party Goes to Washington Rand Paul Paul's first book, part 2010 victory account, part Tea Party manifesto against bailouts, deficits, and a bipartisan establishment he vowed to confront. The Tell Amy Griffin Amy Griffin's memoir follows a successful woman who, in midlife, recovers buried memories of childhood trauma and reckons with them. 1 recommender The Testaments Margaret Atwood Gilead told from inside its machinery, fifteen years on, by three women who could bring the regime down. Booker winner The Theft of Nations Ahamed Kameel Mydin Meera Subtitled Returning to Gold, an argument that fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking quietly transfer wealth from the many to the few. The Things I Would Tell You Sabrina Mahfouz An anthology of fiction, poetry and essays by British Muslim women writing past the headlines about them. 1 recommender The Things That Nobody Knows William Hartston A tour of the big questions science still cannot answer. 1 recommender The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans Bill Hammack An engineer explains how things are actually made, from Gothic cathedrals to the aluminium can. 1 recommender The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip Stephen Witt Nvidia spent thirty years building chips almost nobody wanted, then the AI boom arrived. 1 recommender The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond Jared Diamond examines what the small genetic gap between humans and apes reveals about our rise, our habits, and our capacity for self-destruction. 1 recommender The Third Door Alex Banayan At eighteen he hacked a TV game show to fund the quest: track down the world's most successful people and ask how they actually got their start. 1 recommender The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, II James J. Walsh A 1907 argument that the thirteenth century, not the Renaissance, is where the modern West actually starts. 1 recommender The Three Lives of Cate Kay Kate Fagan A famous author nobody has ever seen finally tells the story of the identities she shed to become her. 1 recommender The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship David Whyte Whyte argues that the commitments to a person, to work and to your own interior life cannot be balanced against one another, only lived at the same time. 1 recommender The Three-Body Problem Liu Cixin A physicist's suicide, a mysterious game, and first contact with a dying alien civilization open this landmark of Chinese science fiction. 2 recommenders The Time Paradox Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd Everyone leans habitually toward past, present or future, and it shapes more than they notice. 1 recommender The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell Ideas spread the way viruses do. Gladwell asks what makes one catch and another die out. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics John Mearsheimer Great powers pursue dominance because nothing above them guarantees survival, whoever is governing. The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris Andrea Wulf Georg Forster sailed with Cook at seventeen, changed European nature writing, and died in revolutionary Paris having lost everything he had to his own politics. 2 recommenders