Books

1984 George Orwell George Orwell’s dystopia of total surveillance and rewritten truth, where the Party controls language, memory, and reality itself. 7 recommenders A Burning Megha Majumdar One careless post after an attack, and three lives that find her more useful guilty. 2 recommenders A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry Set in 1970s India during the Emergency, Rohinton Mistry braids together four strangers whose lives meet in a single cramped apartment. 2 recommenders 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. 2 recommenders Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner William Faulkner's 1936 Southern Gothic novel of the rise and fall of the plantation owner Thomas Sutpen, told by several unreliable narrators. 2 recommenders Abundance Ezra Klein Why a rich country cannot build housing, transit or clean energy, and the case that the scarcity is self-inflicted. 2 recommenders All About Love Bell Hooks Bell Hooks argues that love is an action rather than a feeling, and that we are taught almost nothing about how to do it. 3 recommenders All the King’s Men Robert Penn Warren Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel of populist demagogue Willie Stark and the corrupting machinery of political power. 2 recommenders Animal Farm George Orwell Orwell's satirical fable in which farm animals overthrow their owner, only to watch the pigs rebuild the tyranny they rose against. 2 recommenders Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy's tragic epic of a married aristocrat's affair, set against a panorama of Russian society and one man's search for meaning. 3 recommenders Antifragile Nassim Nicholas Taleb Beyond robust: things that improve under stress, and how suppressing small shocks guarantees larger ones. 2 recommenders As I Lay Dying William Faulkner William Faulkner's novel follows a poor Mississippi family's grueling journey to bury their mother, told in fractured inner voices. 2 recommenders Atomic Habits James Clear A practical framework for building good habits and breaking bad ones. 3 recommenders Audition Katie Kitamura An actress meets a young man who may be her son. Then the novel splits down the middle and rearranges everything you thought you had already understood. 3 recommenders Austerlitz W. G. Sebald A man raised in Wales discovers he came to Britain on a Kindertransport, and sets out to recover what was taken. 2 recommenders Beloved Toni Morrison A woman who escaped slavery is haunted, literally, by the daughter she killed to keep from being taken back. 2 recommenders Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy A scalp-hunting gang crosses the 1850s borderlands, and the desert regards the violence with exactly the same attention it gives a rock. 2 recommenders Brave New World Aldous Huxley A society engineered for contentment, and the question of what it costs to have nothing left to want. 2 recommenders Business Adventures John Brooks John Brooks's twelve New Yorker tales of corporate triumph and disaster, from the Ford Edsel to a famous Wall Street panic. 2 recommenders Civilization Niall Ferguson Ferguson identifies six "killer apps" that let the West race ahead of the rest of the world, and asks whether that edge is fading. 2 recommenders Cloud Atlas David Mitchell Six stories nested inside one another, from a nineteenth-century Pacific voyage to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, each one echoing through the next. 2 recommenders Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Marvin Harris Sacred cows, pig taboos and witch hunts, each read as a solution to a problem you have not spotted. 2 recommenders Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton Alan Paton's 1948 novel follows a Black minister searching for his son in Johannesburg, a lament for a South Africa breaking under racial injustice. 2 recommenders Deacon King Kong James McBride James McBride's novel spins out from a drunken church deacon shooting a drug dealer in a 1969 Brooklyn housing project. 2 recommenders Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey A season as a ranger in the Utah desert, written by a man with no patience for anyone who arrives by car. 2 recommenders Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes A man reads too many chivalric romances and sets out to live inside one. 2 recommenders East of Eden John Steinbeck Steinbeck's sweeping retelling of Cain and Abel follows two families in California's Salinas Valley across generations of love and choice. 3 recommenders Educated Tara Westover Kept out of school and hospitals by a survivalist father in rural Idaho, Tara Westover set foot in a classroom at seventeen and ended up at Cambridge. 2 recommenders Excellent Advice for Living Kevin Kelly Wired's founding editor distills a lifetime into hundreds of short, sharp aphorisms on how to live, work, and treat other people well. 2 recommenders Expert Secrets Russell Brunson How to turn what you know into a movement and a business, by finding your voice and leading a following of true fans. 2 recommenders Fault Lines Raghuram G. Rajan The deeper causes of the financial crisis: inequality, export dependence, and a financial sector asked to paper over both. 2 recommenders Fever Dream Samanta Schweblin Samanta Schweblin's short, unsettling novel, built as a dialogue at a hospital bed, in Megan McDowell's translation for Riverhead. 2 recommenders Flashlight Susan Choi A father vanishes on a night-time beach walk, and the silence he leaves behind stretches across continents and decades. 2 recommenders Flesh David Szalay A life recorded as things that happen to a body, with the interior deliberately withheld. 2 recommenders Foundation Isaac Asimov Asimov's genre-defining saga: as a galactic empire decays, a scientist uses "psychohistory" to shorten the coming dark age, founding a colony to preserve knowledge for a better future. 2 recommenders Frankenstein Mary Shelley A student builds a living man from dead matter, then abandons him, in the novel that invented science fiction. 5 recommenders