Books

1984 George Orwell George Orwell’s dystopia of total surveillance and rewritten truth, where the Party controls language, memory, and reality itself. 3 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. 2 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 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. 2 recommenders Antifragile Nassim Nicholas Taleb Beyond robust: things that improve under stress, and how suppressing small shocks guarantees larger ones. 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. 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 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 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 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 Frankenstein Mary Shelley A student builds a living man from dead matter, then abandons him, in the novel that invented science fiction. 2 recommenders Genome Matt Ridley Matt Ridley tours the human genome one chromosome at a time, turning genetics into a story about who we are and how we came to be. 2 recommenders Getting Things Done David Allen A complete system for capturing and acting on everything competing for your attention, starting with getting it out of your head. 2 recommenders Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin Published in 1956 against his publisher advice, with white characters so nobody could mistake what the novel was actually about. 4 recommenders Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond Jared Diamond's sweeping account of why some societies came to dominate others, tracing it to geography rather than race. 3 recommenders How to Say Babylon Safiya Sinclair A Jamaican girlhood ruled by her father's doctrine, and poetry as the only available exit. 2 recommenders Human Compatible Stuart Russell Berkeley AI pioneer Stuart Russell argues that the standard model of building ever-smarter machines to pursue fixed goals is a mistake, and proposes a new foundation for keeping AI provably beneficial to humans. 2 recommenders I Who Have Never Known Men Jacqueline Harpman Thirty-nine women wake in an underground cage with no memory of arriving, and one child among them. 2 recommenders Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini Robert Cialdini's classic study of the six principles that make people say yes, from reciprocity to scarcity and social proof. 4 recommenders Inside the Box David Epstein David Epstein, author of Range, makes the counterintuitive case that the right limits and constraints, not boundless freedom, are what push people to do their best work. 2 recommenders Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor E. Frankl A psychiatrist's account of the camps, and the argument he drew from them that meaning survives when nothing else does. 2 recommenders Meditations Marcus Aurelius The private notebooks of a Roman emperor, still read as the most practical of the Stoic texts. 3 recommenders Mindset Carol S. Dweck The difference between believing ability is innate and believing it can be developed, and how much rides on which one you hold. 2 recommenders Mother Mary Comes to Me Arundhati Roy Mary Roy won a landmark case in India Supreme Court and was, by her daughter account, impossible to live with. Arundhati Roy writes her anyway. 2 recommenders My Face for the World to See Alfred Hayes He pulls a stranger from the surf, and the rescue quietly dismantles the life he had. 2 recommenders Noughts & Crosses Malorie Blackman A society split between ruling dark-skinned Crosses and oppressed light-skinned noughts, and two young people on the wrong sides of it. 2 recommenders 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. 2 recommenders One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez Garcia Marquez traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the town of Macondo, in the novel that defined magical realism. 2 recommenders Pachinko Min Jin Lee Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, enduring an adopted country that never quite accepts them. 2 recommenders Persuasion Jane Austen Anne Elliot was talked out of marrying the man she loved at nineteen, and meets him again eight years later with everything changed. 2 recommenders Poor Charlie’s Almanack Charlie Munger A collection of Charlie Munger's talks and wit, built around his idea of using mental models from many disciplines to think better. 2 recommenders Rebecca Daphne du Maurier A young bride is haunted by the memory of her husband's glamorous first wife in du Maurier's timeless gothic novel. 2 recommenders