Books

On Writing Well William Zinsser In print since 1976, and still one instruction above all others: cut every word doing no work. 1 recommender Once Meghan O'Rourke Poems of violence, loss and recovery that move between a daughter mourning her mother and a citizen reckoning with her country. Once They Moved Like the Wind David Roberts The Apache Wars told through first-person accounts, with Cochise, Geronimo and General Crook at the center. 1 recommender One Day in December Josie Silver She locks eyes with a stranger through a bus window; a year later, her best friend introduces him as her boyfriend. 1 recommender 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. 5 recommenders One Jama’at, One Ameer Imran N. Hosein On how a Muslim community should organise itself in an age of trials. One Lonely Night Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer at full throttle, answering his critics by shooting his way through them. 1 recommender One Long Night Andrea Pitzer The camp as an invention, traced from 1890s Cuba to the present, country by country. 1 recommender One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder Brian Doyle Hummingbird hearts, a son faulty one, and long sentences written by a man who knew he was running out of time to stop. 1 recommender One Man’s Bible Gao Xingjian A novel by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, set during the Cultural Revolution, in Mabel Lee's English translation. 1 recommender One Shot Lee Child A sniper kills five people in a small Indiana city, and the accused man asks the police for one person by name: Jack Reacher. One Step Behind Henning Mankell Henning Mankell's seventh Kurt Wallander novel, in the Vintage paperback, about a triple murder on Midsummer's Eve. 1 recommender One to Many Jason Fladlien The webinar operator's playbook for selling to a room of hundreds as persuasively as selling to one. 1 recommender One Two Three . . . Infinity George Gamow A physicist's tour of large numbers, dimensions and relativity, illustrated by the author. 1 recommender Only the Paranoid Survive Andrew S. Grove Intel's Andrew Grove explains how to spot the strategic inflection points that can remake or destroy a company, drawing on his own hard calls. 1 recommender Only Yesterday S Y Agnon 1 recommender Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration Bryan Caplan An economist argues for open borders in comic-book form, working through wages, culture and crime with the citations left visible in the margins. Open House Elizabeth Berg Elizabeth Berg's novel follows a newly divorced woman who takes in boarders and slowly rebuilds a life of her own. 1 recommender Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano Eduardo Galeano's furious, lyrical history of how Latin America's wealth was carried off by empire, from the Spanish conquest to the twentieth century. 1 recommender Orbital Samantha Harvey Almost nothing happens across sixteen orbits of the Earth, and the novel won the Booker Prize anyway, on sustained attention alone. 1 recommender Orientalism Edward Said Western scholarship on the East read as a system for managing it rather than knowing it. Origins Neil deGrasse Tyson The whole story of everything, from the first second after the Big Bang to the chemistry that made life Orlando Furioso Ludovico Ariosto Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem of knights, ladies, war and love, in Guido Waldman's translation for Oxford World's Classics. 1 recommender Ornamentalism David Cannadine 1 recommender Orwell’s Revenge Peter W. Huber A rewrite of 1984 arguing Orwell had the technology backwards, and that networks scatter power rather than concentrate it. 1 recommender Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood A man who may be the last human alive pieces together how corporate bioengineering and one friend's genius ended the world Other People’s Money John Kay An economist asks why finance grew so large and complicated, and whose interests it really serves. Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis Gregor Craigie Canada's housing shortage explained by a broadcaster who went and looked at what other countries do. 1 recommender Our Dollar, Your Problem Kenneth Rogoff The dollar's unquestioned run may be ending, and the person arguing it watched the last crises from inside. 1 recommender Our Final Invention Our Final Invention James Barrat A documentary filmmaker investigates whether artificial intelligence could outstrip human intelligence and why that outcome may not end well for us. Our Missing Hearts Celeste Ng In a near-future America that removes children from disloyal parents, a boy goes looking for his exiled poet mother. 1 recommender Our Own Worst Enemy Tom Nichols Nichols argues the threat to democracy comes less from tyrants than from bored, resentful citizens. 1 recommender Out of Eden Paul W Kahn 1 recommender Out of Many, One George W. Bush Forty-three portraits painted by the former president, each with the story of the immigrant who sat for it. 1 recommender Out of Place Edward Said A childhood between Jerusalem, Cairo and Beirut, and never being wholly at home in any language. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas Vidyan Ravinthiran Sri Lankan poetry in Tamil, Sinhala and English, gathered across the divisions of a civil war. 1 recommender