Books

Franny and Zooey J.D. Salinger Two Glass siblings argue about faith and phoniness across a long afternoon in one apartment. 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. 4 recommenders Half the Sky Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn Two Pulitzer winners report on the oppression of women across the developing world, and on what actually works against it. 2 recommenders Happy Derren Brown An illusionist dismantling the happiness industry, then rebuilding something older and considerably less flattering. 2 recommenders Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix J.K. Rowling The Ministry denies Voldemort's return while Harry organizes a secret student resistance. 2 recommenders Heart Berries Terese Marie Mailhot A slim, ferocious memoir of growing up on the Seabird Island Band reservation, written partly from a psychiatric ward. 2 recommenders Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky What happens to institutions when the cost of getting a group to act together falls to almost nothing. 2 recommenders Homage to Catalonia George Orwell Orwell's memoir of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and of watching the revolution he believed in turn on itself. 3 recommenders How to Lie with Statistics Darrell Huff A brief, funny guide to spotting misleading numbers, still in print more than seventy years after it first appeared. 2 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 In Cold Blood Truman Capote Four murders in Kansas, reported for six years and written like a novel. 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. 6 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 Living in Denial Kari Marie Norgaard Why people who know about climate change still carry on as before, seen through one Norwegian town. 2 recommenders Lolita Vladimir Nabokov A monstrous narrator tells his own story so beautifully that the prose itself becomes the trap. 2 recommenders Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel follows a man who waits more than fifty years to renew his love for a woman he lost in youth. 2 recommenders Making Movies Sidney Lumet The director of Network and Dog Day Afternoon walks through how a film actually gets made, decision by decision. 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. 3 recommenders Moby-Dick Herman Melville A whaling voyage, an encyclopedia of whales, and a captain who has decided the ocean owes him an answer. 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 Mothers and Others Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Humans are the only ape that lets strangers hold the baby, and that oddity may be where empathy came from. 2 recommenders My Antonia Willa Cather A Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, remembered by the boy who never quite had her. 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 My Struggle Karl Ove Knausgaard Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgård's six-book autobiographical novel series, translated by Don Bartlett and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013. 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. 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 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