Books

Building a Second Brain Tiago Forte A method for capturing and organising the flood of information we consume, so ideas compound instead of getting lost. 1 recommender Built to Last Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras A study of what separates enduring, visionary companies from their rivals over the long run. 1 recommender Bull’s-Eye Brian Tracy A short book on the one habit Tracy returns to most: aiming at a clear target and refusing to be pulled off it. Burmese Days George Orwell Drawing on his years as a colonial policeman, Orwell's first novel exposes the racism and rot of British rule in Burma. Burn-In P.W. Singer, August Cole A techno-thriller following an FBI agent partnered with an advanced robot, built on real near-future AI and automation research. 1 recommender 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 Business Stripped Bare Richard Branson Virgin's real wins and costly flops, mined for lessons on brand, people, and finance by a founder who treats failure as tuition. Busy Betty Reese Witherspoon Witherspoon's first picture book, about a small girl with enormous plans and a dog badly in need of a bath. Busy Betty & the Circus Surprise Reese Witherspoon Betty takes her outsized ambitions to the circus, in the second outing for Witherspoon's irrepressible young problem-solver. Busy Betty & the Perfect Christmas Present Reese Witherspoon The Christmas instalment, in which Betty sets out to find a present equal to the size of her own enthusiasm. Butterfly Yusra Mardini The Syrian swimmer who pushed a sinking dinghy through the Aegean, then swam at the Olympics. 1 recommender The Bands of Mourning Brandon Sanderson A treasure hunt for the Lord Ruler's mythical metalminds turns into something much larger when evidence surfaces that the Bands are real. The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf Wolf argues that beauty standards tightened precisely as women gained power, functioning as a political weapon. 1 recommender The Bee Sting Paul Murray One Irish family, four private catastrophes, and years of everyone misreading everyone else. 1 recommender The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch Physicist David Deutsch argues that good explanations have unlimited reach and drive endless human progress. 1 recommender The Beginning of Spring Penelope Fitzgerald Moscow, 1913: a printer's English wife leaves him, and nobody quite explains anything. 1 recommender The Belly Art Project Sara Blakely Spanx founder Sara Blakely's photo collection turns pregnant bellies into painted canvases, celebrating motherhood with warmth, humor, and a movement-builder's eye. The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days Michael Kempe Seven particular days, taking in binary arithmetic, the calculus dispute, epidemic-control proposals and mining engineering, instead of one continuous Leibniz life. 1 recommender The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker Pinker marshals sweeping data to argue that violence has fallen dramatically across human history. 2 recommenders The Big Short Michael Lewis The few investors who saw the mortgage collapse coming, and what it cost them to be right before anyone believed it. The Black Stallion Walter Farley A shipwrecked boy and an untamed Arabian survive a desert island together, then have to survive coming home. 1 recommender The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb Taleb's influential examination of rare, high-impact events and our blindness to them. 1 recommender The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England Jonathan Healey Seventeenth-century England executed its king, abolished the monarchy, and then quietly invited it all back. 1 recommender The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood A novel inside a novel inside a scandal: an old woman unspools her sister's death and the story they hid. Booker winner The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642 Jonathan Healey The months in which England stopped arguing and started killing, reconstructed almost day by day. 1 recommender The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison Toni Morrison's first novel follows a young Black girl in 1940s Ohio who longs for blue eyes, believing they would make her loved. 3 recommenders The Bomber Mafia Malcolm Gladwell A circle of airmen believed precision bombing could make war humane. Tokyo, March 1945, answered them. The Book Against Death Elias Canetti Canetti spent fifty years refusing to accept mortality as wisdom, and the fragments assembled after his own death are furious, funny and entirely unreconciled. 1 recommender The Book of a Naturalist W. H. Hudson Raised on the Argentine pampas, Hudson observed with a scientist precision and wrote with a poet attachment. This 1919 collection ranges across birds, snakes and memory. 1 recommender The Book of Beautiful Questions Warren Berger Warren Berger makes the case that better questions lead to better decisions, and offers a toolkit of them for thinking, creating, and leading. 1 recommender The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa A trunk of fragments left by a Lisbon bookkeeper who never existed, assembled after Pessoa died into a book with no plot that is somehow impossible to put down. 1 recommender The Book of Elsewhere Keanu Reeves, China Miéville Keanu Reeves and China Miéville's novel of an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior who longs to die, pulp action lifted into meditative literary fantasy. The Book of Five Rings Miyamoto Musashi The legendary undefeated samurai’s treatise on strategy, combat, and mastery, read for centuries as a guide to excellence in any discipline. 2 recommenders The Book of Imaginary Beings Jorge Luis Borges Borges's bestiary of creatures dreamed up across world literature and myth, catalogued with deadpan erudition. 1 recommender The Book of Ruth Jane Hamilton Jane Hamilton's debut narrates the hard life of a young woman in a small Illinois town, building toward a shattering act of violence. 1 recommender The Book of Three Lloyd Alexander An assistant pig-keeper is swept into a war for Prydain in the opening book of Lloyd Alexander's beloved fantasy series. 1 recommender