Books

Pachinko Min Jin Lee Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, enduring an adopted country that never quite accepts them. 2 recommenders Pedro Páramo Juan Rulfo Juan Rulfo's novel of a man who travels to the ghost town of Comala to find his father, in Margaret Sayers Peden's translation. 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. 3 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 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen A comedy of manners with an economic argument underneath: marriage as the only career on offer. 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 Sahih al-Bukhari Imam al-Bukhari The most authoritative collection of hadith in Sunni Islam. 2 recommenders Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari How an unremarkable African ape became the dominant force on the planet, told through the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolutions. 5 recommenders Scoop Evelyn Waugh A nature columnist is sent by mistake to cover a foreign war, and somehow gets the scoop. 2 recommenders Shogun James Clavell An English navigator shipwrecked on the coast of Japan in 1600 is drawn into the power struggle of a warlord who means to rule the country. 2 recommenders Silent Spring Rachel Carson The 1962 book on pesticides that began the modern environmental movement. 2 recommenders Small Boat Vincent Delecroix A Channel drowning, and the operator who took the calls, told largely as her own defence. 2 recommenders Small Things Like These Claire Keegan Claire Keegan's slim, luminous novel follows an Irish coal merchant who confronts the cruelty of a convent laundry at Christmas. 2 recommenders Song of Solomon Toni Morrison Toni Morrison's novel follows a man nicknamed Milkman Dead as he leaves Michigan to trace his family's roots and finds a buried history. 2 recommenders Stoner John Williams 2 recommenders Tell Me Everything Elizabeth Strout Elizabeth Strout gathers Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and lawyer Bob Burgess in a small Maine town around a local mystery. 2 recommenders The 4-Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss The manifesto that popularised remote work, lifestyle design and mini-retirements long before any of it was mainstream. 2 recommenders The Aleph and Other Stories Jorge Luis Borges Borges's labyrinths and infinities, including The Immortal and The Aleph, in one volume. 2 recommenders The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt The rewiring of childhood around smartphones and social media, and the mental-health crisis that followed a play-based upbringing's collapse. 2 recommenders The Arabian Nights Richard Francis Burton Shahrazad keeps herself alive one story at a time, in Richard Burton's translation of the famous collection of Middle Eastern tales. 2 recommenders The Argumentative Indian Amartya Sen Sen's case that India's long tradition of public argument, not any single faith, is the real inheritance worth defending. 2 recommenders The Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm X, Alex Haley The life story of the American civil-rights leader, told to Alex Haley. 3 recommenders The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker Pinker marshals sweeping data to argue that violence has fallen dramatically across human history. 4 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. 2 recommenders The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb Taleb's influential examination of rare, high-impact events and our blindness to them. 2 recommenders 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. 4 recommenders 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 Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones A pastor's journal, a Blackfeet vampire's confession, and the history of the American West doing the haunting. 2 recommenders The Captive Mind Czeslaw Milosz How intelligent people talk themselves into a totalitarian order, written in 1953 by a poet who had watched friends do it. 2 recommenders The Courage to Be Disliked Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga A dialogue between a philosopher and a sceptical young man, distilling Alfred Adler's psychology into a provocative argument about freedom. 2 recommenders The Daily Stoic Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman A year of daily Stoic wisdom, one short meditation a day drawn from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus. 2 recommenders The Divine Reality Hamza Andreas Tzortzis An Islamic case for God against atheist arguments. 2 recommenders The E-Myth Revisited Michael E. Gerber Most small businesses fail because they are started by technicians, people good at the craft who assume that is the same as running a business. 2 recommenders The Effective Executive Peter F. Drucker Drucker's timeless guide to the habits that make executives effective, starting with managing their own time and decisions. 2 recommenders The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer The 1970 polemic that argued women had been cut off from their own desire, and made Greer famous. 2 recommenders The Four Agreements Don Miguel Ruiz Drawing on Toltec wisdom, Ruiz distills a code for living into four agreements, be impeccable with your word, don't take things personally, don't assume, and always do your best. 2 recommenders