Books

The Goal Eliyahu M. Goldratt Told as a novel: a plant manager races to save his failing factory and learns that a system is only as fast as its constraint. 2 recommenders The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing Four notebooks for the parts of a life that will not cohere, and a fifth that tries to join them. Lessing own preface is impatient with how it got read. 2 recommenders The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck Pearl S. Buck's novel follows a Chinese farmer's rise from poverty to wealth and the pull the land keeps on him. 2 recommenders The Good Lord Bird James McBride A boy freed by John Brown is mistaken for a girl, and decides not to correct anyone for years. 2 recommenders The Greeks and the Irrational E. R. Dodds The classic study of the irrational in Greek religion and thought, and of the daemon as a creative force. 2 recommenders The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood In the Republic of Gilead, fertile women are conscripted as breeders, and Offred remembers a world where she had a name. 4 recommenders The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton M. Christensen Christensen's classic on why well-run companies get toppled by disruptive innovation, and how to avoid it. 2 recommenders The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Kiran Desai The Booker winner returns to displacement, not as subject but as the air two people breathe across India and America. 2 recommenders The Looming Tower Lawrence Wright 2 recommenders The Lord of the Rings J R R Tolkien 2 recommenders The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Honoree Fanonne Jeffers Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's epic follows a Black family across centuries of American history through the eyes of a young scholar. 2 recommenders The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury Linked stories of the settlement of Mars, written as elegy rather than as engineering. 2 recommenders The Ministry for the Future Kim Stanley Robinson A UN body is created to represent people not yet born, and spends decades trying to force the world to act on climate. 2 recommenders The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway Hemingway's spare, Pulitzer-winning novella: an old Cuban fisherman battles a giant marlin far out at sea, a study in endurance, dignity, and grace under pressure. 3 recommenders The Penguin and the Leviathan Yochai Benkler The case that cooperation, not self-interest, explains much of how people actually behave — and what that means for how systems should be built. 2 recommenders The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle Most suffering comes from being trapped in thoughts about past and future, and presence is the way out. 2 recommenders The Psychology of Money Morgan Housel Doing well with money has less to do with intelligence than with behaviour: how you handle greed, fear, patience and luck. 2 recommenders The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro An aging English butler reflects on a life of dignified service and quiet regret in Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel. 3 recommenders The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt Why decent people disagree so bitterly about politics and religion. Intuition comes first, and reasoning mostly arrives to justify it. 3 recommenders The Road Cormac McCarthy A father and son walk through a burned, lifeless America, carrying the fire of their bond, in McCarthy's stark Pulitzer-winning novel. 3 recommenders The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir Beauvoir's study of how woman came to be defined as the other, in the unabridged Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation. 2 recommenders The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn Kuhn's classic on how science advances not smoothly but through disruptive paradigm shifts. 2 recommenders The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway Expatriates drift from Paris cafes to Pamplona bullrings, all of them wounded in ways nobody will name. 2 recommenders The Three-Body Problem Liu Cixin A physicist's suicide, a mysterious game, and first contact with a dying alien civilization open this landmark of Chinese science fiction. 2 recommenders The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris Andrea Wulf Georg Forster sailed with Cook at seventeen, changed European nature writing, and died in revolutionary Paris having lost everything he had to his own politics. 2 recommenders The Untethered Soul Michael A. Singer The constant mental chatter and emotional reaction we mistake for ourselves, and what happens when you stop believing it is you. 3 recommenders The Varieties of Religious Experience William James James studies religion by setting doctrine aside and examining what conversion, mysticism and despair actually feel like. 2 recommenders The War of Art Steven Pressfield A field guide to beating “Resistance,” the internal force that stops creative work, and showing up to do the work like a professional. 5 recommenders The Warren Buffett Portfolio Robert G. Hagstrom Robert Hagstrom lays out the focus-investing strategy behind Warren Buffett's success, making the case for concentrated, long-term portfolios. 2 recommenders The Wealth and Poverty of Nations David S. Landes Historian David Landes ranges across centuries to ask why some nations grew rich while others stayed poor, weighing culture, geography, and institutions. 2 recommenders The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith Wealth is not gold in a vault but the living standards of ordinary people, and its source is their work. 2 recommenders The World According to Garp John Irving A wrestler turned novelist, his famously radical mother, and a life visited by absurd and sudden violence. 2 recommenders There There Tommy Orange Twelve Native lives converging on an Oakland powwow, in a novel with no reservation in it. 2 recommenders This House of Grief Helen Garner A writer in a murder trial, recording her own shifting judgement rather than a verdict. 3 recommenders This Time Is Different Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff Eight hundred years of defaults and banking crises, assembled to show how reliably each generation believes its own case is unlike the last. 2 recommenders To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee Harper Lee's Pulitzer-winning story of childhood, conscience, and racial injustice in the Depression-era South. 3 recommenders