Books

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 Nobody Read Owen Gingerich 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 Hope Jane Goodall Jane Goodall's reflections on hope, in a Celadon Books hardcover from 2021. 1 recommender 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 Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera Seven linked parts on memory and erasure in occupied Czechoslovakia, where forgetting is something a state can organise. 1 recommender The Book of Memory Mary Carruthers The standard study of what memory meant in the Middle Ages, when it was a discipline rather than a faculty. 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 The Books of Earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin 1 recommender The Books of Jacob Olga Tokarczuk Olga Tokarczuk's epic historical novel about Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah, translated by Jennifer Croft. The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History Jose Donoso A novelist's memoir of the moment Latin American fiction took over the world, written from inside it. 1 recommender The Box Man Kobo Abe Kobo Abe's 1973 novel about a man who lives in a cardboard box and watches the world outside, translated by E. Dale Saunders. 1 recommender The Boy with the Topknot Sathnam Sanghera A journalist learns as an adult that his father has schizophrenia, and pieces together the family story nobody told him. 1 recommender The Broken Sword Poul Anderson A stolen child raised by elves, a changeling raised by humans, and a sword that guarantees they meet. 1 recommender The Brothers Grimm: A Biography Ann Schmiesing The Grimms collected their fairy tales mostly as a by-product of inventing modern German philology. 1 recommender The Brothers Lionheart Astrid Lindgren Astrid Lindgren's children's fantasy about two brothers reunited in a magical land after death, and the courage it takes to face tyranny and loss. 1 recommender 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 Bully Pulpit Doris Kearns Goodwin Roosevelt, Taft, and the muckraking journalists who together drove the Progressive era. 1 recommender The Burhān Mohammed Hijab A step-by-step argument for a necessary being, drawing on Islamic thought. The Butterfly Lion Michael Morpurgo A boy in Africa raises an orphaned white lion cub, and finds it again years later in France. The Cactus Sarah Haywood A rigidly self-sufficient woman at forty-five faces a contested will and an unplanned pregnancy in the same week. 1 recommender The Caliphate, the Hejaz and the Saudi-Wahhabi Nation-State Imran N. Hosein On the end of the Ottoman Caliphate, the fate of the Hejaz, and the state that rose there. The Call of the Tribe Mario Vargas Llosa A novelist's account of the seven liberal thinkers who turned him away from the left. 1 recommender The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance K. Anders Ericsson The standard scholarly survey of how expertise is acquired, across chess, music, medicine, sport and more. 1 recommender The Cancer Journals Audre Lorde Lorde on her diagnosis, her mastectomy, and her refusal of the prosthesis she was expected to wear, insisting throughout that silence about illness is a political act. 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 Carrying Ada Limón Ada Limón's poems on aging parents, infertility, a body in pain and a nation in turmoil. The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money Bryan Caplan Employers pay for the credential rather than the algebra. Caplan follows the signalling evidence to conclusions about public funding that few readers accept whole. The Case Against Socialism Rand Paul Paul's one-sided brief marshaling history and economics, from Venezuela to the Nordics, to argue that socialism trends toward scarcity, coercion, and lost freedom. The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 James Stafford Ireland argued its way into the Union on commercial grounds, and this recovers those arguments. 1 recommender The Casual Vacancy J.K. Rowling Rowling's first novel for adults: when a parish councilman dies suddenly, a small English town's genteel surface cracks open to reveal class resentment, addiction, and quiet cruelty.