Books

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece Tom Hanks Hanks's debut novel, a fond insider's tour of how a superhero blockbuster actually gets made, from first idea to final cut. The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State Philip Bowring Why a country with real advantages has stayed poorer than its neighbours for a long time. 1 recommender The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett Everyone wants the black bird, everyone is lying, and Sam Spade trusts none of them. 1 recommender The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Sloan Wilson The commute, the office, the mortgage, and the war none of it quite covers up. 1 recommender The Man Who Came Uptown George Pelecanos A prison librarian, a man just released, and the favour he owes to the wrong person. 1 recommender The Man Who Counted Malba Tahan 1 recommender The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks A neurologist's portraits of patients whose strange conditions reveal how the mind makes a self. 1 recommender The Man Without a Face Masha Gessen Masha Gessen’s account of Vladimir Putin’s rise from KGB officer to unchallenged ruler of Russia. 1 recommender The MANIAC Benjamin Labatut Von Neumann rendered as fiction, then handed over to AlphaGo and what came after. 1 recommender The Many Lives of Mama Love Lara Love Hardin Lara Love Hardin's memoir traces her fall from suburban mother to jail for heroin-fueled theft, and her rise as a ghostwriter. 1 recommender The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe Sarah Churchwell Why so many different Marilyn Monroes exist, and what the myths say about their makers. The Marriage Portrait Maggie O'Farrell A Medici girl married at fifteen becomes certain her husband intends to kill her, in a novel drawn from a real death. 1 recommender The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury Linked stories of the settlement of Mars, written as elegy rather than as engineering. 2 recommenders The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist A psychiatrist argues that the differing outlooks of the brain's two hemispheres have shaped Western culture since the ancient Greeks. 1 recommender The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov Mikhail Bulgakov's satire of the devil's visit to Soviet Russia, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's Penguin Classics translation. 1 recommender The Mattering Instinct Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Goldstein argues the drive to matter is basic equipment rather than vanity, then follows what that implies for ethics, ambition, and how we justify ourselves. 1 recommender The Means of Escape Penelope Fitzgerald Her only story collection, assembled as she was dying, ranging from Tasmania to the supernatural. 1 recommender The Measure of a Man Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier's memoir reflects on his journey from poverty in the Bahamas to Hollywood, and on the values that guided him. 1 recommender The Measure of Economies: Measuring Productivity in an Age of Technological Change Marshall B. Reinsdorf Productivity statistics were built for a different economy, and this is the technical case for fixing them. 1 recommender The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters Diane Coyle Our economic statistics were designed for a world of factories, and they no longer see what matters. 1 recommender The Memory Theater Karin Tidbeck Karin Tidbeck's 2021 novel, written in English, about two friends trying to escape a timeless realm called the Gardens. The Messiah, the Qur’an and Akhir al-Zaman Imran N. Hosein The Qur'anic account of the Messiah and his return, read against the end of time. The Metal Shredders Nancy Zafris A novel that takes a family scrapyard seriously as a workplace, which almost no fiction does. 1 recommender The Mighty Queens of Freeville Amy Dickinson The woman who inherited Ann Landers's column goes home to the town of women who raised her. 1 recommender The Mighty Red Louise Erdrich A wedding in North Dakota farm country, and young lives shaped by land that may not survive them. 1 recommender The Mighty Walzer Howard Jacobson A comic novel of table tennis and adolescence in 1950s Manchester. 1 recommender The Millionaire Fastlane MJ DeMarco A blunt, contrarian rejection of get rich slow in favour of building businesses that create value and scale fast. 1 recommender The Mind of a Mnemonist Aleksandr R. Luria Luria's thirty-year study of a man who could not forget, and for whom that was a burden rather than a gift. 1 recommender The Mind of South Africa Allister Sparks Written in 1990 as apartheid ended and before anyone knew what followed, explaining how the system was built and believed in rather than only what it did. 1 recommender 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 Mirror and the Lamp M. H. Abrams How criticism turned from seeing art as a mirror held to nature to seeing it as a lamp lit from within. 1 recommender The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories Stacie Shannon Denetsosie A Navajo writer's debut collection, moving between the gritty, the tender and the strange. 1 recommender The Moment of Lift Melinda French Gates Gates makes the data-and-story case that empowering women, on contraception, education, and unpaid work, is the fastest way to lift a whole society. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Robin Sharma A burned-out lawyer sells everything for a Himalayan pilgrimage and returns with a fable about how to actually live The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Robert A. Heinlein A lunar penal colony revolts against the authority that governs and exploits it. 1 recommender The Most Fun We Ever Had Claire Lombardo Four adult sisters flounder in the shadow of parents whose marriage was so happy it became impossible to live up to. 1 recommender