Books

The Way of Kings Brandon Sanderson A slave, a scholar and a highprince in a vast, storm-scoured world. The first volume of Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive. 1 recommender The Way of the Superior Man David Deida A cult classic addressing men on purpose, relationships and sexuality, arguing a man should live his deepest purpose rather than wait for certainty. 1 recommender The Weaker Vessel Antonia Fraser What it was actually like to be a woman in seventeenth-century England, drawn from letters, diaries and court records. 1 recommender 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 Wedding People Alison Espach She arrives at the hotel with no luggage and no plan to leave, and walks into someone else's wedding. 1 recommender The Well of Ascension Brandon Sanderson The tyrant is dead, and now the rebels have to govern, with three armies besieging the capital and the economy collapsing under them. The Whale Philip Hoare A history of whales and of what people have believed about them, written in the wake of Moby-Dick. 1 recommender The Wheels of Commerce Fernand Braudel The middle volume of Braudel's history, distinguishing the everyday market economy from the capitalism that sat above and against it. 1 recommender The White Album Joan Didion Didion's essays on the late sixties in California, when the stories people lived by fell apart. 1 recommender The White People and Other Weird Stories Arthur Machen Machen's tales of pagan survivals and creeping dread, the weird fiction that Lovecraft revered. 1 recommender The Wilderness Angela Flournoy Friendship given the weight most novels reserve for marriage: five women, tracked across the long middle of adult life. 1 recommender The Will to Win Robert Herjavec Herjavec reframes winning as a trainable discipline of focus, fitness, and honest self-assessment, illustrated with deals, races, and the failures that taught him most. The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal Willpower as a physiological capacity with limits, where self-criticism makes it worse rather than better. 1 recommender The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami Haruki Murakami's novel of 1994 and 1995, in Jay Rubin's English translation, whose central themes include war and violence. 1 recommender The Windup Girl Paolo Bacigalupi A world where calories are currency and the seed companies own the future, seen from the bottom of it. 1 recommender The Winner Effect Ian H. Robertson A neuroscientist explains how winning changes the brain, making further wins more likely and power harder to handle wisely. The Winners Fredrik Backman The final Beartown novel, in which a storm, a homecoming and an old rivalry bring Beartown and its neighbor Hed to a reckoning. The Wisdom of Psychopaths Kevin Dutton What saints, spies and serial killers can teach the rest of us about keeping a cool head. 1 recommender The Wisdom of Sundays Oprah Winfrey Highlights from Oprah’s Super Soul conversations, arranged as insights on meaning, presence, and personal growth. The Witch of Portobello Paulo Coelho Paulo Coelho's 2006 novel about a woman born in Transylvania to a Romani mother and raised by a Lebanese couple, in the Harper Perennial paperback. The Woman Who Could Not Forget Ying-Ying Chang Iris Chang mother on what documenting a massacre cost her daughter, who took her own life at thirty-six 1 recommender The Women Kristin Hannah Hannah follows an army nurse through two tours of Vietnam and a homecoming that proves harder than the war, into a country insisting women were never there. 1 recommender The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum Dorothy, Toto and three unlikely friends follow the Yellow Brick Road, in L. Frank Baum's 1900 classic. 1 recommender The Wood Wife Terri Windling A dead poet, a desert house, and a drowning that happened where there is no water. 1 recommender The Wordy Book Julie Paschkis Julie Paschkis pairs each image with a phrase that declines to settle, in the saturated folk style of her Neruda picture books. 1 recommender The Work of Art Adam Moss The former editor of New York magazine interviews dozens of artists, writers, and musicians about how a finished work actually gets made, mess and all. 1 recommender The Works of John Leguizamo John Leguizamo Four landmark solo-show scripts in which Leguizamo plays dozens of characters to dissect machismo, immigration, and identity with tenderness and savagery. 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 The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance Bernd Roeck A very long Renaissance history that asks why it happened in Europe and not somewhere else. 1 recommender The World Without Us Alan Weisman A thought experiment about what would happen to cities, plastics and wildlife if humans suddenly vanished. 1 recommender The Worm Ouroboros E. R. Eddison Jacobean prose, magnificent and amoral heroes, and an ending that turns back to the beginning. 1 recommender The Worst Journey in the World Apsley Cherry-Garrard The worst journey was not the fatal one: it was a midwinter trek for penguin eggs at seventy below. 1 recommender The Worth of Water Gary White, Matt Damon An actor and an engineer discover that the poor will repay loans for clean water, then rebuild their charity around it. The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II David Nasaw Sixteen million Americans came home from the war, and the country decided not to ask how they were. 1 recommender The Wrath to Come Sarah Churchwell How Gone with the Wind helped shape the stories America tells itself about race and history.