2022
Klara and the Sun
Kazou Ishiguru
Can robots dream? From Bladerunner to AI there is no shortage of sci-fi narratives asking how close the artificial experience may come to our own. But Ishiguro manages to carve his own ...
Crying In H-Mart
Michelle Zauner
I’ve loved Japanese Breakfast, the musical project of Michelle Zauner’s, ever since she released her sophomore album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. So I always planned on buying her memoir, regardless of ...
2021
A Children's Bible
Lydia Millet
The generational rage showcased in this book can be felt all around us. Members of the Sunrise Movement protest at the early hours outside politician’s houses, Greta Thunberg gives impassioned and outraged ...
The Good Lord Bird
James McBride
In addition to being a best-selling author, James McBride is also an accomplished musician. This is immediately evident in The Good Lord Bird; his words sing. The reader can sense how much ...
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders
It’s been years since I’ve dived into the Russian greats. The short stories of Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev, and others serve as perfect imitations of our world in all their complexity and ambiguity. ...
Close to the Machine
Ellen Ullman
We are only now coming to understand the incredible impact Silicon Valley has had on the past twenty years - even as the products made by companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon ...
The Solace of Open Spaces
Gretel Ehrlich
Wyoming is something else. When I first saw the sun rise behind me, turning the Tetons purple and red, their white caps shimmering in the lake’s reflection before me, I knew I ...
The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains
Antony Lewis
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Based on a real Florida reform school, the Nickel Boys follows the experience of Elwood Curtis and his friend Turner. A bright young black kid from Tallahassee, Elwood is on his way ...
The Moor's Account
Laila Lalami
When Europeans ‘discovered’ the New World, there wasn’t much new about it - upwards of 53 million people had already been living here for generations. And yet, when the Spanish, French, and ...
The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanely Robinson
A heatwave grips the Indian subcontinent, pushing temperatures to the 35 degree wet bulb threshold - 35 degrees celsius with 100 percent relative humidity. The point at which humans can no longer ...
Missionaries
Phil Klay
From the day I was born through to now, my country has never been at peace. From the Gulf War, to the intervention in Bosnia, to the invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, ...
Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
Hamnet is the story of William Shakespeare’s domestic life: his family, his small hometown, his wife, his children. But Shakespeare himself plays a minor role in Maggie O'Farrell's telling. In fact, throughout ...
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Russia: A Short History
Abraham Ascher
Craeft
Alexander Langlands
Reign of Terror
Spencer Ackerman
2020
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s books are astounding. I’ve read a few now. The way he is able to cast a spell - and there’s nothing else to really call it - over his reader is ...
Dark Money
Jane Mayer
It doesn’t take the most astute observer to realize American politics are in crisis. Our government is often gridlocked on the precipice of shutdown. Laws are rarely passed. Politicians seem to ...
CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Software
Charles Petzold
Hunts in Dreams
Tom Drury
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend came to me a year before I started the series, through my sister. She had recommended it to me over Christmas, I grabbed it at the book store, and ...
The Story of a New Name
Elena Ferrante
Ferrante continues her two character's lives through the adversarial ins and outs of teenage theatrics. While lesser writers might catch themselves on the petty details and low stakes in a similar story, ...
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Elena Ferrante
The Story of the Lost Child
Elena Ferrante
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
I’m not sure why I decided on this one. Maybe I was tired of the Doom Scrolling and wanted to expand into Doom Reading? Taking place years after a pandemic has ...
Encounters with the Archdruid
John McPhee
Masterfully presented, three American wildernesses hang in the balance between David Brower - ‘the most militant conservationist in the world’ - and a series of antagonists, each experts in their fields, who ...
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman
Weather
Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill's Weather is a perfect encapsulation of not only a certain time and place, but also a mood. Enmeshed are our lives, emotions, and events in an age where information comes ...
These Truths: a History of the United States
Jill Lepore
I originally started These Truths - a survey of American history beginning in the 1500s leading all the way up to 2016 - to give myself context as we dived into yet ...
Inland
Téa Obreht
I like westerns. To someone who has seen the open spaces, wide skies, and unimaginable features of the American west - and was drawn to them enough to live among them - ...
Homeland Elegies
Ayad Akhtar
Homeland Elegies is a book that contains multitudes. It is at once heady, disturbing, cringe inducing, and deeply thoughtful. Each experience covered in the protagonist’s life - a man similarly named to ...
