Books read

“❊” marks favorites.

2024

  • Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
  • Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman
  • All Fours by Miranda July
  • UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan
  • ❊ The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
  • ❊ The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson
  • How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra
  • ❊ The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
  • Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen
  • Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
  • Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
  • The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
  • Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis by John T. McGreevy
  • If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland
  • City in Ruins by Don Winslow
  • Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
  • All Systems Red by Martha Wells
  • No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy
  • ❊ Syrup by Maxx Barry
  • Marketing Insights from A to Z: 80 Concepts Every Manager Needs to Know by Philip Kotler
  • The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
  • ❊ Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston
  • This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin
  • Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed by Peter Singer
  • Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison
  • The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
  • Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
  • Mating by Norman Rush
  • The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the World by Suzie Sheehy
  • ❊ The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey
  • Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER by Farzon A. Nahvi, MD
  • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
  • Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey
  • The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell
  • Exhalation by Ted Chiang
  • Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
  • Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World’s Most Common Man-Made Material by Robert Courland

2023

  • All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
  • Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley
  • Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
  • The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind by Ben Terris
  • Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz
  • Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants by James Vincent
  • The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy by James Risen
  • Thud! by Terry Pratchett
  • Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002) by David Sedaris
  • ❊ Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
  • All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
  • King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
  • When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole
  • The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
  • ❊ Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
  • Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
  • Cobalt Red: How the Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara
  • Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
  • Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream by Alissa Quart
  • A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders
  • ❊ Use Gnu Emacs: The Plain Text Computing Environment by Keith Waclena (writing was still in progress at the time I read it) 
  • City of Dreams by Don Winslow
  • The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
  • The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington
  • Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy
  • The Country Life by Rachel Cusk
  • We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole
  • Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss
  • Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • Liberation Day by George Saunders
  • Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer
  • Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen
  • Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong
  • A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley
  • Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning Through Making by Anna Ploszajski
  • Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time by Martin Gorst
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
  • ❊ An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
  • The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles
  • Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang
  • Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

2022

  • Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
  • Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff
  • Missionaries by Phil Klay
  • The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
  • Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
  • ❊ Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
  • ❊ Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature by Richard Rhodes
  • Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum
  • Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them by Adrienne Raphel
  • City on Fire by Don Winslow
  • ❊ Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
  • Either/Or by Elif Batuman
  • The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen
  • Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas
  • Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
  • Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky
  • The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
  • Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone by James Martin, SJ
  • Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
  • Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan
  • How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs
  • Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
  • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
  • The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
  • Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
  • Mastering Emacs by Mickey Peterson
  • The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER by Thomas Fisher
  • Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff
  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
  • Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez
  • The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
  • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
  • 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
  • Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
  • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
  • Tripwire by Lee Child
  • The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal
  • The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
  • Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
  • Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It by Adam Savage
  • Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
  • Football for Dummies, Sixth Edition by Howie Long and John Czarnecki
  • The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
  • Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza
  • The Hunter by Richard Stark
  • LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin

2021

  • Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen
  • Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury by Evan Osnos
  • No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
  • Matrix by Lauren Groff
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
  • Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel E. Lieberman
  • It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh
  • The Appalachian Trail: A Biography by Philip D’Anieri
  • On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor
  • Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
  • War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan
  • Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
  • The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson
  • Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
  • Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg
  • This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
  • Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth
  • Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly by John Quiggin
  • Falling by T. J. Newman
  • Lab Rats: Tech Gurus, Junk Science, and Management Fads—My Quest to Make Work Less Miserable by Dan Lyons
  • Our Endless and Proper Work: Starting (and Sticking to) Your Writing Practice by Ron Hogan
  • The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
  • The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle
  • Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World by Alexander Rose
  • Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
  • Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
  • Die Trying by Lee Child
  • Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
  • Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich by Thomas Levenson
  • Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson
  • What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era by Carlos Lozada
  • Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil
  • If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore
  • The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States by Benjamin C. Waterhouse
  • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
  • Learning SQL: Generate, Manipulate, and Retrieve Data by Alan Beaulieu
  • 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis
  • The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter
  • JELL-O Girls: A Family History by Allie Rowbottom
  • Just Like You by Nick Hornby
  • Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
  • The Price You Pay by Aidan Truhen
  • Severance by Ling Ma
  • Autumn by Ali Smith
  • The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
  • Clutter: A History by Jennifer Howard
  • The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
  • Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America by Gerald Posner
  • Democracy in One Book or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn’t, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think by David Litt
  • Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen
  • The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum
  • Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
  • Educated by Tara Westover

2020

  • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley by Adrian Daub
  • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
  • Fall; or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Books by Leah Price
  • Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener
  • The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
  • The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
  • Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M.M. Blume
  • Killing Floor by Lee Child
  • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova
  • My Mistake: A Memoir by Daniel Menaker
  • Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
  • Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson
  • Run Your Butt Off!: A Breakthrough Plan to Shed Pounds and Start Running by Sarah Lorge Butler, Leslie Bonci and Budd Coates
  • Running: A Love Story: 10 Years, 5 Marathons, and 1 Life-Changing Sport by Jen A. Miller
  • The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
  • Wow, No Thank You. by Samantha Irby
  • On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis
  • Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft by Peter Westwick
  • Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
  • The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political by Judith Butler
  • Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  • Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph
  • The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
  • Agency by William Gibson
  • The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
  • True Grit by Charles Portis (with Afterword by Donna Tartt)
  • Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  • The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
  • Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher
  • Weather by Jenny Offill
  • Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann
  • Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have by Tatiana Schlossberg
  • The Wanderers by Meg Howrey
  • Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change by Eitan Hersh
  • Death’s End by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)
  • The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles by Gary Krist
  • Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer
  • Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
  • Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz
  • A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura by Eileen Markey
  • The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
  • Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein
  • Radical: The Science, Culture and History of Breast Cancer in America by Kate Pickert
  • First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life by Joe Moran
  • How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe
  • Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac
  • The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
  • The Idiot by Elif Batuman
  • The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. by Evan Ratliff
  • The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
  • Kudos by Rachel Cusk

2019

  • My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul
  • The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson
  • Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan
  • Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz
  • Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
  • New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
  • Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
  • The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen)
  • We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Normal People by Sally Rooney
  • The Border by Don Winslow
  • Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer
  • The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society by David Waltner-Toews
  • This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
  • Working by Robert A. Caro
  • The Mayo Clinic Diet by Donald D. Hensrud, MD
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up by Tom Phillips
  • Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
  • Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben
  • Clojure for the Brave and True by Daniel Higginbotham
  • Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land
  • Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich
  • Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
  • Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
  • No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder
  • The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)
  • The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal
  • Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Raden Keefe
  • Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal
  • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
  • The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
  • The Library Book by Susan Orlean
  • The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are by Paul Bogard
  • The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  • Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein
  • Milkman by Anna Burns
  • The Ultimate Beginner’s Running Guide by Ryan Robert
  • Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier
  • Bitwise: A Life in Code by David Auerbach
  • Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
  • The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte
  • Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
  • The Patch by John McPhee
  • The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
  • The Power by Naomi Alderman
  • The Glitch by Elisabeth Cohen
  • An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp by Robert J. Chassell
  • We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler
  • Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
  • Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
  • The Judge Hunter by Christopher Buckley
  • Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy by Melissa Gregg
  • Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam
  • She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Zimmer
  • Lghtning Rods by Helen De Witt
  • The Force by Don Winslow

2018

  • The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
  • Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
  • Cherry by Nico Walker
  • The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis
  • Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
  • Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
  • There There by Tommy Orange
  • How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensible Retirement Guide by Jane Bryant Quinn
  • The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
  • World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
  • Conan Doyle for the Defense: How Sherlock Holmes’s Creator Turned Real-Life Detective and Freed a Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Murder by Margalit Fox
  • How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks
  • My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)
  • This Could Hurt by Jillian Medoff
  • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons From the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
  • Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark
  • Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean
  • Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
  • Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz
  • Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick
  • Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Advertising Industry (and Why This Matters) by Ken Auletta
  • Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
  • The Overstory by Richard Powers
  • Practical SQL: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Data by Anthony DeBarros
  • The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
  • Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes
  • Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
  • Sociable by Rebecca Harrington
  • Learning Web Design, Fifth Edition by Jennifer Robbins
  • I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong
  • Learning JavaScript, Third Edition by Ethan Brown
  • Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams
  • The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and a Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History by David Enrich
  • Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
  • The Female Persuation by Meg Wolitzer
  • Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
  • My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
  • Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman
  • The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
  • Transit by Rachel Cusk
  • You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser
  • Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman
  • Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
  • Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
  • Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  • Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
  • Seven Last Words: An Invitation to a Deeper Friendship with Jesus by James Martin, SJ
  • With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge
  • The Dance of the Possible: The Mostly Honest Completely Irreverent Guide to Creativity by Scott Berkun
  • Python Tricks: A Buffet of Awesome Python Features by Dan Bader
  • Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
  • World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
  • The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
  • Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
  • The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
  • Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
  • Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
  • Half Empty by David Rakoff

2017

  • Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  • The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
  • The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer
  • Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology by Ellen Ullman
  • Devotion by Patti Smith
  • My Struggle, Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard
  • Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler
  • Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
  • Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin
  • The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman
  • The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
  • The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser
  • Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
  • The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work by Eli J. Finkel
  • The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road by Finn Murphy
  • Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden
  • Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
  • Into the Heart of Our World: A Journey to the Center of the Earth; A Remarkable Voyage of Scientific Discovery by David Whitehouse
  • The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
  • Less by Andrew Sean Greer
  • We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
  • The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World by Sally Denton
  • Version Control by Dexter Palmer
  • Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters from the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey
  • The Sellout by Paul Beatty
  • Mislaid by Nell Zink
  • The Nix by Nathan Hill
  • The Vacationers by Emma Straub
  • The Trespasser by Tana French
  • Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh
  • Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
  • The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency by Robert Kanigel
  • The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek
  • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
  • Great Plains by Ian Frazier
  • The Regional Office is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  • R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund
  • Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
  • Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons by Ward Wilson
  • Here’s Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math by Alex Bellos
  • Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age by Dan Zak
  • The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely
  • My Life with the Saints by James Martin, SJ
  • How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David Frank
  • You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt
  • Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild
  • How to Write: Advice and Reflections by Richard Rhodes
  • The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin
  • Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A.O. Scott
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Blakewell
  • The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
  • To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Simon Garfield
  • 10:04 by Ben Lerner
  • Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street by Rana Foroohar
  • Arcadia by Lauren Groff
  • The Profitable Side Project Handbook by Rachel Andrew
  • Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

2016

  • All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
  • Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank
  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
  • Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
  • Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
  • Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art by Virginia Heffernan
  • The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax
  • Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
  • The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
  • Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan
  • Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story by John Bloom
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
  • Barbarian DaysL A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
  • The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure by Henry Petroski
  • Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate
  • The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  • Creating Flow with OmniFocus, 2/e by Kourosh Dini
  • Outline by Rachel Cusk
  • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  • The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close
  • The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future by Peter Moore
  • The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi
  • Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
  • Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
  • The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth Mckenzie
  • The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler
  • Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez
  • Living with a Dead Language: My Romance with Latin by Ann Patty
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  • Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell
  • Purity by Jonathan Franzen
  • The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook
  • The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Brawford
  • SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
  • In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides
  • Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
  • Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur
  • We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
  • Reading The Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth by Marcia Bjornerud
  • Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder
  • Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
  • The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber
  • Economics for Dummies by Sean Masaki Flynn
  • The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
  • M Train by Patti Smith
  • Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
  • Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
  • Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux by Boris Kachka
  • The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
  • Mr. Speaker!: The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed The Man Who Broke the Filibuster by James Grant
  • Martian Summer: My Ninety Days with Interplanetary Pioneers, Temperamental Robots, and NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission by Andrew Kessler
  • The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth
  • Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport