9 books
David Sax
Sax noticed—in 2016, the year I launched AJ in print—that vinyl, paper notebooks, film, board games, and independent bookstores were all growing while the industries around them digitized, and went to find out why. It isn’t nostalgia — the buyers…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
Robert G. Bednarik
Bednarik is a self-taught Australian researcher with more than a thousand papers and no formal degree, and he has spent his career telling the rock art field it is making things up. This is the catalog of that. Natural cracks…
Meg Little Reilly
Ash and Pia leave Brooklyn for rural Vermont wanting a simpler life, and then the forecasts start describing a superstorm months out — big enough that the government begins issuing guidance and the town begins picking sides. Pia throws herself…
Camilla Läckberg
A four-year-old girl goes missing near Fjällbacka, and the case is a mirror of one thirty years earlier, when two teenage girls confessed to killing a child and were later released. Both women are back in town. Detective Patrik Hedström…
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Colorado River has been cut down to nothing and the states have gone to war over what’s left, legally and otherwise. Nevada has water knives — Angel Velasquez is one — men who show up with a court order…
Brendan Leonard
Leonard got sober at twenty-three after an arrest and a night in a cell, and then had to work out what a life looks like without the thing that had organized it. What he found was climbing. The book runs…
Tristan Gooley
Water carries signs and almost nobody reads them. Gooley works through puddles, ponds, rivers, and open sea: How ripple patterns reveal wind direction and depth, how eddies mark what’s under the surface, how the color of a wave says something…
