15 books
Fumio Sasaki
Sasaki was a magazine editor in Tokyo, thirty-five, living alone in a room stacked with books, CDs, DVDs, and gear for hobbies he’d quit, comparing himself to everybody and losing. So he spent a year getting rid of about 95…
Felix Scheinberger
Felix Scheinberger has drawn more than fifty children’s books, and he wrote this to get people over the fear of the blank page. His whole stance is that a sketchbook belongs to you and nobody else, so there’s no wrong…
Anu Partanen
Partanen moved from Finland to New York, married an American, and found herself suddenly anxious in ways she never had been — about health insurance, about childcare, about student debt, about what happens if a job ends. Her argument is…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Our last common ancestor with an octopus was a flattened worm about six hundred million years back, which makes them the closest thing to meeting an intelligent alien on this planet. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and a scuba diver, and…
Jessica Easto
No espresso in it at all, which is the first thing worth knowing. Easto sticks to manual brewing and covers ten devices — French press, Chemex, V60, AeroPress, siphon, cold brew, the lot — and treats them as variations on…
Katy Bowman
Bowman is a biomechanist, and her argument is that exercise isn’t movement. An hour at the gym followed by nine hours in a chair leaves most of your body loaded exactly the same way all day, and cells respond to…
Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren
This is the survey doorstop, the one that gets assigned. Marilyn Stokstad wrote the first edition in the nineties at Kansas, and she did something the old standbys hadn’t: She quit treating art history as a straight line from Greece…
Kassia St. Clair
Seventy-five colors, two or three pages each, and every one has a story with a twist. Mummy brown was made from actual ground-up mummies, and Victorian painters kept buying it until they found out. Scheele’s green was arsenic and it…
Jennifer Ackerman
Birdbrain is a slur for which we should apologize to our feathered friends. Ackerman goes out with the researchers doing the work and lays out what birds actually pull off. New Caledonian crows manufacture hooked tools out of twigs and…
Jardine Libaire
New Haven, 1986. Elise Perez is twenty, mixed race, out of the projects, squatting in the house next door to a Yale senior named Jamey Hyde, who has an heir’s trust fund and a family that will not tolerate her…
