20 books
George Saunders
George Saunders taught a class on the nineteenth-century Russian short story at Syracuse for twenty years, and this book is that class on the page. Seven stories in translation, three by Chekhov and the rest by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol,…
Alan Weisman
Weisman asks what happens if every human disappears tomorrow, and reports it out with the engineers and biologists who know. New York floods in two days once the pumps stop; the subways go first, then the streets collapse into rivers.…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Annie Montgomery Labatt
Annie Labatt taught art history at Texas, did a Rome Prize and a stint at the Met, and between 2013 and 2015 she gave twenty Friday-night lectures at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This book is those talks. One…
Donald D. Hoffman
Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who ran evolutionary simulations and got a result he didn’t like: Organisms that perceive reality accurately lose to organisms that perceive fitness payoffs instead. His conclusion is that space, time, and objects are a species-specific…
Frank Decourten
Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996 and Utah went to war over it, and this was the first book to actually walk you through what got protected. It’s 1.9 million acres, bigger than Utah’s five national parks put together, bigger…
Raymond B. Cowles
Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, ended up at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard is running a schedule all day,…
Stephanie Bower
Less a how-to than a survey of where the movement went. Urban Sketchers started as a Flickr group in 2007 and turned into a global thing with chapters in hundreds of cities, and Bower gathers work from sketchers across those…
Dennis Mersereau
A field guide to what’s over your head, written by a weather journalist for people who don’t want the math. Cloud types and what each one is telling you about the next few hours. How a thunderstorm actually organizes itself…
George Hlavacs
An argument that sketching is a set of decisions, not a talent. Hlavacs breaks it into a small number of things you’re actually choosing — line weight, edge, value, what to include — and shows how varying just those changes…
