20 books
Virginia Hein and Gail L. Wong
The volume about sketching the parts of a scene that won’t hold still and don’t have straight lines. Hein and Wong work through trees as masses rather than leaves, foliage in different seasons, water and reflections, rock and cliff, skies…
Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara
Everybody draws the lines and then fills them in. Daikubara does it backwards — watercolor down first, loose and fast, shapes and values with no outline, then ink on top once it’s dry, and only where it’s needed. The advantage…
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…
Mur Lafferty
Mallory Viridian has a problem: People keep getting murdered around her, and she keeps solving it, and after enough bodies nobody wants her near them. So she moves to a sentient space station called Eternity, which is largely populated by…
Heather Gudenkauf
Wylie Lark is a true crime writer holed up in a rented Iowa farmhouse over Christmas, working on the 1980s murders that happened in that house — two parents shot, a girl missing, a boy who survived. A blizzard comes…
Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early sixties Southern California who is very good and gets nothing for it — no doctorate, no credit on her own work, and a lab full of men who treat her as furniture.…
Rivka Galchen
Katharina Kepler was a widow in her seventies in a small German town, illiterate, sharp-tongued, in the business of mixing herbal remedies, and the mother of Johannes Kepler, who by then had worked out how the planets move. In 1615…
Alice Feeney
Adam and Amelia have been married ten years and give each other a gift by the traditional list every anniversary — paper, cotton, leather. She wins a weekend away in a converted chapel in the Scottish Highlands, they drive up…
Ed Yong
An Immense World delivers miracles on every page. A fly’s vision updates six times faster than a human’s, perhaps rending its perception of our movements in slow motion. Cows’ gazes appear unfocused because they see in a horizontal band and…
David Liittschwager
My Octopus Teacher might have alerted us to the idea of a novel alien intelligence beneath the waves, but nothing can prepare you for the profound diversity and unconventional beauty of octopuses, seahorses, and jellyfish seen through the lens of…
