28 books
Taria Dawson
Dawson runs the Urban Sketching World blog and a YouTube channel out of Johannesburg, and she teaches this the way she talks — relaxed, minimal supplies, no gatekeeping. The lessons build: Individual objects, then food on a table, then a…
Lars Chittka
Chittka has spent his career designing experiments for bees, and the results keep being unreasonable. Bees count. They recognize human faces. They learn to roll a ball into a goal for a sugar reward by watching another bee do it,…
Kyra Cane
Cane is a British potter, and her argument is that drawing and making are the same activity at different stages. Drawing isn’t how you plan a pot, it’s how you think about one — the loose sketch that finds the…
Philip Ball
The gene-as-blueprint story is wrong, and Ball’s argument is that biology has known it for a while without saying so out loud. The human genome came in at around 20,000 genes, fewer than a water flea, and it turned out…
Peter Swanson
A short one, told mostly as a diary, and it’s pulpy. Ashley, an American student in London in the nineties, is invited home to a friend’s family estate in the country for Christmas — an old house, a brother she’s…
Halley Sutton
Salma Lowe gives celebrity death tours in Los Angeles — a van, a script, the houses where famous people died — and one of the stops is her own sister’s, a movie star found dead in 1975 at twenty-two. Then…
Zadie Smith
Eliza Touchet is a Scottish widow running the household of her cousin, a once-famous novelist now writing books nobody reads, in Victorian England. She becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial — a butcher from Australia claiming to be a missing…
James McBride
A skeleton turns up in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1972, and the story goes back to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and 30s — the neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and Black families lived alongside each other on the…
Daniel Mason
One house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic son, a true crime writer,…
Helen Macdonald
Sunil Rao can tell whether any statement is true — no explanation, he just knows — and he’s been used for that by intelligence services until they got tired of the drug habit. Adam Rubenstein is the American colonel sent…
