33 books
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver took David Copperfield, moved it to Lee County in the far southwest corner of Virginia, and let Dickens do the work he was built for. Damon Fields, called Demon, gets born on the floor of a single-wide to a…
Janet Malcolm
Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that…
Natalie Leon
The old Japanese calendar splits the year into twenty-four sekki and then into seventy-two ko — microseasons of about five days each, with names like east wind melts the ice and rotten grass becomes fireflies. Leon studied tea and spent…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
Luis Elizondo
Elizondo ran a Pentagon program on unidentified aerial phenomena, resigned in 2017, and was central to the infamous Navy UFO videos going public. This is his account. He promised more than he delivered—or, to be fair suggested more. But still.…
Alison Jean Cole
Alison Jean Cole is a lapidary in Portland who cuts stone for a living, guides rockhounding trips, and puts out a zine called Thunderegg about where the hobby is headed. Most rock guides hand you a list of famous sites…
Amy Tan
Amy Tan started drawing birds in 2016 and kept a nature journal for six years, and this is a facsimile of it — her ink and watercolor drawings with her handwritten notes running around them. The Northern flicker, the scrub…
Patrick Bringley
Bringley was working a desk job at The New Yorker when his older brother Tom died of cancer in his twenties. He didn’t want a career after that. He wanted to stand still. So he took a job as a…
Christof Koch
Koch spent decades at Caltech hunting the neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick, and this is his case for integrated information theory — the idea that consciousness is a measure of how much a system’s parts inform each other,…
Murray Dickson
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. Published by the Hesperian Foundation, the outfit behind Where There Is No Doctor, and written for health workers and villagers with no dentist within a day’s travel.…
