This is the only modern natural history of the Mojave, which makes it the standard by default, but it’s also thorough, engaging, and well-written. There’s the geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little…
Kenneth Arnold
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier saw nine objects moving in formation and later described their motion as like a saucer skipping across water. A reporter turned that into “flying saucer” and the phrase went…
Isabel Carmona Andreu
Confession: I have an absurdly large collection of urban sketching books and spend more time admiring their artwork than actually drawing. That’s okay. This is a beginner’s book, and right up my alley. Andreu sketches around Newbury in England and…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
Anil Ananthaswamy
Recommended by a friend of a friend who’s a working physicist. One experiment, two hundred years. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still…
Roland Allen
A history of the blank book, and it’s better than that sounds. Allen starts in medieval Italy, where merchants worked out double-entry bookkeeping and needed something to keep it in, and paper had just gotten cheap enough. From there the…
Ueda Akinari
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the…
Jennifer Ackerman
Owls are hard to study — night, silence, no interest in being watched — so most of what people believed about them was folklore. Ackerman goes out with the researchers finally cracking it. Feathers with a comb on the leading…
Róisín
People are the thing that stops most sketchers cold. They move, and everybody already knows what a person is supposed to look like, so the errors show. Curé’s fix is to start with proportion and then get you drawing fast…
Jennifer Ackerman
Birdbrain is a slur for which we should apologize to our feathered friends. Ackerman goes out with researchers and comes back with the feats birds pull off. New Caledonian crows manufacture hooked tools out of twigs and keep the good…
Diane Ackerman
Ackerman is a poet who reports like a naturalist, and she built this as five long sections, one per sense, with a short final piece on synesthesia. She starts with smell because it is the oldest sense and the one…
David Abram
Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land.…
David Abram
David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at…
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…
Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick blew up his life seven years ago and has been living off the grid in the woods of eastern Washington, no phone, no news, growing his own food and stewing. Then his granddaughter and grandson turn up at…
Lena Valencia
Ten stories, most of them set in the desert Southwest, most of them about women in situations that tilt just past ordinary. A wellness retreat that goes wrong. Influencers in a canyon. A boarding school. A woman on the road…
Antti Tuomainen
Jaakko Kaunismaa runs a small matsutake mushroom export business in a Finnish town, shipping to Japan, and a doctor tells him he’s been systematically poisoned and has weeks left to live. So he sets out to find out who’s killing…
Amy Taylor
Amy Taylor is a Melbourne novelist whose first book, Search History, made The Guardian’s best-of-the-year list. Ruins, her second, drops a couple into an Athens summer. Emma and Julian are house-sitting for a friend and quietly falling apart — she…
Donna Tartt
Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother, and in the smoke a dying old man tells him to take a small Dutch painting off the wall. He does, and…
David Szalay
István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his,…
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…
Maggie Su
Vi Liu is 24, half-Taiwanese, dumped by her boyfriend, dropped out of school without telling her parents, and working the front desk at a motel in the Indiana college town she grew up in. She doesn’t even have the energy…
Maggie Stiefvater
June Hudson runs the Avallon, a grand hotel built over mineral springs in the West Virginia mountains, and she came up from the hollers to do it. In 1942, the State Department requisitions the place to intern Axis diplomats and…
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…
