Macfarlane writes that an old path is a record of everyone who wore it, that walking one puts you in their company whether you want it or not, and that this does something to the inside of your head —…
Haruki Murakami
Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane and is thrown back to 1969, to a Tokyo university, and to two women. Naoko was his dead best friend’s girlfriend, fragile and receding into a sanatorium in the hills. Midori…
Alafair Burke
Three women who met as teenagers and have a bad summer in their shared past take a weekend in the Hamptons to patch things up. A car cuts them off, they’re annoyed, and one of them leaves a note on…
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…
Tove Jansson
For twenty-six years, Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent summers on a bare platter of rock in the Gulf of Finland, a tiny speck called Klovharun, living their dream of art and isolation. Her…
Alvaro Enrigue
A Mexican woman flees into the desert after an Apache raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel chasing cattle rustlers realizes he’s tracking an abduction instead. Decades on, the American and Mexican armies maneuver Geronimo toward a surrender…
Oliver Sacks
Sacks was a lifelong fern obsessive and in 2000 he went to Oaxaca with the American Fern Society — a busload of amateur botanists, a few professionals, and him with a notebook. So the book is about ferns, but it’s…
Mariko Higaki
Higaki is an industrial designer at Seiko, and this teaches drawing as a way of understanding how things are made. You sketch a stapler, a chair, a shoe, a coffee grinder — and the exercises push you to look for…
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…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Jack Hitt
Hitt walked the Camino de Santiago in the early nineties, five hundred miles across northern Spain, back when the trail was still mostly empty and the pilgrim infrastructure was a few nuns with a stamp. He is not a believer…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane writes that an old path is a record of everyone who wore it, that walking one puts you in their company whether you want it or not, and that this does something to the inside of your head —…
Michael Pollan
This book disabused me of my illusions about “organic” and introduced me to Michael Pollan. He tackles four meals, traced all the way back to their sources. There’s a fast food dinner eaten in the car, which turns out to…
Solvej Balle
Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer, wakes up and it is the eighteenth of November. It is the eighteenth of November again the next day, and the next, and it doesn’t stop. She isn’t looking for a way out and…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it…
Jack Kerouac
Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and spends the next few years crossing and recrossing the country — New York to Denver to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, back again, in borrowed cars and on buses, with no money, chasing…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Margaret Atwood
Snowman is living in a tree, wrapped in a bedsheet, maybe the last human, looked after by a group of gentle green-eyed people who aren’t human at all and think he’s a prophet. He works backward through how this happened:…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Our last common ancestor with an octopus was a flattened worm about six hundred million years back, which makes them the closest thing to meeting an intelligent alien on this planet. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and a scuba diver, and…
Graham Greene
Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, has a teenage daughter with expensive tastes, and no money. The British intelligence service recruits him to spy, but having nothing to report, and no spying experience, he invents a network of agents out…
Peter Attia
This book was written and blew up before Attia was connected to Jeffrey Epstein. His argument — and I wholeheartedly agree — is that medicine is good at trauma and infection and bad at the four things that actually kill…
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…
Richard Powers
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from nineteenth century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. Wait, what? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
Audrey Sutherland
Audrey Sutherland paddled a nine-foot inflatable kayak up the Inside Passage from Ketchikan, alone, in her sixties, in summer after summer until she’d done the whole eight hundred and fifty miles. No support, no motor, food she’d dehydrated herself, camping…
