Some Recent and Favorite Books

* stands for notable, ** are seminal

 

Essay
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN*
Virginia Woolf
Having and Being Had
Eula Biss
Hope In The Dark
Rebecca Solnit
Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays
Eula Biss
On Evil
Terry Eagleton
Poetries and Sciences*
I. A. Richards
Science and Human Values*
Jacob Bronowski
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World*
Hyde, Lewis
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible*
Charles Eisenstein
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics: Revised Edition
Mark Lilla
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve*
Stephen Greenblatt
Thin Places: Essays from In Between
Jordan Kisner
   
Non-fiction
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain*
Maryanne Wolf
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition*
Charles Eisenstein
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know
Malcolm Gladwell
The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
Charles Eisenstein
The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century
James Howard Kunstler
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind**
Jaynes, Julian
The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
David Orr
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Robert Macfarlane
   
Science
A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction
Michael J. Ryan
An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives
Matt Richtel
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande
Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less
James Hamblin
Entropy: God’s Dice Game
Oded Kafri and Hava Kafri
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Suzanne Simard
Permaculture for the Rest of Us: Abundant Living on Less than an Acre
Jenni Blackmore
The Gene: An Intimate History
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Sacred Depths of Nature
Ursula Goodenough
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring with the World’s Last True Explorers*
Richard Preston
This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society*
Kathleen McAuliffe
 
Writing
The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down
Jonathan Gottschall
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Steven Pressfield
Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution
Derrick Jensen
Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books
Ursula K. Le Guin
   
History
Debt: The First 5,000 Years*
David Graeber
Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Medea Benjamin
Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples
Erica Lagalisse
Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder
Christian Parenti
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity*
David Graeber and David Wengrow
These Truths: A History of the United States
Jill Lepore
This America: The Case for the Nation
Jill Lepore
 
Spiritual
In Love With the World
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’s Words*
Neil Douglas-Klotz
Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World
Sharon Salzberg
 
Ecology
Bright Green Lies
Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert
Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward
James Howard Kunstler
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action
Matthew Fox and Skylar Wilson and Jennifer Berit Listug
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Elizabeth Kolbert
   
Politics\Society
Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World
Michael C. Ruppert
Creating a World That Works for All
Sharif M Abdullah
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America*
Nancy MacLean
Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World
Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard
Females: A Concern
Andrea Long Chu
Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies
Edward O. Wilson
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J. D. Vance
How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate
Andrew J. Hoffman
How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi
How to blow up a pipeline
Andreas Malm
How to Read the Constitution–and Why
Kim Wehle
Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy*
Adam Jentleson
PANdemIC!: Covid-19 Shakes the World
Slavoj ?i?ek
Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics
Michael Walzer
Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World
RABBI Michael Lerner
Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution
John Paul Stevens
Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism
Sharyl Attkisson
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
Steven Johnson
The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
Mark Lilla
The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart
Alicia Garza
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt
The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene
Jamie Allinson and China Miéville and Richard Seymour and Rosie Warren
The Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks
Bruce Bartlett
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells
Theories of International Politics and Zombies
Daniel W. Drezner
Trump and a Post-Truth World
Ken Wilber
Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
John Ralston Saul
What Is Populism?:
Jan-Werner Müller
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Robin DiAngelo
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America:
Nancy Isenberg
   
Biography
Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen
Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren
Ongoingness: the End of a Diary
Sarah Manguso
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
 
Fiction
Afterglow: A Dog Memoir
Eileen Myles
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel
Anthony Doerr
Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel
Commonwealth:
Ann Patchett
Dictation: A Quartet
Cynthia Ozick
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: And Other Stories
William H. Gass
Middlemarch*
George Eliot
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
My Brilliant Friend: Neapolitan Novels, Book One
Elena Ferrante
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Parable of the Sower*
Octavia E. Butler
Seven Taoist Masters: A Folk Novel of China
Unknown Author
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Stoner: A Novel*
John Williams
Stranger in a Strange Land**
Robert A. Heinlein
The Big Clock
Kenneth Fearing
The Fifth Sacred Thing*
Starhawk
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
Richard Flanagan
The Man in My Basement*
Walter Mosley
The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
The Overstory: A Novel
Richard Powers
The Passion
Jeanette Winterson
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
The Spectator Bird
Wallace Stegner
The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson