Books

The Message ★★★★★

You cannot read Ta-Nehisi Coates for fun. In The Message, he moves from Senegal to the 2020 reckoning and to Palestine, and draws one line through all three. A difficult, necessary book.

Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best ★★★★★

Duckworth answered the criticism of 'Grit', which raised this book's quality. I’m a big fan

And Then There Were None ★★★★★

The bar for Christie is high, and this clears it. It's relentless. Once the island closes in, the

The Strange Library ★★★☆☆

Strange, short, and well made, and I’m still not sure what it was about. I haven’t read much

So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men ★★★★☆

Three short stories, very few words, and not one of them wasted. Claire Keegan uses words like rice grains in

Sleeping Giants ★★★☆☆

A strong premise, a clever format, and a middle that loses its grip. The format is the best thing here.

Rules of Civility ★★★★☆

There’s something about Amor Towles’s writing that I could read forever. Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose, it comes

How to Survive America ★★★★☆

Angry, and better researched than you’d expect from a comedian. I feel bad for D.L. Hughley. He wrote

The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World ★★★★☆

Useful, but more scholarly and longer than I like for casual reading. One warning first: this book is not about

Meditations for Mortals ★★★★☆

A worthy follow-up to a book I loved enough to gift to people. Four Thousand Weeks got under my

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better ★★★★☆

Epstein makes a strong case for operating within constraints, although he repeats his points more often than needed. I liked

How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening ★★★★☆

This serves as a solid introductory guide to communication. The audiobook proved to be an appropriate format for the material.

The Order of Time ★★★★☆

This book altered my view of a topic I believed I understood. It is a more approachable version of Hawking&

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

I came to this sideways, after reading about ancient Egypt and learning that its empire, which lasted three millennia, was

How To Be Idle ★★★★★

This book found me at the right age to actually appreciate it. If I'd read this in my

Blood Test: A Comedy ★★☆☆☆

A disappointing read. It starts with an interesting almost-scifi premise but eventually peters out to be a disappointing read.

The Names ★★★★★

Wonderfully written. Although it's more about choices, the names Cora choses for each of the three parallel lives,

How Fiction Works ★★★☆☆

It was a little too academic for casual reading. Also, it focused on the works of classic literature most of

Hell of a Book ★★★★☆

Hell of a Book is doing at least two things at once, and it knows it. That's the

Six Days in Bombay ★★★☆☆

Meh! Six Days in Bombay had everything going for it on paper: late-1930s Bombay, a half-Indian half-English

The Book of Lost Hours ★★★★★

I'm a sucker for time travel, so this was always going to land well. But The Book of