Recommendations
Where to start, genre by genre
If you only take one book from us this year, take one of these. Two to four titles per genre, each chosen by the curator and argued over by the council.
Classic
4 recommendations
Classic
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A student commits murder in theory and then has to live inside it.
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Classic
The Stranger
Albert Camus
A cold, short novel about a man who refuses to perform the feelings expected of him.
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Classic
Middlemarch
George Eliot
A whole provincial world, rendered with more sympathy than any novel before it.
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Classic
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The wittiest courtship in English, and a study of how judgement misleads.
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Contemporary
3 recommendations
Contemporary
Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata
A woman is perfectly happy; everyone insists she cannot be.
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Contemporary
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Two friends make video games and almost say what they mean.
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Contemporary
Normal People
Sally Rooney
Two people keep finding and misreading each other for years.
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Criticism
2 recommendations
Criticism
On Photography
Susan Sontag
Essays that changed how a century looked at looking.
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Criticism
Ways of Seeing
John Berger
Seven essays that rewired how we read images.
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Dystopian
4 recommendations
Dystopian
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
A theocracy built on women's bodies, told in a whisper.
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Dystopian
1984
George Orwell
Surveillance, language and the ordinary machinery of tyranny.
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Dystopian
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
A society kept obedient by pleasure rather than fear.
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Dystopian
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Firemen burn books; one begins to read them.
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Epic
4 recommendations
Epic
The Odyssey
Homer
Ten years of getting home, and the woman who waited differently.
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Epic
The Iliad
Homer
Rage, honour and the last weeks of a long siege.
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Epic
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
A guided descent and ascent through everything.
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Epic
Beowulf
Anonymous
Monsters, boasts and a hero going gladly toward his end.
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Essays
4 recommendations
Essays
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
California in the sixties, reported like weather before a storm.
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Essays
The White Album
Joan Didion
Notes on disorder from a writer keeping her own inventory.
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Essays
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Two hundred and forty numbered propositions about the colour blue.
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Essays
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
A father writes to his son about the American body.
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Experimental
4 recommendations
Experimental
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
A poem, a madman's footnotes, and a novel hidden between them.
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Experimental
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino
Ten novels that keep interrupting themselves and you.
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Experimental
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Marco Polo describes cities that are all one city.
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Experimental
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
A graveyard chorus and a president holding his dead son.
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Fantasy
4 recommendations
Fantasy
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
A man lives in an infinite house and loves it completely.
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Fantasy
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke
English magic returns, with footnotes and terrible manners.
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Fantasy
A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
A gifted boy names his own shadow and must chase it.
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Fantasy
The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
A world that keeps ending, and the people blamed for holding it together.
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Gothic
4 recommendations
Gothic
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
A second wife, a great house, and a dead woman still in charge.
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Gothic
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
A scientist makes a person and then refuses to love him.
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Gothic
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Letters and diaries assembling a terror they cannot name.
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Gothic
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Beauty preserved at the price of a soul, epigrams included.
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Graphic Memoir
3 recommendations
Graphic Memoir
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
A girlhood in revolutionary Iran, drawn in fierce black and white.
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Graphic Memoir
Maus
Art Spiegelman
A son draws his father's survival and their difficulty.
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Graphic Memoir
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel
A father, a funeral home, and a daughter's careful excavation.
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Historical Fiction
4 recommendations
Historical Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Memory walks through the door and sits down in Morrison's fierce, haunted masterpiece.
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Historical Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Biafra through three lives, told with heat and enormous tenderness.
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Historical Fiction
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, refusing to disappear.
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Historical Fiction
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
A Sicilian prince watches his class end with terrible elegance.
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History
4 recommendations
History
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
A brisk, argumentative history of our very strange species.
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History
Stamped from the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi
Racist ideas traced to their inventors and their uses.
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History
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson
America read as a caste system, compared and unflinching.
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History
The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
The Great Migration through three unforgettable journeys.
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Literary Fiction
4 recommendations
Literary Fiction
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
An English butler retraces a lifetime of service and quietly discovers what it cost him.
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Literary Fiction
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
A young Black man in mid-century America, unseen by every institution he enters.
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Literary Fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie tells her own story in a voice nobody can borrow.
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Literary Fiction
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
A man learns to fly by learning where his family came from.
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Magical Realism
4 recommendations
Magical Realism
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Seven generations of Buendias in a town where the miraculous is ordinary.
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Magical Realism
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
A boy born at independence carries a nation's history in his nose.
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Magical Realism
Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
A runaway boy, a talking cat, and a hole in reality.
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Magical Realism
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
A missing cat leads to a well, a war and a marriage.
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Memoir
4 recommendations
Memoir
Educated
Tara Westover
A girl leaves a survivalist mountain for Cambridge, and pays for it.
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Memoir
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Grief examined by the coldest, clearest eye in American prose.
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Memoir
Just Kids
Patti Smith
Two young artists in New York, broke and entirely serious.
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Memoir
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
Love, gender and family thought through in real time.
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Modernist
4 recommendations
Modernist
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
One London day, one party, and the war humming under every hour.
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Modernist
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Time passes; a house waits; grief becomes shape and light.
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Modernist
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
A boy talks himself out of Ireland and into art.
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Modernist
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
One Southern family, four ways of failing to tell its story.
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Mythic Fiction
2 recommendations
Mythic Fiction
Circe
Madeline Miller
The witch of Aiaia tells her own long, patient story.
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Mythic Fiction
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Patroclus narrates the love the Iliad leaves in the margins.
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Nature Writing
3 recommendations
Nature Writing
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Botany and Potawatomi teaching braided into gratitude.
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Nature Writing
H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk, a dead father, and grief given talons.
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Nature Writing
The Peregrine
J. A. Baker
One winter of watching, in the most intense prose in nature writing.
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Nonfiction
3 recommendations
Nonfiction
Say Nothing
Patrick Radden Keefe
A disappearance in Belfast and the long silence around it.
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Nonfiction
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
Four murders in Kansas and the invention of a genre.
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Nonfiction
The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson
A world's fair, a serial killer, and one gilded city.
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Philosophy
2 recommendations
Philosophy
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
An emperor's private notes on how to behave.
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Philosophy
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius
Written awaiting execution, and still oddly comforting.
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Poetry
4 recommendations
Poetry
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Slanted, electric, and unlike anything before or since.
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Poetry
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
A body, a country, and a voice large enough for both.
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Poetry
Ariel
Sylvia Plath
Late poems written at speed and burning.
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Poetry
Devotions
Mary Oliver
Attention as a spiritual practice, in fifty years of poems.
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Psychology
2 recommendations
Psychology
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
How trauma lives in the body, and what actually helps.
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Psychology
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
The two systems running your judgement, and how both fail.
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Satire
4 recommendations
Satire
Animal Farm
George Orwell
A revolution eats itself, in the plainest fable ever written.
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Satire
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Dresden, time travel and the shrug of a man who survived.
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Satire
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
War as bureaucracy, and the logic that traps everyone inside it.
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Satire
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil visits Soviet Moscow and puts on a show.
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Science
4 recommendations
Science
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
The woman behind HeLa cells and the family left out.
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Science
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
The book that made a movement out of careful observation.
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Science
The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert
Field reporting from the vanishing, species by species.
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Science
The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee
A biography of cancer, told with a clinician's grace.
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Science Fiction
4 recommendations
Science Fiction
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
An envoy on a world without fixed gender learns to be translated.
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Science Fiction
Dune
Frank Herbert
Desert, spice, prophecy and the danger of a hero.
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Science Fiction
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
Two worlds, two economies, one physicist trying to hold both.
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Science Fiction
Solaris
Stanislaw Lem
First contact with something that will not be understood.
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Speculative Fiction
4 recommendations
Speculative Fiction
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Boarding-school friendship shadowed by a purpose the children only half-know.
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Speculative Fiction
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
An artificial friend watches human love from the window.
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Speculative Fiction
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
The end of the world, engineered by the smartest people in it.
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Speculative Fiction
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
A Black woman is pulled from 1976 into a Maryland plantation.
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