Sample Post Category: Books

Ed Yong’s An Immense World is about how other animals perceive the world — how a bat hears, how a snake senses heat, how a dog navigates a smell landscape that we cannot even conceive of. It reads like the best kind of science journalism: specific, warm, based on interviews with researchers who love their animals.

The chapter that stayed with me was the one on echolocation. There is a passage where he describes hearing a recording of a bat cry slowed down to human speed, and how the researcher described it — the bat is not just detecting an obstacle, it is building a real-time 3D model of a moving world made of returning sound. That is a mode of being alive I had never imagined. It rearranged, briefly, my sense of what “seeing” even is.

Since finishing it I look at my dog differently. When she stops to sniff a specific patch of grass for 30 seconds, she is doing something I cannot do — she is reading a chronological log of who and what has been there recently. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact of her sensory life. Yong’s book is 350 pages of that kind of respect.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is the book I abandoned most spectacularly. I was 24, I bought it as a status object, I read 300 pages, I hated the tennis academy sections, I sold it to a used bookshop, and I told myself for a decade that I had done the mature thing by walking away from a bad-faith 1,000-page project.

What I did not consider until recently: the reasons I hated it at 24 — the dense structure, the endless footnotes, the emotional distance of the tennis characters — are the exact things I now enjoy in other novels. I abandoned it not because it was bad but because I was not the right reader yet. I was reading it to be the kind of person who reads it, which is the worst way to read any book.

I bought another copy last month. I am not going to force myself. I am going to keep it on the shelf and see if the mood arrives. If it does, I will report back. If it does not, that is also fine. This is one of the useful lessons of getting older: the books I abandoned at 24 are not permanently closed. Some of them are just waiting for me to be a different person.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is filed as a medical book. It is really a book about how modern medicine has taken the end of life and turned it into a series of technical problems, and what you can do — as a patient, as an adult child, as a caregiver — to fight back against that. It is one of the few books I have read twice.

The key idea, which changes how you talk to a doctor: instead of asking “what treatments are available?” you ask “what are you hoping to achieve, and what are you afraid of?” That reframing sounds obvious once you read it. It is not obvious in practice. Most families discover it too late.

I gave a copy to my parents when they were in their late sixties, along with a note that said “you do not have to read this now.” Both did. Both said the conversation about what quality of life meant, specifically, was the most useful conversation we had had as a family in years. That is what this book unlocks. It is not for you when you are dying. It is for you now, before anyone in your family gets sick.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is short (240 pages) but it opens like a puzzle you did not sign up for. A man named Piranesi lives in a house of infinite marble halls, tides rise and fall through the lower levels, statues line every corridor, and he is having conversations with someone called The Other about scientific research. If you try to read it fast you will bounce off it. I did, twice.

What worked on the third try: I stopped trying to figure out what was going on. I let Piranesi’s voice do its work. The book is written entirely in his journal entries, and the pleasure is in his particular way of noticing things — the light through the vestibules, the specific patterns of the tides, his affection for particular statues. By the halfway point you know exactly what is happening, and it lands harder because you had to earn it.

It is now the book I keep buying for people who love slow-cinema movies or the poetry of Mary Oliver. Not for people who want plot. For people who want a specific kind of atmosphere, this is one of the best short novels I have read in years.

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns is the book I recommend most often to people who tell me they want to understand American history but not through a textbook. It follows three specific people who moved north during the Great Migration — a woman leaving Mississippi, a doctor leaving Louisiana, a cotton picker leaving Florida — and lets the enormity of the migration land through their lives.

It is 600 pages and I have never met anyone who felt they were long. The three narratives are so distinct in voice and pacing that it reads like a novel, and by the middle you have absorbed a graduate-level understanding of race, geography, industry and family without noticing you were being taught anything. That is the mark of a great popular historian.

Wilkerson later wrote Caste, which is a shorter and more argumentative book. If you have read her, start there. If you have not, start here. It is the American history book my parents’ generation wishes they had been given, and one you can put in the hands of a college-age reader without worrying.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens is a book about the Zettelkasten method, invented by a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann who published more than 70 books partly because his note system did most of the work. I read it thinking I would get productivity tips. I got a small, quiet revolution in how I read.

The key idea, which is embarrassingly simple: never take a note that is only about the source. Every note should be a self-contained thought, written in your own words, that you could still understand ten years later. The corollary is that most highlights and margin scribbles are useless because they only make sense in context. If you cannot rewrite the idea in a sentence, you did not really absorb it.

I stopped highlighting after this book. I stopped taking notes during the reading and started taking them after — 24 hours after, in a separate session, without the book in front of me. The friction went up. The number of notes went down. And two years later I am actually still using half of them, which is more than I can say for the previous twenty years of highlighter marks.

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is 240 numbered fragments about the colour blue, grief, obsession, and a friend who was paralysed. It sounds like something you would not enjoy, and I would agree with you on paper. In practice it is the book I return to when the days start getting shorter, when I have been running too hard, when I want to be reminded that thinking clearly is not the same as thinking simply.

The fragments are short — sometimes one sentence, sometimes half a page — and none of them explain the ones before. You have to sit with each one. That is the point. The book teaches you a slower reading speed by refusing to be read fast. On a good weekend I finish it in three sittings. On a bad one I get halfway through and put it down because I do not have the patience yet, which is a signal.

I do not think it is her best book. It is the one I need most. That is a distinction I try to remember when I am recommending things to other people: my favourite is not always the one I hand out. Sometimes the useful book is the one that fits the season.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is technically a book about a robot. Klara is an “Artificial Friend” bought as a companion for a sick child in a slightly-future America. That is the plot. The book itself is about faith, class, and what a mother will do for her child — and it happens to be narrated by an AI who is trying to make sense of a household she does not understand.

I picked it up expecting one thing (dystopia, warnings, cautionary tale) and got another (a strange, quiet, sun-drenched book about love that would be almost unbearable if you removed the emotional distance of the narrator). Ishiguro pulls the same trick he pulled in Never Let Me Go: he gives you a narrator who does not know what she is describing, and lets you figure out the horror and the beauty at your own pace.

If you have avoided literary science fiction because it always ends in a warning about technology, this one does not do that. If you have avoided Ishiguro because Remains of the Day made you uncomfortable, this one is warmer. And if you like books that pretend to be about one thing and are actually about another, you have found a good one.

I know this because I finally counted. Eleven copies of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, given away over about eight years. It is not the book I would pick to describe myself. It is the book I keep picking for other people.

The book is short — you can read it in a long afternoon — and the first half is a Holocaust survivor’s memoir of Auschwitz. The second half is the theory of meaning he built out of what he saw there. What I keep noticing is that people never come back to me and mention the first half. They come back to me and say something specific from the second, in their own words, about a decision they had been putting off. It is not a self-help book. It is a book that gives you permission to take yourself seriously.

I do not push it. I put it in a shopping cart quietly with a note that says “you do not have to read it now.” About half the time it works. The other half people forget it exists, which is fine too — it is a heavy gift and it should be optional. But when it lands, it lands as a permission slip, and the person you gave it to comes back four months later and asks you what else you have.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief is the shortest book I recommend most often. It came out of an essay she wrote after her father died during the pandemic, expanded to a slim hardback that fits in a coat pocket. If you have ever tried to read a full-length grief memoir and abandoned it because it was too much all at once, this one lets you in through a smaller door.

What makes it not sad, exactly, is that it has anger in it. Grief written honestly is often furious — at the systems, at the timing, at people who mean well but say the wrong thing, at yourself for expecting to feel differently than you do. That anger is where the book breathes. It is not therapy and it is not consolation. It is a report from someone who is still inside it, writing it down in real time.

I have handed it to three people who lost a parent recently, always with the same disclaimer: “this is short and you can put it down.” All three finished it in one sitting. Two came back to me and asked what else Adichie had written. The third just texted the words “thank you.” Every book recommendation is really a bet, and this one has paid out every time.