Fiction

  • "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë — strong writing, but the cast is nearly devoid of likable characters; almost everyone is crazy, evil, stupid, or some mix of the three. Also striking is how small the world of the era's nobility could be: entire lives contained within a tiny area and a handful of acquaintances, and that among the nobility rather than some remote farm's bumpkin.
  • "After Rain" by William Trevor — a collection of 12 stories, largely about love and relationships, both between partners and between parents and children, usually set in 1980s Ireland or England. Read while hunting for short-story writers as evocative as Steinbeck and Lahiri, who were the recommendation's reference points; the author is worth revisiting.
  • "Spoonhandle" by Ruth Moore — a novel of Maine natives living through changing times as their picturesque coastal area turns into a magnet for "summer people," rich vacationers from the big cities. No single protagonist; warm, human writing.
  • "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf — a year in the lives of several loosely connected people in a remote farm town in eastern Colorado. A wholesome story with no distinct beginning or end.
  • "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin — science fiction only in the sense of 1984. Written in the early 1970s, it presents life thousands of years in the future as essentially identical to the early 1970s apart from near-speed-of-light travel — an amusingly unambitious futuristic vision. Science isn't the point: it's political and philosophical fiction contrasting an anarchist-communist society with a capitalist, "propertarian" one. Strong vibes of the Soviet children's story "Dunno on the Moon" (Незнайка на Луне).
  • "The Lion Women of Tehran" by Marjan Kamali — a multi-generational novel about the lives of young women in Iran from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, set against the authoritarian governments of those decades, from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's rule to after the 1979 Islamic revolution. A good story that needs neither excessive twists nor the usual attention-grabbing drama.
  • "Humorous short stories" by Anton Chekhov (read in Russian) — typically just 2-3 pages each, but with superb character building. Reason enough to try something longer by Chekhov.

Non-fiction

  • "Rebel Island: the incredible history of Taiwan" by Jonathan Clements — comprehensive, detailed history weighted toward early, pre-modern times. The prose is somewhat academic and dry, and the modern era gets less space than it deserves.
  • "The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money" by Brendan Greeley — traces the dollar's role in the world economy from its origin as the Joachimsthaler in 16th-century Bohemia to modern times. Interesting ideas, but academic and hard to digest.
  • "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by Robert M. Sapolsky — enormous in scope, aiming to explain human behavior from basic biological principles. Understanding of behavior's actual biological underpinnings is still so nascent that most of the book covers familiar ground: psychological studies (the prisoner's dilemma, the Stanford prison experiment, and other well-known ones) and comparisons with other animals. Little new for anyone who has read other books on the topic.
  • "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" by Katherine Boo — investigative journalism following several connected families in Annawadi, one of Mumbai's most miserable slums, roughly from 2007 to 2010. The corruption, fraud and exploitation surrounding them are even more shocking than the squalor. A poignant read.
  • "The Pickled City: The Story of New York pickles" by Paul Van Ravenstein and Monique Mulder — a book about pickles, with plenty of photos, found while browsing the local public library during a children's book run. Covers pickle history with particular emphasis on early-20th-century New York City and its connection to Jewish immigration there.
  • "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot" by Robert Macfarlane — an ode to long walks, from a few hours to multi-day hikes, beautifully written but largely pointless. Detailed portraits of friends and obscure historical poets have little to do with the book's thesis; the first quarter is very good and the rest unnecessary.

Re-reads

  • "The Old Way: A story of the first people" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
  • "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami
  • "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck