Books

The Best Science Books of 2018 | Five Books Expert Recommendations https://ift.tt/2ALx9YH Has 2018 been a good year for science books? Very. Every year is a deluge, of course—science publishing has been on a roll for well over a decade now, and hundreds of books must be sifted annually. There is just this immense thirst out there now for news about research at the cutting edge, say in astrobiology or the human microbiome, or, inevitably, gene editing. Science books so beautifully encapsulate and contextualise those findings in a highly multidisciplinary way. They’re where you get the history, the vital backstory. […]

The Best Books of 2018 https://ift.tt/2Ua1Yz8 To me, each of the titles below represents an energizing alternative to the ripped-apart illogic of our contemporary reality. Even the most disorienting novel is a reminder that you are more than a frayed nerve ending flailing across the Internet—that you, a somewhat coherent person, exist. Each one of these books does what Alexander Pope said wit can do: it “gives us back the image of our mind.” “Asymmetry,” by Lisa Halliday Halliday’s début arrived in February, dangling bait: a roman à clef starring an aging and unchaste Philip Roth. That’s the first half […]

Here are the Biggest Nonfiction Bestsellers of the Last 100 Years https://ift.tt/2Qjim2c Last week, we published a list of the biggest fiction bestsellers of the past 100 years—and gently compared them to the books we still read and talk about from those very same years. Sometimes the difference was striking, and sometimes, readers of the past, you kind of nailed it. A few of our own, present-day readers wrote in to request that we give nonfiction books the same treatment, and since Publishers Weekly also kept lists of the bestselling nonfiction of the past 100 years, those readers are in luck. The […]

Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards! https://ift.tt/2DfvDSv 2018 Rules & Eligibility The 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards have three rounds of voting open to all registered Goodreads members. Winners will be announced December 04, 2018. Opening Round: Oct 30 – Nov 04 Voting opens to 15 official nominees, and write-in votes can be placed for any eligible book (see eligibility below). Our special “Best of the Best” category features the 170 past winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards. Write-in votes can not be placed in this category. Semifinal Round: Nov 06 – 11 The top five write-in votes […]

Lit Hub’s Favorite Books of 2018 https://ift.tt/2PhnFJO Year-end lists, which seem to come out closer and closer to Halloween every year, can feel like a burden to reader and compiler alike: for the former, more books to feel guilty about not having read, for the latter, the inevitable opprobrium of your readers for those books you left off the list. And yet. We couldn’t resist asking both our staff and contributors to tell us what they loved this year. Here’s what they said. Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry (Simon & Schuster) Listen, whom among us would not be tickled by a thinly-veiled […]

23 must-read books that Bill Gates recommended in 2018 https://ift.tt/2E1CmyN Fans of the Netflix documentary "Wild Wild Country" will enjoy Tara Westover’s memoir, "Educated," the story of a woman raised in a Mormon survivalist home. As a child, Westover grew up under the influence of her conspiracy-theorist father, who believed that doomsday was upon them. Despite Westover never stepping foot in a classroom until age 17, she was able to study enough to gain admission to Brigham Young University. From there, she earned a Gates Scholarship (a fact Gates himself discovered upon reading her book), which brought her to the […]

100 Notable Books of 2018 https://ift.tt/2A8xNPy The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Publish via – The New York Times November 24, 2018 at 03:57PM https://ift.tt/2A8xNPy

A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1930s https://ift.tt/2P3gngZ Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time. In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon […]