How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Pierre Bayard

The title belies the real subject, which is an argument against reading and for writing. The book that convinced me to launch this site.

Mediated

Thomas de Zengotita

de Zengotita investigates the ways in which our experience of the world is mediated through traditional media (television, newspapers) as well as the ways in which we self-mediate.

Merchants of Doubt

Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway

An important and infuriating book. The authors describe in detail the methods by which a few scientists successfully manipulated public opinion about tobacco, DDT, the ozone hole, global warming, and more.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Elizabeth Kolbert

Kolbert’s essays span Kyoto, Bush-era climate denialism, ocean acidification, Canadian tar sands, and melting glaciers.

White Rage

Carol Anderson

Anderson traces the repeated push and pull of black advancement and the white response that sought to defeat it, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

Women Talking

Miriam Toews

A group of Mennonite women suffer for years from mysterious midnight attacks, purportedly the work of demons come to punish them for their sins. Eventually, they discover the assaults are not the work of demons but of men—their own husbands, sons, and neighbors.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

“I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke

When young Jonathan Strange sets it upon himself to become a magician, he ends up as Mr. Norrell’s only pupil—but it’s a dry sort of magic Norrell preaches, absent any of the mystery or terror of the old days.

The Wood at Midwinter

Susanna Clarke

In this short fable of midwinter, Susanna Clarke tells of the speech of dogs and pigs and foxes and the woods themselves, who talk to those who know how to listen.