Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
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87 summaries, page 1 of 4
Book Summary | 1900: The Last President
An 1896 pamphlet by a New York lawyer imagines a populist outsider winning the White House and the republic coming apart, a Gilded Age warning that the internet rediscovered as prophecy.
Book Summary | 1984
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
Book Summary | Animal Farm
Farm animals overthrow their drunken master to build a society of equals, then watch the pigs who lead them slowly become the tyrants they replaced.
Book Summary | Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey
An 1893 children's fantasy sends a big-brained boy baron and his brilliant dog down a Russian well into a hollow earth of transparent people, a blind city of silver and a kingdom of ice.
Book Summary | Hamlet
A grieving prince is told by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, and cannot be sure what to believe or how to act.
Book Summary | Jane Eyre
A poor, plain, fiercely principled orphan grows up through cruelty and privation, becomes a governess at a house full of secrets, and falls in love with its brooding master on her own terms.
Book Summary | One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and unravel in Macondo, a jungle town where ghosts, plagues of insomnia and civil wars are all equally ordinary.
Book Summary | Out of the Silent Planet
A Cambridge philologist is kidnapped and flown to Mars, where he finds a world without sin that looks back at fallen Earth with pity.
Book Summary | Perelandra
C.S. Lewis sends Elwin Ransom to an unfallen Venus, where a new Eve faces a tempter and the fate of a world rests on one reluctant man.
Book Summary | That Hideous Strength
C.S. Lewis closes his Space Trilogy on Earth, where a sinister scientific institute, a fraying young marriage and a sleeping Merlin collide in a battle for England's soul.
Book Summary | The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final masterpiece: a murder in a provincial Russian family becomes a battle over God, freedom, suffering and love.
Book Summary | The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
The Python community's opinionated field guide to setting up, writing, reading and shipping great code.
Book Summary | The Idiot
A gentle prince returns to Russia and tests whether pure goodness can survive money, pride and obsessive love.
Book Summary | The Odyssey
The cunning king of Ithaca fights monsters, gods and his own pride for ten years to get home, while his wife and son hold off a house full of suitors.
Book Summary | To Kill a Mockingbird
In Depression-era Alabama, a tomboy named Scout watches her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defend a Black man falsely accused of rape while a hidden neighbor watches over her.
Bible Summary | Book of Genesis
The Bible's book of beginnings: the creation of the world, the first humans, the flood, and the family of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, bound to God by promise.
Bible Summary | Book of Exodus
Israel's founding story: slavery in Egypt, Moses and the burning bush, the plagues and the sea, and then the covenant, the commandments and the tabernacle at Sinai.
Bible Summary | Book of Leviticus
The priestly heart of the Torah: how a people is to live beside a holy God, through sacrifice, purity, the Day of Atonement and the command to love your neighbour as yourself.
Bible Summary | Book of Numbers
Israel's forty years between Mount Sinai and the Jordan: two censuses, a refusal at the border of Canaan, a generation lost in the desert and a new one made ready.
Bible Summary | Book of Deuteronomy
Moses' farewell speeches on the edge of the promised land: the story so far, the law restated, a covenant to choose, and the death of Israel's greatest prophet.
Bible Summary | Book of Joshua
After the wilderness, Israel crosses the Jordan under a new leader, takes and divides the promised land, and is asked to choose whom it will serve.
Bible Summary | Book of Judges
Between Joshua and the kings, Israel falls again and again into unfaithfulness and is rescued by flawed champions such as Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson.
Bible Summary | Book of Ruth
A widowed foreigner's stubborn loyalty to her mother-in-law turns famine, grief and emptiness into a harvest, a marriage and the family line of King David.
Bible Summary | Book of 1 Samuel
Israel asks for a king and gets Saul, who rises and unravels while a shepherd named David, anointed in secret, kills a giant and spends years on the run from the man he will replace.