Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
FiltersClassicsRomanceComputers & TechnologyScience FictionClear
Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
23 summaries
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 | Butcher & Blackbird
Two rival serial killers who prey only on other serial killers start an annual hunting contest, and somewhere between the crime scenes they fall in love.
Book Summary | Dark Age
Ten years after the revolution, Darrow's army is besieged on Mercury, the Republic's Senate is torn apart and Mars is overrun in the saga's darkest book.
Book Summary | Golden Son
Darrow, a Red miner remade as a Gold, turns his enemies on each other and carries his secret rebellion from Mars into a war across the solar system.
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 | Iron Gold
Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.
Book Summary | It Ends With Us
A young Boston florist falls for a brilliant surgeon, then finds herself inside the pattern she grew up watching, just as her first love walks back into her life.
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 | Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
Book Summary | Morning Star
Broken by a year in the dark, a slave-born revolutionary rises again to lead a solar-system-wide war against the tyrants who rule it in the finale of the Red Rising trilogy.
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 | Red Rising
A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.
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.