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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30 summaries, page 1 of 2
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 | A Very Typical Family
Fifteen years after her actions sent her siblings to prison, Natalie Walker must return to Santa Cruz and reunite with them to inherit their late mother's house, in a darkly funny, tender debut about guilt, forgiveness and second chances.
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 | Broken Country
On a Dorset sheep farm in 1968, a grieving wife's first love comes home with his young son, and a love triangle slides toward a killing and a murder trial.
Book Summary | Dear Edward
A twelve-year-old boy is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his family, and must learn, slowly and with one fierce friend beside him, how to live afterward.
Book Summary | Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver moves David Copperfield to the mountains of Virginia, where a red-haired boy nobody wants narrates his way through foster care, football glory and the opioid epidemic.
Book Summary | Everything I Never Told You
In 1977 Ohio, the favorite daughter of a Chinese American family is found drowned in the town lake, and her parents and siblings discover how little they knew her or each other.
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 | Life of Pi
A sixteen-year-old Indian boy survives a shipwreck and drifts across the Pacific in a lifeboat he must share with a Bengal tiger.
Book Summary | Little Fires Everywhere
A wandering artist and her daughter rent a house in rule-loving Shaker Heights, and a custody fight over a baby sets two mothers, and two ways of living, against each other.
Book Summary | Lying
Sam Harris argues that even kind white lies cost more than they save, and that simply telling the truth makes life simpler and relationships deeper.
Book Summary | My Big TOE
A NASA physicist's theory of everything: consciousness is the foundation of reality, the physical world is a virtual training ground, and the point of it all is to grow from fear toward love.
Book Summary | Never Let Me Go
Three friends from an idyllic English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for, in Kazuo Ishiguro's quiet, devastating novel about love, memory and mortality.
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 Descent of Man
Darwin finally turns his theory on ourselves, arguing that humans share ancestry, mind and even morality with other animals, and that mate choice helped shape us.
Book Summary | The Electric
In the late summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old finds an abandoned cinema that screens films made by ghosts, for ghosts, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story about loss and the magic of movies.
Book Summary | The Hidden Life of Trees
German forester Peter Wohlleben argues that a forest is a cooperative community in which trees communicate, share food and raise their young, and that we should manage it that way.