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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46 summaries, page 1 of 2
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
A clinical psychologist's twelve blunt, oddly named rules for carrying responsibility, telling the truth and finding meaning in a life that will include suffering.
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.
1984
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
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.
Atomic Habits
James Clear's case that tiny daily habits, backed by good systems and a new sense of identity, compound into remarkable change.
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.
Confronting Christianity
Rebecca McLaughlin takes twelve of the hardest objections to Christianity, from science and slavery to suffering and hell, and argues each one points toward faith.
Deep Work
Cal Newport argues that undistracted concentration on hard problems is becoming rare and valuable, and gives four rules for building a working life around it.
Desiring God
John Piper's case for Christian Hedonism: that chasing your deepest joy in God is not selfish but the very thing that honors Him most.
Do the Work
The Holistic Psychologist's guide to why willpower fails, how childhood wires our automatic patterns, and the daily mind-and-body practices that let you choose who you become.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Greg McKeown's method for finding the few things that truly matter, cutting the rest, and making the vital work almost effortless.
Gentle and Lowly
Dane Ortlund draws on Jesus's own self-description and the Puritans to argue that Christ's deepest heart toward weary sinners and sufferers is tender, eager, unwavering love.
God and the Gay Christian
Matthew Vines argues, passage by passage, that Christians who hold the Bible as fully authoritative can also bless committed same-sex relationships.
God Has a Name
John Mark Comer walks line by line through Exodus 34:6-7, where God names himself, to show how the God you picture shapes the person you become.
God's Not Dead
A campus pastor's brisk, confident tour of the scientific, philosophical and historical case for God, written for seekers, believers and skeptics alike.
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.
Ikigai
What the centenarians of an Okinawan village can teach the rest of us about purpose, calm, food, friends and a reason to get up in the morning.
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.
Man, Myth, Messiah
Rice Broocks argues from history that Jesus was no myth and no mere man, which leaves only one answer: the Messiah.
Mastery
Robert Greene argues that greatness is a path anyone can walk: find your calling, serve a long apprenticeship, learn from mentors, read people well, and let deep immersion ripen into intuition.
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.
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.
People to Be Loved
A New Testament scholar keeps the traditional Christian view of sex and marriage while telling the church its treatment of gay people has to change.
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.