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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Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
16 summaries
A Fighter's Heart
A Harvard-educated wanderer trains and fights his way through the world's toughest gyms to discover why people choose to fight, and what the fight teaches them.
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.
American Prometheus
The Pulitzer-winning life of J. Robert Oppenheimer: the brilliant, contradictory physicist who led the building of the atomic bomb and was later destroyed by the Cold War security state he served.
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.
Can’t Hurt Me
A retired Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner tells how he turned an abused, overweight, aimless young man into one of the toughest people alive, and hands over the mental tools he used.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
A Nobel physicist's mischievous, curious, sometimes profound life stories, from cracking safes at Los Alamos to drumming samba in Brazil, ending with a famous warning against fooling yourself.
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.
Tuesdays with Morrie
A busy sports columnist reunites with his dying college professor for weekly Tuesday visits, and their conversations become a final class on how to live.
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard Feynman's last book of memories moves from a childhood of questions and a doomed love story to his investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Abandoned as a child in the North Carolina marsh, Kya raises herself among the gulls and tides, until the town's golden boy turns up dead and she is the one accused.