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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43 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.
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.
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.
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.
Before We Were Yours
Five river children are stolen for a corrupt Memphis adoption home in 1939, and decades later a senator's daughter uncovers the trail.
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.
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.
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.
Frozen River
In the winter of 1789 a Maine midwife examines a body pulled from the ice and sets out to win justice for a woman the town's judge would rather silence.
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.
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.
Only Time Will Tell
A docker's son with a golden voice climbs out of Bristol's shipyards, while the secret of who his father really was waits to catch up with him.
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.
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.
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.
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.