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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224 summaries, page 1 of 10
10x Is Easier Than 2x
A coach and a psychologist argue that a tenfold goal is simpler than doubling, because it forces you to drop the 80 percent of your work that cannot come along.
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.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari turns from humanity's past and far future to the present, asking how AI, nationalism, fake news and the loss of old stories will test us right now.
A Court of Thorns and Roses
A mortal huntress kills a wolf that was really a faerie and is taken across the wall to a masked lord's enchanted, cursed court.
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 Monster Calls
A thirteen-year-old whose mother is gravely ill is visited at 12:07 by a monster made from a yew tree, who trades three stories for the one truth the boy cannot say.
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.
A World Without Email
Cal Newport argues that the inbox has become a broken way of organising work, and lays out four principles for doing knowledge work without the constant chatter.
All the Colors of the Dark
In 1975 Missouri a one-eyed boy saves a girl from abduction and is taken himself, and the friend who refuses to stop looking for him spends decades chasing the truth.
Allegedly
Convicted as a small child of killing a baby, sixteen-year-old Mary finally has a reason to tell what really happened that night.
Altered Traits
A science journalist and a neuroscientist sort the hype from the hard evidence to show how meditation can lastingly change who we are.
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.
And Then There Were None
Ten strangers with buried secrets are lured to an island off the Devon coast, where a nursery rhyme begins counting them down one by one.
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.
Bargaining with the Devil
Harvard negotiation professor Robert Mnookin uses Churchill, Mandela, IBM and bitter family fights to show when to make a deal with an enemy and when to refuse.
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.
Best Evidence
David Lifton's fifteen-year investigation argues that President Kennedy's body was secretly altered between Dallas and Bethesda to hide shots fired from the front.
Blitzed
A novelist turned historian argues that methamphetamine, opiates and cocaine ran through Nazi Germany, from the blitzkrieg to Hitler's own veins.
Blood Will Tell
A teen search-and-rescue volunteer in Portland becomes the prime suspect in a murder, and his two friends race to clear his name.
Blue Ocean Strategy
INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that the smartest companies stop fighting rivals in crowded markets and create new, uncontested ones instead.