My Favorite Books

Paul Kalanithi - a Stanford neurosurgical resident in his sixth and final year of training, with a Stanford BA in English literature and human biology, a Stanford MA in English, a Cambridge master's in history and philosophy of science and medicine, and a Yale medical degree - was diagnosed in May 2013 with stage IV non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer at thirty-six; his daughter Cady was born on July 4, 2014; he died on March 9, 2015, at thirty-seven, with Cady eight months old; the memoir he had been writing in the time he had left was published posthumously in January 2016 with a foreword by Abraham Verghese and an epilogue by his wife Lucy covering the last weeks of his life, spent sixty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Biography.

Russian-Kazakhstani guide Anatoli Boukreev's firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster - co-written with G. Weston DeWalt, published the same year as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and offering the Mountain Madness team's perspective on the storm that killed eight climbers and the three trips into it that Boukreev made alone to bring three of his clients back alive.

Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece follows Elizabeth Bennet through misjudgment and revelation - a Hunsford proposal that goes horribly, a letter that rearranges everything, a visit to Pemberley that changes what she thought she knew - in the great Regency comedy of manners about what we get wrong about other people and ourselves.

Kendra Michaels, blind for the first twenty years of her life, uses her extraordinary observational skills to hunt a brilliant serial killer in this pulse-pounding thriller.

The true story of the secret World War II operations between Shetland and Norway. A gripping account of courage, danger, and resistance during the Nazi occupation.

A gripping thriller about a woman who changed her identity to protect her children after her husband's murder. When her carefully constructed new life begins to unravel, Rachel Marin must confront the past she's been hiding from.

The riveting story of Alex Honnold's historic free solo climb of El Capitan's 3,000-foot Freerider route, and the obsessive pursuit of perfection in one of the most dangerous athletic achievements ever attempted.

The extraordinary true story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando who survived alone in the Arctic wilderness for months after a failed sabotage mission during World War II.

A haunting post-apocalyptic horror novel about a world where seeing the wrong thing means certain death, and one mother's desperate journey to safety.

A high-stakes thriller involving a NASA discovery in the Arctic that could change everything, if the political conspiracy surrounding it doesn't destroy it first.

President Snow visits Katniss at home, tells her the threat she didn't know she'd become, and watches her try to perform her way out of it on a Victory Tour that only spreads what she's accused of - and then announces the 75th Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell drawn from the existing pool of victors, sending Katniss back into an arena designed as a clock with twelve hourly terrors and a force field at its edge.

On Reaping Day in the coal-mining poverty of District 12, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister Prim's place in the 74th annual Hunger Games - the televised arena battle in which the Capitol forces twenty-four teenage tributes from twelve districts to kill each other on live broadcast - and the book that follows became, fairly, the YA dystopian novel by which all subsequent YA dystopian novels would be measured.

Two weeks after high school sophomore Hannah Baker kills herself, a shoebox arrives at Clay Jensen's house containing seven cassette tapes she recorded before she died - one side per person who contributed to the decision, thirteen reasons in all, with instructions to listen, pass them on, and not break the chain or the second set held by a watchful classmate gets released to the world.

Jack London's 1903 short novel: Buck, a 140-pound St. Bernard / Scotch Shepherd mix living the comfortable life on Judge Miller's California ranch, is stolen one night by a gambling-debt-saddled gardener's helper, sold into the Klondike Gold Rush as a sled dog, and slowly discovers - through cold, club, fang, and the man named John Thornton he comes to love - the wolf that has always been inside him.

Music therapist Kendra Michaels - blind for the first twenty years of her life, now sighted with the unnerving observational reflexes those twenty years built - is pulled out of the consulting work she's tried to leave behind by Adam Lynch, a former FBI agent known as the Puppetmaster, who arrives with a San Diego serial-stabbing case and the leverage that Kendra's ex-lover, FBI agent Jeff Stedler, has gone missing while investigating it.

After a New Hampshire car accident leaves wolf biologist Luke Warren in a vegetative state, his estranged gay son Edward flies home from Thailand and finds himself in legal combat with his teenage sister Cara over whether to remove their father's life support.

On the night a famous actor dies performing King Lear in Toronto, a deadly flu pandemic begins. Twenty years later, a traveling theater troupe performs Shakespeare for scattered survivors - and one of them carries a mysterious comic book given to her by the actor the night he died.

FBI agents Nicholas Drummond and Mike Caine hunt a descendant of Vlad the Impaler who commands a deadly drone army - and will stop at nothing to unlock an ancient manuscript he believes holds the cure for his dying brother.

LAPD Detective Renée Ballard works the graveyard shift, catching cases no one else wants. When two cases intersect dangerously, she must go rogue to find justice.

A stunning portrait of a geisha's life in pre-war and wartime Japan. Through the eyes of Sayuri, we witness the beauty, artistry, and complex world of geisha culture.

A psychological thriller exploring the dark secrets of a small English town where women have been drowning for centuries. When Nel Abbott dies in the same river, her sister Jules returns to uncover the truth.

Detective Billy Harney's life is turned upside down when he's framed for a murder he didn't commit, forcing him to navigate a web of corruption within his own police department.

A psychological thriller about a woman who returns to her hometown to face dark secrets from her past that threaten to destroy everything she's built.

A thoughtful exploration of the emotional and psychological aspects of clutter. Richardson goes beyond simple organizing tips to examine what our possessions reveal about our inner lives and relationships.

Norman Paperman - a middle-aged Broadway press agent who has just had a heart attack and decided he is done with New York - flies to the fictional Caribbean island of Amerigo (which the people who live there still call by its old British name, Kinja) with his millionaire friend Lester Atlas, buys a faltering resort called the Gull Reef Club, leaves his wife Henny and daughter Hazel back home while he tries to make a go of it, nearly drowns on his first day and is rescued by a Navy frogman named Bob Cohn, takes up with a former actress named Iris Tramm who lives at the club, watches the hotel's water and electrical systems fail in sequence, watches Atlas fire his irreplaceable handyman Hippolyte while he is briefly off-island, and ends the novel agreeing with Henny to sell the hotel and go home. Herman Wouk's 1965 comic novel, drawn from the six years he and his wife actually spent running a small hotel in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Tom Sawyer - a clever, talkative, frequently dishonest small-town Missouri boy living with his Aunt Polly and his brother Sid in the fictional St. Petersburg, modeled on Mark Twain's own boyhood Hannibal - whitewashes a fence by selling the right to whitewash it, falls for the new judge's daughter Becky Thatcher, witnesses the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe one midnight in the graveyard with his friend Huckleberry Finn, swears a blood oath of silence and breaks it on the witness stand at the wrong man's trial, runs away with Huck and Joe Harper to Jackson's Island and returns in time to attend his own funeral, gets lost with Becky in McDougal's Cave on a school picnic, and ends the novel splitting twelve thousand dollars in buried gold with Huck. Mark Twain's 1876 boyhood novel, set on the 1830s-1840s Mississippi, and read for a century and a half as the canonical version of American childhood - alongside racial content that still requires the reader to do the work.

Chariton of Aphrodisias's mid-first-century AD Greek romance - the oldest surviving complete prose novel - sends the supernaturally beautiful Callirhoe and her Syracusan husband Chaereas through entombment, pirates, slavery in Miletus, an adultery trial in Babylon before the Persian king Artaxerxes, an Egyptian rebellion, and a naval battle on their two-thousand-year-old way back to each other.

On a Memorial Day weekend Girl Scout campout at Apache Pass, twelve-year-old Jenny Brady and her tentmate Dora Matthews sneak off to smoke a cigarette and stumble onto the body of a murdered Phoenix heiress; when Dora turns up dead two days later, Sheriff Joanna Brady has to figure out who left the body for her own daughter to find before they come back for the second witness.

S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel - written while she was a junior in high school - opens on fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis getting jumped on his way home from a movie in Tulsa, and walks the next several days through a fountain killing, a hideout in an abandoned country church, a fire that saves schoolchildren, a rumble between greasers and Socs, a Robert Frost poem, and one of the more devastating closing arcs in YA literature.

George Orwell's 1945 fable: the animals of Manor Farm, inspired by an old prize boar named Major, rise up and drive out the drunk Mr. Jones, paint seven commandments on the barn wall, and over the next several years watch as two pigs - the idealist Snowball and the schemer Napoleon - turn the revolution into exactly the regime it was supposed to replace.

In the summer of 2009, recent college graduate Lindsey takes a nanny job for an influential Martha's Vineyard family and becomes close to their nearly-fifteen-year-old daughter Georgie - until a night by the lighthouse breaks the friendship and locks both women into a ten-year silence about what happened, in Julia Spiro's debut novel about class, complicity, and why people who survive things don't always speak.

Wedding photographer Libby McKenzie - newly home to Virginia after a divorce, multiple miscarriages, and her father's death - takes a job photographing a wedding at the Woodmont estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, becomes drawn to its honeysuckle-overgrown greenhouse, and pulls a thread that runs back through the estate's owner Elaine, a 1940s teen named Sadie, and the closed adoption Libby has carried questions about her whole life.

In Roxane Gay's short, administrative dystopia, every girl is tested at sixteen to see whether the state will license her to have a child of her own; Hadley failed, so she goes to the baby library, where unlicensed women can borrow an infant girl on a two-week loan.

An Ancestry.com match arrives in the inbox of a woman who has spent forty-plus years pretending the baby she gave up for adoption in 1964 never existed - and Cheryl Strayed traces, in a tight short story for Amazon's Out of Line collection, what happens when a teenager named Geraldine Waters has to integrate the life she actually lived with the one she's been telling.

Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning third novel: thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives the bombing of the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother, walks out of the rubble with Carel Fabritius's tiny 1654 painting of a chained goldfinch, and spends the next fourteen years carrying it from Park Avenue to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, alongside the most unforgettable problem child in recent fiction.

When a Cheviot Hills couple unearths an old hospital supply box with an infant skeleton from the early 1950s, then a nanny is found shot in a nearby park beside more recent infant bones picked clean and coated in beeswax, Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis follow two trails - one back to a 1950s pediatric nurse and a doctor in a rare Duesenberg, the other into the gated estate of movie stars Donny Rader and Prema Moon.

The closing volume of Greg Iles's Natchez Burning trilogy puts Dr. Tom Cage on trial for the murder of Viola Turner - his Black nurse, his decades-long lover, the mother of a son he never publicly acknowledged - while his son Penn Cage tries to defend a father who refuses to defend himself.

To pay for a lifetime of medical care for her six-year-old daughter Willow, who has severe osteogenesis imperfecta, Charlotte O'Keefe sues her best friend - Willow's obstetrician - for wrongful birth, forcing her to testify in open court that she would have terminated the pregnancy had she known.

A week before her wedding to Butch Dixon, Sheriff Joanna Brady is hit with two cases at once - her octogenarian neighbor Clayton Rhodes is found dead in his garage, and a woman freshly paroled for killing her husband is murdered, leaving her half-Apache fifteen-year-old daughter Lucy Ridder on the run with a red-tailed hawk and the diskette her father left her.

When free-spirited elderly widow Alice Rogers is found dead in the desert clutching an insulin vial - despite not being diabetic - Sheriff Joanna Brady investigates her greedy children, her mysterious younger boyfriend, and a web of land development corruption.

A memoir of growing up in a remote Kentucky holler in 1980s Appalachia, surviving an alcoholic, drug-dealing father, falling into her own cycles of abuse, and finding a path out through Berea College and graduate school.

When a gun dealer is murdered and his assault weapons stolen, Sheriff Joanna Brady follows a trail of sniper killings and scalped victims to a New Age dude ranch - while her best friend's adopted baby daughter faces a life-or-death heart transplant.

When high school valedictorian Brianna O'Brien is found murdered in remote Skeleton Canyon, her wealthy parents blame her forbidden Hispanic boyfriend - but Sheriff Joanna Brady suspects the family racism masks darker secrets involving smugglers using their land.

When the town veterinarian who killed a woman while driving drunk is found murdered by pitchfork in his burning barn, Sheriff Joanna Brady must prove that the obvious suspect - the victim grieving widower - is innocent while juggling multiple crises including a hostage situation involving her own daughter.

Sheriff Joanna Brady attends the Arizona Police Officers Academy for mandatory training, but when a serial killer begins targeting women on campus and a man sits in jail wrongly accused of murder, her coursework becomes a matter of life and death.

Two months into her job as the first female sheriff of Cochise County, Joanna Brady investigates when rancher Harold Patterson is found dead at the bottom of a mine pit - along with a second, older set of remains that raises disturbing questions about long-buried family secrets.

When her deputy husband is shot and killed in the Arizona desert - then accused of being a crooked cop - Joanna Brady refuses to accept the lies and launches her own investigation to clear his name and find his killer.

Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady investigates when two women with no apparent connection fall to their deaths from a local peak, uncovering a web of dark secrets in this seventeenth installment of the beloved series.

A 54-year-old advice columnist creates a TV show inspired by her grandmother's WWII story, and the cast becomes the family she didn't know she needed.

When two wounded souls cross paths in a small Washington town, they discover that sometimes the hardest battles are fought in the heart. A heartwarming story about finding hope and love after loss.

When a mysterious diary falls into his hands on New Year's Day, a rigid businessman embarks on a life-changing journey of tasks and self-discovery that connects him with a free-spirited woman and changes both their lives forever.

The summer after freshman year of college - the friends are scattered, changed, and struggling. The pants bring them together as they navigate who they're becoming.

The summer before college - the last summer of innocence, of being together, of the magic pants. Carmen, Tibby, Bridget, and Lena face their biggest transition yet.

The pants are back for a second summer as Carmen, Tibby, Bridget, and Lena face new challenges, deeper heartbreak, and the continued magic of their unbreakable friendship.

Four best friends, one pair of magical jeans, and a summer apart that brings them closer together. A heartwarming story about friendship, growth, and the bonds that hold us together.

Three lonely women living in the same apartment building form an unlikely friendship through notes, chance encounters, and the slow realization that connection is worth the risk.

A touching story about a grieving mother, a teenage runaway, and an eccentric clairvoyant who brings them together in a small Colorado mountain town. A gentle tale about loss, healing, and the bonds between mothers and children.

The first book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, introducing the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros through the eyes of the Stark family as they navigate political intrigue, ancient threats, and the deadly game of thrones where you win or you die.

A collection of eight brilliant science fiction short stories that explore the nature of consciousness, free will, language, and what it means to be human. Includes "Story of Your Life," the basis for the film Arrival.

After her sister Zoe is murdered, Echo struggles with grief and family secrets while trying to understand who her sister really was and what led to her death.

A timeless collection of brief stories featuring animals and mythical creatures that convey moral lessons about human nature, virtue, and wisdom through simple but profound narratives.

The epic conclusion to the Legend trilogy, where Day and June face impossible sacrifices as a deadly plague threatens to plunge the Republic and the Colonies back into war.

The second book in the Legend trilogy, where Day and June join the rebellion against the Republic, only to discover that the Patriots may be just as dangerous as their enemies.

The first book in Marie Lu's dystopian trilogy about Day, the Republic's most wanted criminal, and June, the prodigy tasked with hunting him down.

A psychological thriller about a woman whose perfect life is systematically stolen by someone claiming to be her, forcing her to question everything she thought she knew about her identity.

A motivational self-help book that encourages women to stop believing lies about themselves and start living authentically. Rachel Hollis shares personal stories and practical advice for overcoming self-doubt.