Recommended reading

See a sample of the books we love and share.

Author

Bobbie Johnson
April 04, 2024

Curious Reading Club is still new. So we don't have a long list of books we've shared with our members in the past. But here are some of our recent picks, and a few books that would have made our monthly picks in the past (and who knows, they may still come up in the future.)

Our current book of the month

October 2024
On Tyranny: Graphic Edition
Words by Timothy Snyder, Illustrations by Nora Krug

“Lessons from history that helped contextualize today; to grasp what really happens when a society is falling down; to see what danger really looks like.”

Previous books of the month

September 2024
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, And Ourselves
Nicola Twilley

“Nicola manages to combine history, science and food to show us something new about modern life, with detailed, lively tales that give you a sense of constant discovery and revelation”.

August 2024
Another Word For Love: A Memoir
Carvell Wallace

“A sweet, savage, optimistic examination of what it means to be human.” (Buy now)

July 2024
Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life
Ferris Jabr
"Combines poetic portraits of the ordinary and approachable with a thrilling look at some of the most awe-inspiring sights in the natural world." (Buy now)

June 2024
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
Carl Elliott

"Even if it shows systems at their worst, people are standing up—and we are here, reading about them, hearing them." (Buy now)

"The book starts by looking at a tragedy that happened in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, but it ends up going much further." (Buy now)

Other recent favorites

Here are some of reads that would have made the club in the past.

cover of An Immense World, featurin a monkey and a butterfly connected by a series of almost invisible threadss

This intimate study of animal senses combines scientific detail with a talent for description that will turn your understanding of the world inside out. It shows how little we comprehend about the environment around us, what drives the differences between species, and takes you deep inside all kinds of perception and intelligence. I'll never think the same way about taking my dog for a walk.

Cover of Arbitrary Stupid Goal, a bold half-pink, half-yellow page featuring a line drawing of a woman in football gear about to kick a ball on the ground.

If you were born into a riotous, colorful world stuffed with unique, almost legendary characters—in this case a bohemian restaurant in 1970s Greenwich village captained by the author's brash and singular father, Kenny—then maybe you could have the right experiences to tell a story like this. But to write about it with such a deft touch? To make it so humane and funny and riveting, without ever being caricature? That takes a prodigious amount of work and a tremendous approach to craft. This book always teeters on the edge of chaos, but—just like the restaurant—stays in control the whole time.

Cover of Bullshit Jobs, featuring pencils, paper clips and elastic bands tied together to form a version of a crucifix.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory - David Graeber 
(Simon & Schuster, 2018)

There are plenty of bad jobs out there, and maybe you've even had a few. But Graeber argues with conviction that there are, perhaps, an even larger number of "bullshit jobs"—the meaningless employment that everybody knows contribute nothing and yet nobody can get rid of. Graeber tears a new one into the system that forges this depressing reality and encourages people to push paper from one place to another merely to satisfy some boss's desire for power, or undertake tasks that are so purposely, pointlessly Sisyphean that you will gasp in disbelief.

Cover of Caste, focused on bold white text with the title and subtitles, laid or a dark picture of a crowd of black and white Americans from the 1960s.

I don't think there's been a book that surgically slices through the American myth of meritocracy as sharply as this. Wilkerson argues that America's racial divide is a fully-fledged but thoroughly disguised caste system, much like exists in India or Nazi Germany. In fact, the parallels to the Reich aren't just chilling—Wilkerson makes it clear that, in many cases, the Nazis were inspired by what they saw in the United States.

The cover of Silent Spring, featuring a leaf pattern imprinted on a green background. Blocked out on the leaf is a silhouette of a swallow.

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson 
(Houghton Mifflin, 1962)

It's possible that the green movement would have grown during the 1960s and 1970s without this book, but it seems unlikely that it would have gained the same momentum or taken the same shape. Carson's astonishing and clear-eyed expose of the perils of excessive pesticide use—and examined the terrifying environmental consequences of the liberal application of DDT—led pretty directly to the banning of various substances, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Cover of The Undocumented Americans, featuring an illustration of a red flower with faded immigration documents in the background.

There are lots of stories about migrants and their families, but they rarely get told with such sensitivity and dedication. Villavicencio, a young undocumented writer herself, really goes inside the system to show how it grinds away at the people stuck inside it. She doesn't shy away from her anger, or the heaviness of the subject. But somehow her eye and her ability to capture the real people she's meeting propel you through and on to the other side.

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