Recommended reading

Curious Reading Club is just a year old, so our archive of books we’ve shared doesn’t go back too far. But here are the titles we’ve picked in the past.

Our current book of the month

April 2025
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World
Henry Grabar

“Fills its pages with a cast of memorable characters: wily parking garage owners, obsessive developers wrestling with the system, money-mad politicians and planners who are frankly out of their tree.” (Read more)

Previous books of the month

March 2025
What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

“My brain started finding connections between these people’s ideas and my own life; new questions began appearing that I didn’t even know I had; and I felt wired into a different, more optimistic way of dealing with a global challenge.” (Read more)

February 2025
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
Adam Higginbotham

“Higginbotham sifts through mountains of documents and fresh interviews to carefully layer a blow-by-blow description that keeps you gripped as it creeps towards its tragic denouement.” (Buy now)

January 2025
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
Annalee Newitz

“How the nation’s taste for conspiracy theories and disinformation has turned from a weapon deployed by the military into an arsenal used to fight domestic culture wars.” (Buy now)

December 2024
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Kyle Chayka

“A book that explores how the internet takes an almost infinite landscape of ideas and ends up grinding it up into a kind of creative equivalent of pink slime.” (Buy now)

November 2024
By The Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight For Justice on Native Land
Rebecca Nagle

“A single crime becomes a locus for a detailed examination of US history, power, and control.” (Buy now)

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.” (Buy now)

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”. (Buy now)

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)

May 2024
A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging
Lauren Markham 

"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)

Disclosure: Every time somebody clicks on one of our links and buys a book on our recommendation from Bookshop.org, we earn a small affiliate fee. This does not impact our choices or decisions, but helps sustain Curious Reading Club.