Since you’re here, you already know how reading helps you in uncountable ways. So, here we present to you 5 of the best books that you can add to your list:
1. The Books of Jacob
The Polish Nobel laureate has created a mind-boggling and haunting masterpiece with this magnificent feat of historical imagination. Jennifer Croft’s obvious translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s epic poem captures the savior’s ambition of 18th-century Eastern Europe with a supernaturally calm and generous intelligence.
2. Chilean poet
Parenting and poetry are equally bewildering professions in this stunningly freewheeling novel, tirelessly translated by Megan McDowell. Alejandro Zambra’s seriocomical portrayal deals with a devoted writer and stepfather, even when troubled, and deals more with domestic life than metaphysics.
3. An Immense world
How Animal Senses Reveal Hidden Areas Around Us
We see, touch, hear, smell, and taste, but the earth is full of senses beyond human perception. Ed Yong, a science writer for the Atlantic, notes that every animal, from beetles to electric eels, from whiskered mice to whales, is, like us, “enclosed within its unique sensory bubble.” Vividly describing other creatures’ senses (the ultraviolet sight of bumblebees, the exquisite echolocation ability of dolphins), Mr. Yong enlarges our awe of William Blake’s “immense world of delight.”
4. The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
In a year defined by inflation and sinking asset prices, Christopher Leonard’s character-driven narrative of Federal Reserve decision-making provides insight into how we got here. The author takes us into the halls of power and highlights the workers, investors, and entrepreneurs whose strategies were distorted by years of near-zero interest rates. Their stories illuminate how startlingly little the Fed’s policymakers understand about how their actions affect Main Street.
5. One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World
Attending a lecture on the history of fascism, the writer Michael Frank found himself in a conversation with a woman whose interest in the subject was more than academic:
Nonagenarian Stella Levi had been deported as a child to Auschwitz from the Mediterranean island of Rhodes. Over the years to come, their weekly meetings became a journey into her unforgettable memories of love, tragedy, hard-won survival—and the vanished world of a once-vibrant community.