- Art + Crafts and Cooking
- Biography and Memoir
- Culture
- Health and Human Biology
- History
- Philosophy and Religion
- Science and Nature
- Adventure and Comedy
- Historical Fiction
- Magical Realism
- Mystery and Thriller
- Relationships and Personalities
- Roman à Clef and Autofiction
- Social Commentary
- Southern Gothic
- Adventure and Comedy
- Historical Fiction
- Fantasy and Paranormal
- Magical Realism
- Mystery and Thriller
- Relationships and Personalities
- Social Commentary
- Poetry
† Review coming soon!
Nonfiction
Art + Crafts and Cooking
Appetites by Anthony Bourdain
The Betty Crocker cookbook by the General Mills Betty Crocker Kitchens
The big Texas cookbook by the ed. of Texas Monthly
Cherry bombe: The cookbook ed. by Kerry Diamond and Claudia Wu
The cookbook library: Four centuries of the cooks, writers, and recipes that made the modern cookbook by Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky
Cooking for geeks: Real science, great hacks, and good food by Jeff Potter
Cool beans by Joe Yonan
Feminist cross-stitch by Stephanie Rohr
The food lab: Better home cooking through science by J. Kenji López-Alt
Good drinks: Alcohol-free recipes for when you’re not drinking for whatever reason by Julia Bainbridge
A hastiness of cooks by Cynthia D. Bertelsen
Houston cooks ed. by Francine Spiering
Indian-ish: Recipes and antics from a modern American family by Priya Krishna
The Smitten Kitchen cookbook by Deb Perelman
Vegetarian cooking for everyone by Deborah Madison
Biography and Memoir
All creatures great and small by James Herriot
Ancestor trouble: A reckoning and a reconciliation by Maud Newton
The egg and I by Betty MacDonald
French lessons: Adventures with a knife, fork, and corkscrew by Peter Mayle
I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou
Incidents in the life of a slave girl by Harriet Jacobs
Letters of a woman homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Locally laid: How we built a plucky industry-changing egg farm — from scratch by Lucie B. Amundsen
A moveable feast by Ernest Hemingway
Night by Elie Wiesel
Relish: My life in the kitchen by Lucy Knisley
The Romanovs: 1613–1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
The story of my experiments with truth by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Up from slavery by Booker T. Washington
West with the night by Beryl Markham
The wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser
A year in Provence by Peter Mayle
Culture
Better than beauty: A guide to charm by Helen Valentine and Alice Thompson
The classic ten: The true story of the little black dress and nine other fashion favorites by Nancy MacDonnell Smith
Color stories: Behind the scenes of America’s billion-dollar beauty industry by Mary Lisa Gavenas
The fangirl’s guide to the galaxy by Sam Maggs
Manufacturing consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
The meaning of flowers by Gretchen Scoble and Ann Field
Popular: Vintage wisdom for a modern geek by Maya Van Wagenen
Rising: Dispatches from the new American shore by Elizabeth Rush
Slouching towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion †
Wine folly by Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack
100 flowers and how they got their names by Diana Wells
Health and Human Biology
Allergic: Our irritated bodies in a changing world by Theresa MacPhail
The birth of the pill: How four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution by Jonathan Eig
Bonk: The curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach
The double helix: A personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA by James D. Watson
The emergency: A year of healing and heartbreak in a Chicago ER by Thomas Fisher
A scientific revolution: Ten men and women who reinvented American medicine by Ralph H. Hruban and William Linder
The seven daughters of Eve: The science that reveals our genetic ancestry by Bryan Sykes
Sperm wars: Infidelity, sexual conflict, and other bedroom battles by Robin Baker
What the eyes don’t see: A story of crisis, resistance, and hope in an American city by Mona Hanna-Attisha
History
The astronaut wives club by Lily Koppel
The book: A cover-to-cover exploration of the most powerful object of our time by Keith Houston
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Chocolate wars: The 150-year rivalry between the world’s greatest chocolate makers by Deborah Cadbury
Consider the fork: A history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson
Empire of sin: A story of sex, jazz, murder, and the battle for modern New Orleans by Gary Krist
The fishermen and the dragon: Fear, greed, and a fight for justice on the Gulf Coast by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Founding brothers: The revolutionary generation by Joseph J. Ellis
From silk to silicon: The story of globalization through ten extraordinary lives by Jeffrey E. Garten
The girls who went away by Ann Fessler
The guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
Hawaii’s story by Hawaii’s queen by Lili’uokalani
Healing a divided nation: How the American Civil War revolutionized Western medicine by Carole Adrienne
Helter skelter: The true story of the Manson murders by Vincent Bugliosi †
The rise and fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
The road to Dr Pepper, Texas: The story of Dublin Dr Pepper by Karen Wright
Ten days in a mad-house by Nellie Bly
100 million years of food: What our ancestors ate and why it matters today by Stephen Le
Philosophy and Religion
Man’s search for meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard †
Reason for hope: A spiritual journey by Jane Goodall
Science and Nature
The birds of America by John James Audubon
The book that changed America: How Darwin’s theory of evolution ignited a nation by Randall Fuller
Galileo’s middle finger: Heretics, activists, and the search for justice in science by Alice Dreger
The greatest show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
Headstrong: 52 women who changed science — and the world by Rachel Swaby
Hidden figures: The American dream and the untold story of the black women mathematicians who helped win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly
In the shadow of Man by Jane Goodall
The invention of science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750 by David Wootton
The monkey’s voyage: How improbable journeys shaped the history of life by Alan de Queiroz
Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson
The next species: The future of evolution in the aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen
The only woman in the room: Why science is still a boys’ club by Eileen Pollack
The sea around us by Rachel Carson
The silent world by Jacques-Yves Cousteau †
The six: The untold story of America’s first women astronauts by Loren Grush
This is what you just put in your mouth: From eggnog to beef jerky, the surprising secrets of what’s inside everyday products by Patrick Di Justo
Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Wildlife of the Concho Valley by Terry Maxwell
Your inner fish: A journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body by Neil Shubin
Fiction
Adventure and Comedy
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes †
Gentlemen prefer blondes by Anita Loos
The hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
The mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley †
The merry adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy †
The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Historical Fiction
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Freeman by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Gone with the wind by Margaret Mitchell
The good earth by Pearl S. Buck
The good old boys by Elmer Kelton
How green was my valley by Richard Llewellyn
The hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Magical Realism
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Mystery and Thriller
The adventures and memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
And then there were none by Agatha Christie
Crocodile on the sandbank by Elizabeth Peters
The Maltese falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The name of the rose by Umberto Eco †
The postman always rings twice by James M. Cain
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Riptide by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Relationships and Personalities
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The barefoot queen by Ildefonso Falcones
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons †
The color purple by Alice Walker
Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac †
The house of mirth by Edith Wharton
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan †
Lone star legend by Gwendolyn Zepeda
Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore
The personality of the cat and The personality of the dog ed. by Brandt Aymar
The shipping news by Annie Proulx
A single man by Christopher Isherwood †
The tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu †
Tevye the Milkman by Sholem Aleichem †
We are pirates by Daniel Handler
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Roman à Clef and Autofiction
The bell jar by Sylvia Plath
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Social Commentary
The awakening by Kate Chopin
Cane by Jean Toomer †
A contract with God and other tenement stories by Will Eisner
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Middlemarch by George Eliot
North and south by Elizabeth Gaskell
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey †
Passing by Nella Larsen †
Season of migration to the north by Tayeb Salih †
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Their eyes were watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh †
We are what we pretend to be by Kurt Vonnegut
The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Southern Gothic
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Speculative Fiction
Fantasy and Paranormal
Child of a hidden sea by A.M. Dellamonica
A darker shade of magic by V.E. Schwab
The dinosaur lords by Victor Milán
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
His majesty’s dragon; League of dragons by Naomi Novik
The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Mistborn; The well of ascension; The hero of ages by Brandon Sanderson
A natural history of dragons by Marie Brennan
The once and future king by T.H. White
Soulless; Changeless; Blameless; Heartless; Timeless by Gail Carriger
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
A wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Wizard’s first rule by Terry Goodkind
The wood beyond the world by William Morris
Horror
The blind owl by Sadegh Hedayat
The call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft
A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
The haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Rosemary’s baby by Ira Levin
The turn of the screw by Henry James
Mythology and Folktales
The Arabian nights by Anonymous, transl. by Antoine Galland and Edward William Lane, ed. by Muhsin al-Musawi †
The complete Brothers Grimm fairy tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry by W.B. Yeats
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous, transl. by Simon Armitage
Sci-Fi and Dystopia
Animal farm by George Orwell
The circle by Dave Eggers
The Eyre affair by Jasper Fforde
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood
The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Martian chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Ready player one by Ernest Cline
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
The time machine by H.G. Wells
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
The word exchange by Alena Graedon
Poetry and Theater
Poetry
Poems and fragments by Sappho
The rime of the ancient mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Shakespeare’s sonnets by William Shakespeare
Theater
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
Children’s and Teens’
Adventure and Comedy
All four stars by Tara Dairman
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
The phantom tollbooth by Norton Juster †
The story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome †
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Historical Fiction
Boxers; Saints by Gene Luen Yang
Blood red, snow white by Marcus Sedgwick
Rose under fire by Elizabeth Wein
Under a painted sky by Stacy Lee
Walk on Earth a stranger by Rae Carson
Wonder at the edge of the world by Nicole Helget
Fantasy and Paranormal
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The book jumper by Mechthild Gläser
The burning sky; The perilous sea; The immortal heights by Sherry Thomas
Clariel by Garth Nix
Deep blue by Jennifer Donnelly
The diviners by Libba Bray
The enchanted castle by E. Nesbit
The girl of fire and thorns; The crown of embers; The bitter kingdom by Rae Carson
The golden compass by Philip Pullman
Howl’s moving castle Diana Wynne Jones †
Illusionarium by Heather Dixon
The life and adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
The little mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
The owl service by Alan Garner
Pip Bartlett’s guide to magical creatures by Jackson Pearce and Maggie Stiefvater
The rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
Splintered by A.G. Howard
Magical Realism
The game of love and death by Martha Brockenbrough
Going bovine by Libba Bray
Mystery and Thriller
The devil you know by Trish Doller
The walls around us by Nova Ren Suma
Relationships and Personalities
All the bright places by Jennifer Niven
All we have is now by Lisa Schroeder
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
A little princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett †
My true love gave to me by Stephanie Perkins, et al.
Proof of forever by Lexa Hillyer
The season by Jonah Lisa and Stephen Dyer
Summer days and summer nights by Stephanie Perkins, et al.
Things we know by heart by Jessie Kirby
A tree grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Social Commentary
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
The chocolate war by Robert Cormier
The jungle book by Rudyard Kipling
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Poetry
Goblin market by Christina Rossetti
How the Grinch stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
Old Possum’s book of practical cats by T.S. Eliot