Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards
I am socially awkward and I have a very public job, which is a more common combination than anyone talks about. I spend a lot of my time masking extroversion.
Books That Rewired How I See the Natural World
The genre has a reputation for being earnest in the wrong way, for sentences that try so hard to be beautiful that they forget to be true. The best nature writing is something else entirely. It's science and grief and gratitude and close attention, all working together in the same paragraph. The books on this list are the ones that changed how I actually look at things.
Reading for Yourself: Read Like Nobody's Watching Post 4 (Part 4 of 4)
Who benefits from me reading one hundred books a year? Not me, particularly. The number looks good in a year-end post. But I don't feel the benefit of it. I feel the pressure of it, which is a different thing entirely.
The Dialogue Readers: Read Like Nobody's Watching (Part 3 of 4)
Book culture online has made volume a status signal. Fifty books a year is respectable. A hundred is impressive. When the incentive is finishing books rather than inhabiting them, you start making optimization decisions. You find the dialogue, use it as a modern CliffsNotes, and add the book to your list. What you do not do is read the book.
What Are You Actually Reading For? Read Like Nobody's Watching (Part 2 of 4)
I picked up The Bookshop Below because someone else chose it. I didn't ask myself what I was in the mood for. I didn't ask what kind of reading experience I wanted that month. I just said yes to the book club pick and showed up.
The Performance Layer: Read Like Nobody's Watching (part 1 of 4)
There is a version of being a reader that has very little to do with reading. It's organized around the performance of reading. The right shelves, the right editions, the right haul. The aesthetic is so well-developed it has its own grammar, its own visual language, its own hierarchy of status objects.
The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker
Priya Parker turns her attention to conflict; arguing that fighting, done right, is not a failure of a relationship but proof of one.
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
Pollan doesn't gloss over the gaps with confident theory. He revels in the uncertainty, and that makes this one of the more intellectually honest popular science books in recent memory. Also: Venus flytraps can be anesthetized. Read it and try not to think about that for the rest of the week.
Mattering by Jennifer Breheny Wallace
The most actionable takeaway is also the simplest. Reach out to the people in your life. Make sure they know they matter to you. Don't assume they know. Tell them.
Fiction: Novels for Readers Who Take Reading Seriously
These are five novels I've read and loved that do something more than tell a good story. They're about what stories are for.
Half His Age by Jeannette McCurdy
Jeannette McCurdy's Half His Age is a DNF, but not because the writing fails. It succeeds too completely. A review of a book I couldn't finish and why that says nothing about whether you should read it.
Books That Made Me Forget My Phone
There's a reason this one has a chokehold on the reading internet. Pip Fitz-Amobi reopens a closed murder case for her school capstone project, and what starts as an overachiever's homework assignment becomes something she can't walk away from. Every answer creates two more questions. I finished this in a day and immediately started the second book.
Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco
How many others had foolishly underestimated the Prince of Sloth? Had mistaken his penchant for reading all day for laziness instead of what it truly was— honing the best weapon in his arsenal: his mind.
This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page
A young widow receives her late husband's final gift: one book a month for a year, each one chosen because he knew her completely. Grab the tissues.
Do Audiobooks Count as Reading? Brain Science Has the Receipts
If you've ever finished an audiobook and felt the urge to qualify it (just listened to, technically didn't read, sort of finished), this post is for you. The question of whether audiobooks count as reading is one of the most-asked book questions on the internet, and almost all of the answers are bad.
Most responses either dismiss the worry as snobbery, or quietly side with the snobs. Neither is useful. The actual answer is more interesting, and it has been sitting in peer-reviewed journals for a decade.
The Complete Reader's Guide to Delemhach
My indie bookstore owner pressed The House Witch into my hands and said, "oh, you will love this." Three series and ten books later, I understand completely why the community around these books is as passionate as it is.
Best Cozy Fantasy Books for When You Need a Soft Reset
The problem is that most lists of cozy fantasy lump in books that are merely lower-stakes than your average grimdark trilogy. That is not the same as cozy. Cozy is a deliberate emotional architecture. Slow tempo. Small stakes. Found family. A protagonist who is kind on purpose. A world that rewards patience and noticing small things.
I have read over nine hundred books and I have opinions.
Best Books for Dads (2026)
No Atomic Habits. No Brené Brown (I have read six of them). No 7 Habits, no Daily Stoic, no Adam Grant. Not because they are bad books, but because your dad already owns them, has been gifted them, or has actively declined them at least once. The point of a no-generic-picks list is that the gift should read like a recommendation from someone who actually knows him.