Book Nominations for 2025 (QUICK REFERENCE - SUMMARIES ARE FOUND AT THE END OF THIS LIST) 

* Denotes the books chosen with the most members' votes

*1. All the Light We Cannont See by Anthony Doerr 

2. The Appalachian Trail: A Biography by Philip D'Anieri

*3. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

4. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

5. Atonement by Ian McEwan

*6. Between Two Kingdoms:  A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

7. Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny

8. Brunelleschi's Dome. How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King 

*9. The Coroner's Lunch by Coiln Coterill 

10. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

11. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

12. The Door by Magda Szabo

*13. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

14. Exit West: a Novel by Mohsin Hamid

15. Exodus:  A Novel of Israel by Leon Uris

16.Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark 

*17. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

*18. James: A Novel by Percival Everett

19. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

20. The Liar by Martin A. Hansen

21. The Liars Club, by Mary Karr

22. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

23. Mila 18 by Leon Uris

24. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

25. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

*26. The Overstory by Richard Powers

*27. Pachinko by Min Lee

*28. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe by Laurie Lisle

29. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

30. The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

31. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

32. The Rosie Project (A Don Tillman series)   by Graeme Simsion

33. The Answer is... Reflections on my life by Alex Trebek

34. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

*35. The Tiger by John Vaillant

36. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

37. Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin

*38. Your Presence is Mandatory by Sasha Visilyuk

Book Nomination Summaries (2025) 

*1. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr  

Pub. 2014, 544 pages (paperback). All formats.

Genre: Historical Fiction

This book won the Pulitzer Prize and was published in 2014. The book is about a blind French girl and a German orphan who cross paths during World War II. According to some, the book is "a moving hymn to the defiant human spirit". 

2. The Appalachian Trail: A Biography by Philip D’Anieri

Pub. 2021. 226 pages. All formats.

Genre: Nonfiction

The ten chapters in this book cover the key people and local hiking clubs that were instrumental in developing the Appalachian Trail, early trailblazing hikers, government partnership through federal legislative acts, Bill Bryson’s ‘tour’ of his hike on the trail, and the author’s description of his short hikes on the AT in each state it traverses. According to the book jacket, “The 2,000-mile-long hike from Georgia to Maine is not just a trail through the woods, but a set of ideas about nature etched in the forest floor.”  

*3. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Pub. 1925; 292 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

1926 Pulitzer Prize winner, Arrowsmith is the incisive portrait of a man passionately devoted to science. As a bright, curious boy in a small Midwestern town, Martin Arrowsmith spends his free time in old Doc Vicerson’s office avidly devouring medical texts. Destined to become a physician and a researcher, he discovers that societal forces of ignorance, greed, and corruption can be as life-threatening as the plague.

It’s a surprisingly relevant story to today.

Part satire, part morality tale, this novel illuminates the mystery and power of science while giving enduring life to a singular American hero’s struggle for integrity and intellectual freedom in a small-minded world.

4. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein 

Pub.2008, 321 pages. All formats

Genre: Fiction

The book is narrated by Enzo the dog, who talks about his owner who is a race car driver. The book is about family and relationships, resilience, and makes some comparisons to race car driving and life. It has been banned by some school systems due to the main character in the book is falsely accused of sexual molestation. 336 pages in soft cover book.

5. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Pub. 2001; 351 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

*6. Between Two Kingdoms:  A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Pub. 2021; 352 pages.  All formats.

Genre:  Memoir/Autobiography

A moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces a young woman’s journey from diagnosis to healing and a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip of self-discovery.  After graduating from college, Suleika was preparing to enter “the real world” and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent.  Her real world was interrupted by a diagnosis of cancer and a fight for survival.  She chronicled her journey in a New York Times column and her story is one of triumph and how to begin again.  She learned that the divide between sickness and wellness is porous, and that a vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives.

7. Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny

Pub. 2023; 257 pages (hardback). All formats.

Genre: Nonfiction

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River to survey and catalog the plant life along the Colorado. Science journalist Sevigny traces their forty-three-day journey down the river using letters and diaries of the two women.  Accompanied by an expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen, the two women faced the dangerous conditions of running the Colorado as well as the skepticism and criticism towards female river runners. Historical details surrounding the Colorado fill out the story of this expedition. 

8. Brunelleschi's Dome. How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King. 

Pub. 2013; 167 pages (paperback). All formats.

Genre: Nonfiction

The book is about the construction of a dome over the Cathedral of Maria del Fiore in 1418 in Florence, Italy. It also sheds light on life in 15th century Italy. Although it has a lot of details on engineering which can be difficult to comprehend for some, it is a fascinating read.

*9. The Coroner's Lunch by Coiln Coterill 

Pub. 2004; 257 pages. All formats. 

Genre: Fiction

The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Most of the educated class has fled, but Dr. Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor whose late wife had been an ardent Communist, remains. And so, this 72-year-old physician is appointed state coroner, despite the fact that he has no training or even supplies to use in performing his new task. What he does have is curiosity and integrity. At his age he is not about to let a bunch of ignorant bureaucrats dictate to him. One of his first cases involves three bodies recovered from a reservoir, but Dr. Siri establishes that the cause of death was not drowning. These men seem to have been electrocuted, perhaps tortured, and they also seem to be Vietnamese, which could have international repercussions. And then there is the inexplicable death of a Party bigwig's equally important wife. She collapsed and died at a banquet. But Dr. Siri doesn't think her death was from natural causes. In the course of his investigations, Dr. Siri must travel to his birthplace, a Hmong village he has not visited for more than 60 years, where he makes a profound discovery, not only about the motive for several murders, but about himself.

"If Cotterill, a British social services worker who has lived in Laos, had done nothing more than treat us to Siri's views on the dramatic, even comic crises that mark periods of government upheaval, his debut mystery would still be fascinating. But the multiple cases spread out on Siri's examining table -- including the assassination of a delegation of visiting Vietnamese, the murder of a high-ranking party official's wife and the presence of spies on Siri's own turf -- are not cozy entertainments, but substantial crimes that take us into the thick of political intrigue." - The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio.

10. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Pub: 2023; 736 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

From Amazon:

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

bookrerporter.com review

https://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/the-covenant-of-water

11. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
Pub. 1605/1615; All formats.

Genre: Fiction

The plot revolves around the adventures of a member of the lowest nobility, an hidalgo from La Mancha named Alonso Quijano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and serve his nation under the name Don Quixote de La Mancha. He recruits as his squire a farm laborer, Sancho Panza. As the story evolves, the outlooks of these characters undergo changes. 

This book is considered by some a founding work of Western literature and often said to be the first modern novel. (Accessed from Wikipedia.) 

12. The Door by Magda Szabo

Pub.1987; 288 pages. Paperback

Genre: Fiction

Description      An exploration of the relationship between two women. One an educated writer and the other an illiterate peasant housekeeper.

13. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Pub. 2020. 225 pages. (Main text) All formats. 

Genre: Nonfiction

“Merlin Sheldrake’s exploration of this astonishing kingdom of life reveals how fungi – and out relationships with them – are changing our understanding of how the world works. Bringing to light science’s latest discoveries, he points up toward the fundamental questions that fungi provoke about the nature of life, intelligence, and identity. (Accessed from the book jacket.) Scientific details about fungi create wonder, amazement, and questions. 

14. Exit West: a Novel by Mohsin Hamid

Pub. 2017; Hard copy, audiobook, kindle

Genre: Fiction

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . ..

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

15. Exodus:  A Novel of Israel by Leon Uris

Pub. November 1, 1983 – 608 pages – all formats

Genre:  Historical Fiction

Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon—the towering novel of the twentieth century’s most dramatic geopolitical event.  Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies—the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power.  Here is the tale that swept the world with its fury: the story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era. Here is Exodus—one of the great bestselling novels of all time.   (From Amazon books)

Recent Review (June 2024):  This book is as relevant today as when it was written. The plight of the Jews and the creation of the State of Israel is both fascinating and entertaining. This is a book of tragedy, redemption, and hope. I encourage anyone to read it, regardless of religious background. You will also find excellent character development.

16.Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark 

Pub. 2022; 608 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

From Amazon:

Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly.

Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She strives to create beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself?

Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.

bookreporter.com review

https://www.bookreporter.com/features/bookreportercom-bets-on/fellowship-point

*17. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Pub. August 2023 – 385 pages – all formats 

Genre:  A mix of historical fiction, literary fiction, and murder mystery 

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.  As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.  (From Goodreads) According the the NYT’s Book Review, this book is “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel”. 

*18. James: A Novel by Percival Everett

Pub.2024; 302 pages. Hardcover, Paperback, Large print, eBook, and Audiobook

 Genre: Fiction

An enslaved man debates John Locke. A Black man pretends to be a white man in blackface to sing in a new minstrel show. In a fever dream of a retelling, the new reigning king of satire, Percival Everett, has turned one of America's best loved classics, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, upside down, placing Huck's enslaved companion Jim at the center and making him the narrator. The result is strangely new and familiar – an adrenaline-spiking adventure with absurdity and tragedy blended together.

Re-imaginings of classic literature are challenging, often unnecessary endeavors. This one is different, a startling homage and a new classic in its own right. Readers may be surprised by how much of the original scaffolding remains and how well the turnabout works, swapping a young man's moral awakening for something even more fraught. A kind of historical heist novel about human cargo, as in the original, James is an enslaved man in antebellum Missouri. James loves his wife Sadie and their 9-year-old daughter Lizzie and keeps them safe by not just adhering to – but mastering – the racial codes of an inhumane system. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations.

19. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Pub. 2022; 347 pages. All formats 
Genre: Fiction 

Fiction novel with entertaining subplots and witty dialog. It tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, who becomes a beloved cooking show host in 1960's Southern California after being fired as a chemist four years earlier. [Adapted into an Apple + TV miniseries in 2023.)

20. The Liar by Martin A. Hansen

Pub.1987; 248 pages. Paperback

Genre: Fiction

Description      The Liar tells the story of Johannes Lye, a teacher and parish clerk on a Danish island that in winter is cut off from the world by ice.  Hansen beautifully evokes the stark landscape of Sand Island, the circuit of the seasons as well as the mysterious passage of time in the human heart.

21. The Liars Club, by Mary Karr. 

Pub. 1995; 320 pages. All formats.

Genre: Memoir

4 on The New York Times’ list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation

“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet’s ear.” —Oprah.com

The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.

22. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Pub. 2021; 592 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

23. Mila 18 by Leon Uris

December 1, 1983 – 576 pages – all formats 

Genre:  Historical Fiction 

It was a time of crisis, a time of tragedy—and a time of transcendent courage and determination.  Leon Uris's blazing novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.  (From Amazon books)

24. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Pub. 1925; 240 pages. Paperback

Genre: Fiction

Description:    A vivid portrait of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party and reflects on her past and her memories.

25. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Pub. 2012; 480 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction (Historical) 

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.

“Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which [Adam] Johnson is painting here.”—The Washington Post

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master’s Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today’s greatest writers.

*26. The Overstory by Richard Powers

Pub: 2018; 612 pages. All formats 

Genre: Fiction

(From blinkist.org)

“The Overstory by Richard Powers is a thought-provoking novel that weaves together the stories of nine individuals whose lives are touched by trees. It explores the profound connection between humans and the natural world.”

“As the story progresses, these characters' lives intersect in various ways, and they all become involved in environmental activism. They are united by their shared belief in the interconnectedness of all living things, a concept that is central to the novel. They come to see trees as more than just a resource, but as complex, intelligent beings that play a crucial role in the survival of the planet.”

*27. Pachinko by Min Lee

Pub: 2017; 490 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

(From nationalbook.org) 

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.

So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.

*28. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe by Laurie Lisle

Pub. 1997; 408 pages. All formats

Genre: Nonfiction (Biography)

This admiring and honest biography relates the story of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). Raised on a Wisconsin farm in a family of "irrepressible individualists," Georgia O'Keeffe is a self-reliant child who decides early to become an artist. She works steadily toward that goal, attending art schools and teaching when family misfortunes dictate. In 1916, a friend sends some of her drawings to Alfred Steiglitz, renowned photographer and champion of avant-garde art. He promptly exhibits them, proclaiming that they reveal "a woman on paper." Furious at his presumption, Georgia O'Keefe confronts him. They become lovers and later marry, beginning an energetic collaboration that lasts until his death. She wants to have a baby, but he insists that she choose between motherhood and art. He promotes her work, which immediately becomes famous for its sexually suggestive imagery, an interpretation she resolutely denies. Finding it increasingly difficult to live in his orbit, she gradually establishes a pattern of spending six months with him in New York and six months apart in New Mexico, her "spiritual home." By the time Alfred Steiglitz dies in 1946, Georgia O'Keeffe has firmly established herself as an artist. "Besides having a rich talent, ambition, assistance, and virtually no doubt about the validity of her vision, O'Keeffe had the brains to match her artistic gift and guide its flowering." As she examines Georgia O'Keeffe's complex personality, her choices and her reactions to the social and physical landscape around her, Laurie Lisle succeeds in drawing an inspiring portrait of a truly original, courageous woman. 

29. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 

Pub. 2021; 496 pages, All formats

Genre: Science Fiction

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

From the author of The Martian, a lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this “propulsive” (Entertainment Weekly), cinematic thriller full of suspense, humor, and fascinating science.

30. The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

Pub. 2021; 373 pages. Paperback

Genre: Fiction

Description      A heartwarming novel about how a chance encounter and a list of library books helps two people forge a friendship in a London suburb. 

31. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

Pub. 2021; 642 pages. All formats.

Genre:  Historical Fiction

A World War II story of three female code breakers at Bletchley Park.  As England prepared to fight the Nazis (1940), three very different women answer the call to a mysterious country estate (Bletchley Park) where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes.  In their midst, is a spy they must root out after the war is over (1947).  The three friends-turned-enemies are reunited by a mysterious encrypted letter that requires a reunion to crack one last code together.  

32. The Rosie Project (A Don Tillman series)   by Graeme Simsion

Pub. 2013; 304 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction

“The Rosie Project is a 2013 Australian novel by Australian novelist Graeme Simsion. The novel centers on genetics professor Don Tillman, who struggles to have serious relationships with women. With a friend’s help, he devises a questionnaire to assess the suitability of female partners.  His plans are set off course when he meets Rosie, who does not fit many of Tillman’s criteria, but becomes a big part of his life. (There are two sequels: The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Result.) 

33. The Answer is... Reflections on my life by Alex Trebek
Pub. 2020; 287 pages. All formats (audiobook narrated by Ken Jennings)

Genre: Memoir 

The long time Jeopardy host recounts his life and relationships, as well as his work in television. 
The wise, charming and inspiring book is further evidence of why Trebek was long considered one of the most beloved and respected figures in television.
Three and a half months after the 
books release, he died after 20-month battle w/ stage IV pancreatic cancer.

34. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Pub. 1958; 209 pages. All formats.

Genre: Fiction (Historical) 

Things Fall Apart is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of the Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to the African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a precolonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

*35. The Tiger by John Vaillant. 

Pub. 2010; 295 pages. All formats.

 Genre: Nonfiction

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most fearsome and efficient predator. This "travelogue about tiger poaching in Russia’s far east opens up a new genre ... [the] conservation thriller" (Nature).

Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As John Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator.
 

36. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 

Pub. 2022; 416 pages. All formats

Genre: Fiction

This book was recommended on 2 podcasts I regularly listen to by, what I consider to be, very reliable sources.

From Amazon:

The Amazon Editors' #1 Pick of 2022: I’m not a gamer, I will likely never be a gamer, but this book about childhood friends who bond over gaming in a hospital and later go on to build a video game empire, stole my heart and buoyed my spirits. This is a story of how friendship—in all its messy misunderstandings, mistakes, and mishaps—gives Sam Masur and Sadie Green the fire to pursue their dreams, to be brave and overcome ridicule, to be the best they can be. Along the way they must reckon with what life throws at them: heartache and heartbreak, ambition and bravado, success and failure, jealousy and admiration. I devoured this book, and afterwards walked with a bounce in my step, a full heart, and the buzzy feeling of having discovered one of the best books on friendship—the complexity and the glory--I’ve ever read. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

bookreporter.com review

https://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow

37. Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Pub. 1997 – 272 pages. All formats.

Genre:  Memoir

This is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s touching memoir of growing up with her family and baseball.  Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, the story recreates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.  We are introduced to the people who most influenced Goodwin’s early life – including her mother who taught her the joy of books.  

*38. Your Presence is Mandatory by Sasha Visilyuk

Pub. 2024; 318 pages. All formats.

Genre: Historical Fiction; Biographical Fiction 

The events in this book occurred in Ukraine, Russia and Germany around the years before, during and after World War II. It focuses on the survival, secrecy and guilt surrounding the years Ukrainian born Jew Yefim Shulman spent fighting in the Red Army and the secrets he cannot tell his family after the war. He struggles to build his postwar life in a regime where the wrong lie or truth means exile and death.
The Stalin regime and the many people who experienced hardships under his years as dictator are a backdrop to this story. 

Yefim Shulman is Sasha Visilyuk’s grandfather who left behind a letter after his death that revealed a secret no one in the family had known. She based the book on family stories, interviews with historians, and research. 

**********************************************************************************************

Nominated Books (2024) / *Chosen Books

1. Braiding Sweetgrass

2. Brand Luther

 3. Code Breaker*

 4. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

 5. The Dictionary of Lost Words

 6. Doc: A Novel

 7. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

 8. The Frozen River: A Novel*

 9. Hamnet*

 10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries From a Secret World

 11. In the Woods

 12. Mademoiselle Chanel: A Novel

 13. The Memoir of Stockholm Sven*

 14. A Moveable Feast*

 15. Sold on a Monday

 16. A Stranger Here Below*

 17. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern*

 18. Tom Lake*

 19. Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird

 20. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail*

BOOK SUMMARIES 

1. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

 2013 – 408 pp/ Hardback, Paperback, Kindle

Non-fiction, this book is both a memoir and a book on the ecology of our forests and wetlands.  The author is a Native American and Botany professor who applies both her indigenous wisdom, in which plants are the teachers, and the science of forest ecology to teach her students, and us, about the natural world.  She argues for the value of applying both orientations to the environmental challenges of our time.  Her writing about specific plants, their roles in the ecosystem, and their importance in Native culture is both beautiful and insightful. She elucidates the reciprocal relationship we have with the rest of the living world, and challenges us to join in what is our common best interest of healing and conserving the Earth.

2. Brand Luther by Andrew Pettegree

341 pp. All formats, paperback, etc.

How an unheralded monk turned his small town into a center of publishing, made himself the most famous man in Europe, and started the Protestant Reformation. 

British historian Pettegree (The Invention of News), professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, takes a new look at 16th-century theologist Martin Luther and how his complaints against Rome might have been ignored were it not for their dissemination through the new invention of the printing press. Pettegree follows Luther’s career not from the point of view of theology and reform, but as a masterfully managed use of technology by a savvy promoter. Luther understood how printing worked; to get his message to the general public, he wrote clear, short pamphlets in German that could be printed and sold locally within a few days. Pettegree emphasizes the importance of Luther’s innovations to publishing, including his collaboration with artist and entrepreneur Lucas Cranach, who designed Luther’s frontispieces and carved woodcuts of the author. Luther’s copious writings, in both German and Latin, made him the most published author in Europe; he also autographed books and wrote glowing recommendations for other reformers. Pettegree notes that Catholic refutations of Luther existed but were printed less because “those of Luther’s supporters sold much better.” Readers with experience in publishing will be amazed by how little has changed. 

*3. Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

560 Pages, Hardcover, Paperback, AudioBook: all available on Amazon

This is a biography from 2020 Nobel Prize winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna. Her lab research into RNA biology led to the discovery of CRISPR-Cas 9, a tool that makes targeted changes to genomes, enabling immense possibilities to genome editing from virus to human. The book traces Doudna from her early childhood growing up in Hawaii as a carefree curious child, to her eventual path into her career in science. Thanks to Isaacon’s here and now sense of tone makes reading a breeze and lends the reader an insight into the world of genome editing and editing of microbiomes, as was the case of the discovery of the covid vaccine and likes. 

4. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey

Paperback is 269 pp., All formats

It’s an autobiographical work, originally published in 1968. Desert Solitaire was recognized as an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmental writing. Based on Abbey’s activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in the late 1950s. It is written as a series of vignettes about Abbey’s experiences in the Colorado Plateau region of the  desert southwestern US, ranging from vivid descriptions of the fauna, flora, geology, and human inhabitants of the area, to firsthand accounts of wilderness exploration and river running, to a polemic against development and excessive tourism in the national parks, to stories of the author’s work with a search and rescue team. The book is interspersed with observations and discussions about the various tensions – physical, social, and existential – between humans and the desert environment.

5. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

384 pages; hard/paperback; Audible; Kindle, Libby 

This historical fiction novel is set in a small community near Oxford University in England, during the late 19th / early 20th century.  The author, Pip Williams, creates a fiction narrative including some of the historical figures who worked on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). At the start of the book, we meet Esme, a young child whose father is a member of a small group of men who are engaged in collecting words and defining them for inclusion in the OED. Young Esme, motherless, spends her time under the ‘sorting table’ for most of the day while the men discuss, debate, and check the meanings and usages of words that have been sent to them. (An early crowdsourcing endeavor!) Esme is curious and inquisitive about words. She begins to notice that some words are not included in the dictionary. A dropped word on a slip of paper that flutters into her lap under the table begins her lifelong quest to collect words that others discard or do not give merit to for various reasons. As she matures and begins to define herself, she faces difficult, life-altering experiences, takes on work in the Scriptorium with her father, and builds new relationships. 

6. Doc: A Novel by  By Mary Doria Russell                    2012  -  432 pp/ Hardback, Paperback, Kindle

Historical fiction.  Doc Holliday, a Southern gentleman and dentist who moved to Dodge City after the Civil War, became a professional gambler. His surgical skills were put to good use after the frequent gun violence. and he became close friends with Wyatt Earp who sought his help to replace his missing front teeth.  The society of a post-bellum western town as it suffered successive waves of cowboys, criminals,  and treasure seekers, is deeply explored. Crime was rampant, punishment swift and brutal.  Racism was blatant and pervasive.  The tragedy of the children displaced in government Indian Schools is manifested here in one young man who tried to recover and make a life in society.  The women who moved out west were as adventuresome or desperate as the men, and were generally either teachers or married to a settler or prostitutes.  Women are important and interesting characters in this book.  Mary Doria Russell, through her extensive research, her education as an anthropologist, and her sensitive imagination, has gone beyond the gun-slinging myth and fleshed out a real, and fascinating, man and the exciting doomed world he inhabited.

7. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

348 pages; hard/paperback; Audible, Kindle

This book is part memoir, part scientific journey. Simard writes in an engaging way about her personal life growing up in British Columbia and her early connection to trees that led to her work as a forest ecologist. She interweaves the stories of her personal life and her professional life in ways that build the reader’s connection to her and to her research with trees. Her breakthrough scientific discovery of the interconnectedness of trees changed our view of the forest. (If you read the book, The Overstory, the character Patricia Westerford was based on Suzanne Simard.) If you read/liked Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, you may enjoy this book, too! 

*8. The Frozen River: A Novel by Ariel Lawhon

420 pages, Paperback, Hardcover, Audible, Kindle

Genre: Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction

Synopsis from Amazon [edited].

Maine,1789. When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in her town. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.

GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • New York Times bestselling author 

*9. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell 

320 pages, Paperback, Hardcover, Audible, Kindle

Hamnet was recommended to me by a friend who read it with her book club. At first, she and others were reluctant based on the title but all, including me, have been pleasantly surprised. Keeping an open mind in choosing this book is important. It's a winner.

Synopsis from Amazon [edited].

England,1580. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. She walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • the author delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time. • “—The Boston Globe  

Good Reads nominee for Best Historical Fiction (2020)

10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries From a Secret World

by Peter Wohlleben

GENRE: Non-Fiction, Forestry, Ecology, Conservation

228 pp, Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audiobook

Are trees social beings? In The Hidden Life of Trees forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration that he has observed in his woodland.

11. In the Woods by Tara French

464 pp, Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audiobook

GENRE: Mystery, Suspense, Psychological Fiction

Twenty-two years prior to the novel's events, twelve-year-old Adam and his two best friends failed to come home after playing in the familiar woods bordering their Irish housing estate. The Gardaí find Adam shivering, clawing the bark of a nearby tree, with blood in his shoes and slash marks on his back. His friends are never found. He is unable to say what happened to them. Now using his middle name, Rob, he is a detective with the Murder Squad. His amnesia holds to the present day.

The plot of the novel circles around the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Katy Devlin, whose case Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate. The body is found in the same woods where Rob's friends disappeared, at an archaeological dig site, and the coincidence is enough to make Rob nervous, though he insists to his partner that he is fine.

12. Mademoiselle Chanel: A Novel by C. W. Gortner

Paperback, Hardcover, Audible, Kindle; 435 pages

From the Inside Flap:

She revolutionized fashion and built an international empire . . . all on her own terms.. Born into rural poverty, Gabrielle Chanel and her sisters are sent to a convent orphanage after their mother's death. The nuns of the order nurture Gabrielle's exceptional sewing skills, a talent that would propel the willful young woman into a life far removed from the drudgery of her childhood. Burning with ambition, she transforms herself into Coco, by day a hard-working seamstress and by night a singer in a nightclub, where her incandescence draws in a wealthy gentleman who becomes the love of her life. She immerses herself in his world of money and luxury, discovering a freedom that sparks her creativity. But it is only when her lover takes her to Paris that Coco discovers her destiny. Rejecting the frilly, corseted silhouette of the past, Coco's sleek, minimalist styles reflect the youthful ease and confidence of the 1920s modern woman. As her reputation spreads, her couture business explodes, taking her into rarefied circles of society and bohemian salons. But her fame and fortune cannot save her from heartbreak as the years pass. And when Paris falls to the Nazis, Coco is forced to make choices that will haunt her always.

An enthralling novel about an entirely self-made woman, Mademoiselle Chanel tells the true story of Coco Chanel's extraordinary ambition, passion, and artistic vision.

*13. The Memoir of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Mille

Paperback etc., 336 pages

In this "briskly entertaining" (New York Times Book Review), "transporting and wholly original" (People Magazine) novel, one man banishes himself to a solitary life in the Arctic Circle, and is saved by good friends, a loyal dog, and a surprise visit that changes everything.

In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year and he might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time as a miner ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, and Sven flees even further, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a loyal dog, he builds a hut and lives alone, testing himself against the elements. 

The teachings of a Finnish fur trapper, along with encouraging letters from his family and a Scottish geologist who befriended him in the mining camp, get him through his first winter. Years into his routine isolation, the arrival of an unlikely visitor salves his loneliness, sparking a chain of surprising events that will bring Sven into a family of fellow castoffs and determine the course of the rest of his life. 

Written with wry humor and in prose as breathtaking as the stark landscape it evokes, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is a testament to the strength of our human bonds, reminding us that even in the most inhospitable conditions on the planet, we are not beyond the reach of love.

*4. A Moveable Feast  by Ernest Hemingway

154 pp. All formats

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A correspondent for the Toronto Star,Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921, three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe's cultural landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist form; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses;Gertrude Stein held court at 27 Rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of une gneration perdue; and T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London. It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway's slightly rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Here, too, is an evocation of the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man - a map drawn in his distinct prose of the steets and cafes and bookshops that comprised the city in which he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.A Moveable Feast is at once an elegy to the remakrable group for expatriates that gathered in Paris during the twenties and a testament to the risks and rewards of the writerly life.

15. Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris

2018 - 350 pages / hardback,paperback,kindle,audio

Sold on a Monday was written by Kristina McMorris. She is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Inspired by true personal and historical accounts, her works of fiction have garnered numerous national literary awards.

The book was inspired by a stunning piece of Depression-Era history. 2 Children for Sale. The sign is a last resort, inspired by an actual newspaper photograph that stunned the nation. A touching novel explores the tale within the frame and behind the lens - a journey of ambition, love and the far reaching effects of our actions.

*16. A Stranger Here Below by Charles Fergus

 2019 – 294 pp/ Hardback, Paperback, Kindle

This historical fiction is a mystery set in a fictional town in Central Pennsylvania (a thinly-veiled Bellefonte and Centre County).  In 1835, young Gideon Stoltz leaves Lancaster County for parts unknown and finds a job as Deputy Sheriff of Adamant. When the Sheriff unexpectedly dies, he becomes Acting Sheriff (until the next election).  Gideon is the Pennsylvania Dutch outsider in this close knit and closed mouth settlement of Scots-Irish immigrants.   When Gideon’s friend and mentor, a local Judge, commits suicide, Gideon must investigate and uncovers a previous murder.  The setting, pre-civil war during the iron smelting era, the ancient virgin forest reduced to stumps after the ravages of charcoal-making, and the people are described in interesting detail.  Fergus wrote for the PA Game Commission for many years and has several best-selling nature reference books; it shows in his vivid descriptions of the landscape and the forest.  His first mystery, he has now written 3 sequels.

*17. The Swerve:How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

356 pages;Hardcover/Paperbook/Audiobook (All available at Amazon)

In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius’ ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years.

It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. Its return to circulation changed the course of history. The poem’s vision would shape the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and—in the hands of Thomas Jefferson—leave its trace on the Declaration of Independence.

From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggio’s search and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the world we live in now.

*18. Tom Lake by Anne Patchett

309 pp. Hardback/Paperback, Audible, Kindle.

With a cinematic sparkle, Ann Patchett has once again crafted a novel that beats with the pulse of family and the tug of nostalgia. Over the course of a pandemic summer’s cherry harvest, a mother recounts to her grown girls what happened one summer when she became a little bit famous and fell in love with an actor that became very famous. While the plot is seemingly straightforward, Patchett’s gift for rendering that very specific feeling of youthful independence, love, and ambition is pitch perfect. It’s all too easy and enjoyable to fall into the rhythm of the story—to be reminded of what it’s like to be a child, awash in the mythic glow that your parents had lives before you that were exciting, impactful, and maybe just a little bit racy.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

For those who like to listen to books, good news: Meryl Streep reads this book in the same satisfying way that Tom Hanks did The Dutch House.

19. Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird by Katie Fallon

248 pages; paperback; Kindle

Vultures…what does that word bring to mind? Evil? Fright? Death? This book was a Centre County Reads selection in 2019. The Pennsylvania-born author, currently residing in West Virginia, is the Director of The Avian Center of Appalachia, which promotes bird education, rehabilitation, and research. The author’s engaging writing provides knowledge and inspires appreciation, and wonder for these familiar birds. This book may change your view of vultures! 

*20. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

GENRE: Memoir

336 pp, Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audio CD, Audible Audio

Wild is Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed's journey begins in the Mojave Desert and she hikes through California and Oregon to the Bridge of the Gods into Washington. The book also contains flashbacks to prior life occurrences that led Strayed to begin her journey. Seeking self-discovery and resolution of her enduring grief and personal challenges, at the age of 26, Strayed set out on her journey, alone and with no prior hiking experience. Wild intertwines the stories of Strayed's life before and during the journey, describing her physical challenges, emotional, and spiritual realizations while on the trail.

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