I resisted reading this because it sounded so heavy: it's a personal meditation on aging, death, and dying. But Gawande, a surgeon by trade, tackles weighty issues by sharing lots of stories to go with the research, making this book eminently readable. Ultimately, this book is about what it means—medically and philosophically—to live a good life. I'm so glad I didn't wait longer to read this: this book gave me a much better understanding of the wants and needs of my own aging family members. I found all the superlatives I'd heard bandied about to hold true: it's riveting, absorbing, paradigm-shifting, life-changing. More info →

From The Washington Post: "Riveting.... this is a book that should be read not only for its vivid drama but for its urgent message about the untapped power of girls.... It is difficult to imagine a chronicle of a war more moving, apart from perhaps the diary of Anne Frank. With the essential difference that we lost that girl, and by some miracle, we still have this one." More info →

You know I love a good personality book, right? Gretchen is best known for her work researching habits and happiness, which you may have read all about in books like The Happiness Project and Better Than Before. In the course of that research, she noticed that different people had drastically different responses to the question "How do I respond to expectations?" In this book, she's compiled what she's learned—that people fit into one of Four Tendencies based on how they respond to inner and outer expectations. I read Gretchen's blog and follow her podcast, but it wasn't until I could read the information in book form that I felt like I really got it and could categorize myself correctly. (Upholder, right here, but you may be a Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel). More info →

A friend talked me into reading this after she shared that every member of her diverse book club loved this—the twenty-somethings and the sixty-somethings. That got my attention. If you're looking for books featuring a seasoned female protagonist, it's the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish takes a walk in late-night Manhattan, on a very specific mission. As she walks, she reflects on the life she's lived, the people she's known, and where things began to go wrong. This reminded me of J. Courtney Sullivan's The Engagements because of the strong women at the center of each. More info →

From the 2018 Summer Reading Guide. Roy and Celestial are young, middle-class, in love, and "on the come-up," as Roy likes to put it. But only 18 months into their marriage, Roy is sentenced to twelve years in prison—for a crime he didn't commit. Roy needs Celestial behind him if he is to survive. She needs to cut him loose if she is to do the same. In his letters, Roy writes, "I'm innocent." But Celestial tells him, "I'm innocent, too." If everyone is innocent, where does the fault lie? This is very much a book about mass incarceration—and it's no coincidence that Roy is arrested, tried, and imprisoned in Louisiana, the state with the highest per-capita rate of incarceration, with a 4:1 ratio of black prisoners to white—but there's little talk of "issues" in this book. Instead, this is a love story, though one gone horribly and irreversibly wrong. More info →

Libro.fm is running a sale on several titles this month. They're my go-to for audiobooks these days; read more about Libro.fm here. No membership required for most sale prices, including this one. The ebook is not on sale. Ng's novel opens with a house on fire, literally. It belongs to a suburban family, and it wasn't an accident: as one character reports, “The firemen said there were little fires everywhere." But who did it, and why? That's the setup for this literary thriller, which explores what happens when an itinerant artist and her daughter move into a seemingly perfect Ohio community, and thoroughly disrupt the lives of its residents. More info →

The standalone sequel to Next Year in Havana delivers a tale of politics, history, and love. Beatriz Perez was forced to flee her beloved homeland of Cuba for the refuge of Palm Beach, and will do whatever it takes to help her family and the country she still sees as her own, including begging the CIA to put her to use as a spy—something virtually unheard of in the 1960s. But her offer is too good for her government to refuse, and she soon finds herself uncomfortably close to Castro and other dangerous men, seeking precious information the U.S. can use to bring down his regime. Things get complicated when she falls for a handsome and politically ambitious U.S. senator, a man who will change her life—though perhaps not in the way either of them hoped. A page-turning story of love and revenge, though not necessarily in that order. More info →

I've adored Reichl's food writing in the past, but if I wasn't a devoted Gourmet magazine reader, would I be interested in reading the book aptly subtitled “My Gourmet Memoir”? The answer: YES!! Reichl dishes like a gossipy friend, sharing the behind-the-scenes scoop on the big picture, like livening up Gourmet’s stuffy culture, and the specific, like what was going through her head when she published David Foster Wallace's notorious piece "Consider the Lobster." This is pure delight from start to finish. More info →

Teach yourself to cook, and you can eat better, healthier food, while saving a ton of money. Bittman's manageable cookbooks teach you how to make everything you NEED to know, and a lot of things you don't but will enjoy anyway. Mark Bittman has a reputation for recipes that are foolproof. Sure, you can learn to cook on the internet—but he makes it easy and enjoyable. More info →

Glory Edim chose this for Well-Read Black Girl. From the publisher: "Jenna Jones, former It-girl fashion editor, is broke and desperate for a second chance. When she's dumped by her longtime fiancé and fired from Darling magazine, she begs for a job from her old arch nemesis, Darcy Vale. The beyond-bitchy publisher of StyleZine.com, Darcy agrees to hire her rival – only because her fashion site needs a jolt from Jenna's old school cred. But Jenna soon realizes she's in over her head. She's working with digital-savvy millennials half her age, has never even 'Twittered,' and pretends to still be a Fashion Somebody while living a style lie (she sold her designer wardrobe to afford her sketched-out studio, and now quietly wears Walmart's finest). Worse? The twenty-two-year-old videographer assigned to shoot her web series is driving her crazy. The Perfect Find is a scandalously sexy, laugh-out-loud funny, utterly quotable saga about star-crossed love and starting over." More info →