The Inquiring Reader

by Haruki Murakami

Category: short story

Tanimura moves to Tokyo to pursue his education at the university and befriends Kitaru, a coworker at a small coffee shop he works in. Kitaru speaks in the same Kansai dialect as the narrator, even though he is not from the region, which both sparks curiosity and defines their friendship.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

Category: novel

Janina Duszejko lives in a small Polish town on the border with the Czech Republic. She finds her neighbor dead in his home, having choked on a chicken bone. But a series of murders of well-known, local hunters occurs, and Janina believes them to be a form of retribution.

The Good Hand

by Michael Patrick F. Smith

Category: nonfiction

On the windswept plains of North Dakota, Michael Patrick F. Smith records his experience of becoming a "Good Hand" in the oil fields. He lays out, unflinchingly, the good and bad associated with American boomtowns – opportunity and poverty, brotherhood and toxic masculinity, friendship and racism. From sleeping in his car to finding an outrageously overpriced space in a flophouse, to finally securing a job and building trust with his coworkers, Smith's first-hand account depicts what life may be like for many migrant workers in America today.

If Then

by Jill Lepore

Category: nonfiction

The rise of political consulting, advertising, and computers divided and dissected voters into smaller interest groups. Data was collected and processed at blinding speeds to predict how people would vote. The Simulmatics Corporation was founded in this era. It claimed to accurately forecast the outcome of presidential elections. It stumbled along, occasionally making correct predictions, often not. The Department of Defense would hire the company to predict insurgency in Vietnam, which Simulmatics would then use domestically to predict urban riots. It would thrive and collapse under its pseudo-scientific claims, but lay the groundwork for predictive analytics in the 21st century.

The False Promise of Liberal Order

by Patrick Porter

Category: nonfiction

Many believe that the relative peace of the last century is coming to an end. The rise of authoritarians across the globe indicates that the liberal, democratic order may fail. Porter argues that the order was never really liberal; it was based on the imperialistic dominance of the United States and the compliance of its allies. This contradiction between American democratic values at home and its illerbal foreign policy is revleaing cracks in the myth of liberal order and showing the global stage for what it actually is.

Oathbringer

Stormlight Archive #3

by Brandon Sanderson

Category: novel

Odium, the god of passion, leads an army of Parshendi to lay siege to Roshar. Dalinar Kholin must unite the kingdoms under a new order of Knights Radiant before their cities are captured. But he is plagued by his past mistakes, and he must come to terms with them and save himself before he can save others.

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