Bibliophilia

Not so much about the evils of technology, this book explores more of why and how we get hooked to games and social media apps. Alter examines the roots of addiction and explores how we can use technology that gets us hooked to better the world.

A tale with no set ending and, perhaps, no set beginning. There are several different ways to read this book about obsession, longing, and how we hide ourselves in the digital age.

This look into the search for the man behind the Silk Road is a fascinating and fast-paced read that sucks you in and doesn't let go. Big takeaways: the answers often come from unexpected sources and you should probably avoid dating libertarians.

When Lucie Blackman goes missing in Tokyo what starts as a missing persons case turns into an exploration of Japanese culture and the oddities of family. Richard Lloyd Parry gives a complete picture of the isolation that results from interactions with the people who are closest to us.

Rosemary Kennedy was beautiful, vivacious, and mentally disabled in a time when mental disabilities weren't readily understood. After a botched lobotomy in 1941, she is sequestered away at a home in Wisconsin. This book attempts to look at her life and her legacy, but does it really work?

This book sucks the reader right in and drops them down into NYC's Village in the late 1950's. Bette and Earl have been friends for thirty years. She desires truth and justice, he desires love and beauty. What happens when the world pushes them to their breaking points? It's so good.

New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul tells her life story through the books that she was reading at the time certain things happened. It wasn't supposed to, but the book made me feel nostalgic for something that I will never have. I'm sure a boomer would look at it differently.

Though this book was at one point released as pulp fiction, the characters have real depth and the story is surprisingly modern. Gellhorn tells a story of love, war, and race with compassion and understanding for nearly all of the characters.

James Forman Jr. examines the origins of some of the country's most detrimental policies in this fascinating book that examines class, race, and how they interact. With echoes of Stamped From the Beginning's anti-racist message, the book presents civil rights and the war on drugs in a new way.

When Alice visits her grandmother in New York, she gets sucked into a social media wormhole. Her obsession with a writer soon takes a dark turn in this novel about particles colliding and people connecting.

In this collection of essays, Lauren Elkin considers the cities that she has lived in from the perspective of someone on the ground. She covers history, literature, art, and film all while exploring the idea of the subversive female explorer.

What could be a traditional True Crime book turns into so much more with Ken Corbett steering the conversation towards gender, masculinity, and what we expect from boys and men. This book was difficult to talk about because the reality of the crime extends far beyond the immediate violence.

Elif Batuman's debut novel explores language and communication in a welcome way. Set in 1995, the book uses the emerging internet and email as a way to push the characters into and out of each other's way. It was an incredibly refreshing read in a world dominated by social media.

When you go nearly a decade between readings of a book, things change. There are things that you remember and things that you forget. Becca talks about communication, expectations, and all the things that make McEwan a great writer.

This amazing novel tells the story of Am Spiegelgrund from two different perspectives. Adrian is a child who must live under the horrific conditions and Anna is a nurse who is complicit and loyal to a fault. The book examines not just the reality of living at a place like Spiegelgrund, but how we allow some people to move on when other people just can't. It's a wonderful exploration of guilt, punishment, and duty.

What starts as a story about an estranged mother and son evolves into a delicate tale of fitting in, feeling lonely, and trying to discover who you are in a world that doesn't seem to want you. Buchanan's debut novel is beautiful and haunting. I feel like it will stick with me for years to come.

We all kind of know the story of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, but this book gets in depth about what really happened. Guinn also forces us to ask questions about how something like this could have been stopped, when cults become dangerous, and how social movements can turn. It's a fascinating look at an often derided subject.

War is never easy to understand, and it's even more difficult to understand when the majority of the action takes place on someone else's land. This book tries to explain the roots of terrorism using an American story. It works in some ways and in others fails, but it's an interesting read about a future that could be coming for our own country.

With tensions with North Korea rising, it's important to understand what life is like within the secretive country. Yeonmi Park paints a real, yet relatable, image of the day-to-day of living under a dictatorship. Though her journey isn't typical, it is horrifying in its own way, and leads readers to a greater understanding of the harsh realities of what levels of desperation people will resort to when they don't have any options.

When revisiting a book from your childhood, there's always a chance that it won't live up to your memory. Avi, however, fails to disappoint. This book is full of adventure and fun, making it a great trip down memory lane.