"At a time when book banning is back in vogue, libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information."
- President Barack Obama
~ GOOD BOOKS WORTH READING ~
Desert Solitaire;
The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Open: An Autobiography, Andre Agassi
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
In Their Names, Lenore Anderson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
The Social Animal, Elliot Aronson
Handmaid’s Tale;
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
The Fire Next Time;
Go Tell It on the Mountain;
If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah, et.al.
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry
On Immunity: An Inoculation, Eula Biss
Enemies and Neighbors, Ian Black
If life is a bowl of cherries, what am I doing in the pits?, Erma Bombeck
Fahrenheit 451;
Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
150 Nature Hotsponts in California: The Best Parks, Conservation Areas, and Wild Places;
California Waterfalls, Ann Marie Brown
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story, Elaine Brown
Kindred, Octavia Butler
The Stranger;
The Plague, Albert Camus
The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
Grant, Ron Chernow
The Systems Approach, C. West Churchman
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Water Dancer;
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Open City, Teju Cole
The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Cullors
Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and
the Birth of Modern Comedy, James Curtis
My Land and My People, His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Shaken Loose, Ilana DeBare
The Mandarins;
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Lateral Thinking, Edward de Bono
Love in a Time of Climate Change, Sharon Delgado
Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from..., Larry Diamond
Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
The March;
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois
Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich
Middlemarch, Mary Anne Evans (aka George Eliot)
The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Education for the Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire
The Bank Teller and Other Essays on The Politics of Meaning, Peter Gabel
The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, Henry Louis Gates jr.
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Emotional Intelligence;
A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama's Vision for Humanity, Daniel Goleman
An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore
Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable, Tim Grover
The Last Black Unicorn, Tiffany Haddish
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah
Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
August Wilson: A Life, Patti Hartigan
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Frida: Biography of Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera
Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
The Tidings of the Trees, Wolfgang Hilbig
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Crank; Glass; Fallout, Ellen Hopkins
We Were the Lucky Ones, Georgia Hunter
Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The World According to Garp, John Irving
What If We Get It Right?, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
The Trial;
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy, Marvin Kalb
Running the Amazon, Joe Kane
Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Murder One, Dorothy Kilgallen
The Leavers, Lisa Ko
Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History;
Under the White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Elizabeth Kolbert
Correcting the Landscape, Marjorie Kowalski Cole
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, George Lakoff
Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
Arrowsmith;
It Can't Happen Here;
Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
Small is Profitable, Amory Lovins
You Are Not Alone (Your Roadmap to Effective Political Action), Gary Lucks
Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane
Blowout, Rachel Maddow
The Assistant;
The Natural, Bernard Malamud
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog, Dannie Martin & Peter Sussman
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan
My Life, Golda Meir
Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War, Jon Melrod
Tropic of Capricorn;
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Living in the Environment, G. Tyler Miller
The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford
Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore
Song of Solomon;
Home;
The Bluest Eye;
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
A Beautiful Mind (biography of John Forbes Nash jr.), Sylvia Nasar
Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash
The Fragility of Goodness;
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions;
Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, Martha Nussbaum
Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World, Bill Nye
The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, Michelle Obama
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yōko Ogawa
There, There, Tommy Orange
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes
Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Dr. Dean Ornish
A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, Lauren Redniss
Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
Truth Demands: Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, Abby Reyes
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Barbara Jordan American Hero, Mary Beth Rogers
The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein
Everything is Illuminated;
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan
Buffalo Nickel, Floyd Salas
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
America's Dream, Esmeralda Santiago
Dreams from the Monster Factory, Sunny Schwartz
The Island of Sea Women, Lisa See
Oh, The Places You'll Go!;
The Lorax;
The Sneetches and Other Stories;
Yertle the Turtle, Dr. Seuss
The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man, Paul Shepard (Ed.)
Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
Above The Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, Jerome Skolnick & James Fyfe
Can We Talk About Israel, Daniel Sokatch
Maus I and Maus II, Art Spiegelman
In Dubious Battle;
Grapes of Wrath;
The Winter of Our Discontent;
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Ronald Takaki
That’s Not What I Meant;
You Just Don’t Understand, Deborah Tannen
Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Mismeasure of Woman, Carol Tavris
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
Future Shock, Alvin Toffler
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler
Mila 18, Leon Uris
The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa
Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
Burr, Gore Vidal
Rain of Gold, Victor Villaseñor
Cat’s Cradle;
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
The Pawnbroker, Edward Lewis Wallant
The Man, Irving Wallace
All The Kings Men, Robert Penn Warren
Nature, Man and Woman, Alan Watts
The Red Record, Ida B. Wells
Race Matters, Cornel West
House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Night, Elie Wiesel
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration;
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
From Shiftless to Shifty, My Forty-six Years as a Public Defender, John Wood
Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
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**Click here for info about fighting back against book banning
**Click here to learn about the award-winning documentary, The LIBRARIANS
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This list of books, first created during the COVID-19 shelter at-home timeframe, includes fiction and non-fiction, classic and contemporary. I've read some of these and hope to read more in the future. This list obviously is far from exhaustive and was compiled based on good books I've read in years past, selected award-winning books, and recommendations from close friends and family. - Dan Kalb