Whether you read on a tablet, Kindle, or still prefer the smell of a freshly cracked paperback, finding your next book is never easy. You could never read all the new novels, biographies, or nonfiction tomes released each week, so we’re here to help. These are a handful of the new or upcoming books we think deserve a space on your eReader or nightstand.
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Lindsey Fitzharris
Available Now
Respecting doctors as a profession is a fairly new phenomenon. Until more recently than most people would be comfortable admitting, doctors were someone you went to if you wanted to expedite your life’s departure rather than delay it. A big reason people go to doctors instead of wizards is Joseph Lister’s research. He was one of the first to say the infections that kept killing everyone weren’t God killing the unworthy, but the work of microscopic organisms that thrive in dirty, scummy environments. We take it for granted now, but Lister’s ideas took an unsettling amount of time to catch on, all of them saturated with horrifying tales of people losing body parts to doctors’ insatiable bloodlust. $16
Leonardo da Vinci
Walter Isaacson
Available Now
Leonardo da Vinci invented Renaissance versions of most modern technology and helped establish the foundation for classical art, so reading up on his life and work could only benefit you. The reason you should pick up this biography is Walter Isaacson puts special emphasis on connecting da Vinci’s science and art, which most people surprisingly don’t do. He talks about da Vinci and his work as a single entity rather than the normal narrative of da Vinci the Inventor and, separately, da Vinci the Artist. Everything about his life is connected and that’s the story Isaacson tells in this biography. $21
Origin
Dan Brown
Available Now
Dan Brown’s novels are a guilty pleasure of ours. We know he’s not the most impressive writer, but we can’t help keeping tabs on his career and picking up a copy of whatever he’s working on most recently, because the stories are always so entertaining. Origin is the latest entry in that guilty pleasure, bringing back Robert Langdon and Brown’s familiar conspiratorial stomping grounds, as an Elon Musk-like character gets set to share with the world a discovery about the origins of life. People get chased, governments get indicted, people die, and it all ties back into royalty. Dan Brown’s formulaic, but we’ll be damned if that formula doesn’t pull us in every time. $18
Uncommon Type: Some Stories
Tom Hanks
Available Now
If Tom Hanks releases a book, we’re obviously going to recommend it. It works out too, because the book ended up being good rather than the annoying vanity project that results from people trying to switch media. They’re the kind of stories you’d expect from a man like Tom Hanks. He perfectly understands wholesome, intelligent, fulfilling storytelling and it’s just as easy to imagine Hanks playing some of his characters as it is him writing them. It’s the perfect book for someone who needs a pick-me-up, wants something entertaining and thought-provoking for their commute, or plain wants a book of solid short stories. $16
Smile
Roddy Doyle
Available Now
Someone disturbing your ritualistic pint at your local spot is never a good omen, though most of us don’t go on the same journey as Victor Forde just because someone interrupts us at a bar. Forde goes more on a destructive, introspective journey, all because someone who he doesn’t remember remembers him. Doyle’s novels rarely get into “thriller” territory, so to see him break new ground and explore an unfamiliar genre is worth it in itself. But for him to do it so well solidifies our feelings on Doyle. He’s a capable, entertaining writer who’s most comfortable challenging his reader with a not-quite-straightforward story. $15
Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
Available Now
People who have read A Visit from the Goon Squad will absolutely let you know they have and that it’s imperative you do the same. It’s a good book, to be fair, but with a new book from Egan on the horizon, those people might go quiet for a little. Take the opportunity to head them off and read Egan’s new release for yourself. The story follows a young woman through war-time New York City. In her time working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, Anna gets pulled into the world of unions, organized crime, and white collar crime, while making the discovery that all this might be more of a family tradition than she originally thought. $17
Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches
John Hodgman
Available Now
John Hodgman is one of those creative types who spends most of his time in obscurity until he releases something. Then he makes a ton of noise on the cultural scene until it’s time for him to fade again. We always forgot he was a Daily Show correspondent until Jon Stewart announced his name and he would issue forth a torrent of insane rich person pompousness and selfishness. He’s dropped that bit for this book though, and uses his own natural wit and autobiographical experience to tell the stories of the three main parts of his life; his childhood, his vacations, and his inevitable advancement of age. $15
Artemis
Andy Weir
November 14
You know Andy Weir’s name thanks to his immensely popular debut novel, The Martian. With Artemis, Weir stays in space, telling the story of a small time smuggler, Jazz Bashara, living in the only city on the moon. The city, Artemis, is mostly dominated by affluent tourists and eccentrics, though with a population like that, you can expect a fairly lively black market. Like most stories about debt, Bashara gets the opportunity to pull off the perfect crime, landing a score that would pay everything off and set her up for life. Though, if that sounds ordinary to you, remember that The Martian is just a story about a guy stranded in a hostile environment and that ended up being a unique tale about the challenges of space exploration. $16
Future Home of the Living God
Lousie Erdrich
November 14
There’s definitely a Children of Men vibe coming off the plot of this book, which is what drew us to is in the first place. Though, instead of a complete lack of newborns, every newborn comes out a little further back on the evolutionary timescale. Essentially, human is turning back into ape. It’s still a story about the end of the world, where the government freaks out again and declares martial law before abducting women to find out why we can’t have human babies anymore. A pregnant woman is again at the center of the story, and most of the plot follows her as she attempts to navigate this new, specifically unfriendly world. $19
The World Goes On
László Krasznahorkai
December 5
Not that we’re disparaging any other aspects of The World Goes On, because we’re not, but the settings are absolutely the stars of this short story collection by László Krasznahorkai. They’re wildly varied, endlessly intriguing, and often use their otherworldliness to speak to our more mundane existence. He’s also been called “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse,” so that should tell you a little something about where his stories are going to start, end, and explore. The book spans eleven stories and you can expect each to speak to all the others, regardless of whether or not they’re literally connected. $16
