GOOD BOOKS WORTH READING
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Desert Solitaire;
The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Open: An Autobiography, Andre Agassi
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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
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
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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
Kindred, Octavia Butler
The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
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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
Shaken Loose, Ilana DeBare
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The March, 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
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Education for the Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire
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, Daniel Goleman
An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore
Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable, Tim Grover
The Last Black Unicorn, Tiffany Haddish
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Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
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The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah
Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Frida: Biography of Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera
The Tidings of the Trees, Wolfgang Hilbig
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The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
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We Were the Lucky Ones, Georgia Hunter
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The World According to Garp, John Irving
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The Trial;
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
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Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
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Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Leavers, Lisa Ko
Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn
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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert
Correcting the Landscape, Marjorie Kowalski Cole
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner
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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;
Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
Underland, Robert Macfarlane
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Blowout, Rachel Maddow
The Assistant;
The Natural, Bernard Malamud
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Márquez
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy
The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan
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Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War, Jon Melrod
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Tropic of Capricorn;
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford
Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore
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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
There, There, Tommy Orange
Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes
Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Dr. Dean Ornish
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
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The Overstory, Richard Powers
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Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
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Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
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Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
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Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
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The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein
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Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
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America's Dream, Esmeralda Santiago
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Dreams from the Monster Factory, Sunny Schwartz
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The Island of Sea Women, Lisa See
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The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man, Paul Shepard (Ed.)
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
Above The Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, Jerome Skolnick & James Fyfe
Maus I and Maus II, Art Spiegelman
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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
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
Cat’s Cradle;
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Pawnbroker, Edward Lewis Wallant
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
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
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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This list of books includes fiction and non-fiction, classic and contemporary. I have read some of these and hope to read more in the future. This list is obviously 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.
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