TBR

Fiction

The British Museum Is Falling Down, David Lodge – an awesome satiric book about a poor PhD student and his family

Glorious, Bernice McFadden – a woman from the South joins the circus and then the Harlem Renaissance and ALL SORTS OF THINGS HAPPEN

Waterland, Graham Swift – a book about a schoolmaster in East Anglia, which is also a reflection on history and narrative (yay)

The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier

The Good Psychologist, Noam Shpancer – a thriller about a good psychologist who might actually be good

The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, Michel Faber – a paper conservator joins an archaeological dig in Yorkshire and then all sorts of Gothic stuff starts up

Leaving Atlanta, Tayari Jones – multiple fifth-grade narrators in 1979 Atlanta after a series of murders of black children

Caroline Miniscule, Andrew Taylor – a student of paleography finds his tutor murdered and becomes involved in all sorts of ancient-manuscript-related intrigue and deception

Greenery Street, Denis Mackail – a cheerful story about a young happily married couple

Charles McCarry writes an exciting series of thrillers featuring a poet/spy called Paul Christopher

Laurie Colwin writes superb funny amazing books about relationships, says Other Jenny

The Last Station, Jay Parini – the Tolstoy book has multiple points of view

Land of Marvels, Barry Unsworth – set in an archaeological dig in Egypt just before the start of World War I

So Long a Letter, Mariama Ba – a fictional diary of a Senegalese woman in a polygamous situation writing to her best friend in the United States

Stealing Fire, Jo Graham – a historical novel of great wonderfulness set just after Alexander the Great’s death

The Secret of Crickley Hall, James Herbert – a lovely ghost story in the classic style

The Ghost’s Child, Sonya Hartnett – an old woman finds a child in her house and he asks questions and she says him the story of her life, a two-year sea voyage, reluctance to be married, and so forth

This is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper – a father dies and wants his family to sit shiva for him for seven days and it’s incredibly funny

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Helen Grant – a story about a disappeared girl in a modern German town, interwoven with folk tales and awesomeness

Death at the Opera, Gladys Mitchell – a murder mystery set at a school production of the Mikado

The Red House Mystery, AA Milne – a locked door country house mystery that is rather charming and used to be very popular

The Oxford Murders , Guillermo Martinez – two Oxford mathematicians try to catch a serial killer

Angela Thirkell – writes Barsetshire novels that are reminiscent of Austen, Wodehouse, & Pym

Family Roundabout , Richmal Crompton – intertwined stories of two wealthy families

Opening Night , Ngaio Marsh – a murder in a provincial theatre

James Thurber’s fairy tales!

Dragonflies, Grant Buday – the Iliad from Odysseus’s point of view

I, Claudius, Robert Graves – hit it up

An Absolute Gentleman , R.M. Kinder – a polished, suspenseful novel about a killer

Shadows and Lies , Marjorie Eccles – a woman who has lost her memory in 1910 tries to remember it by writing in an exercise book, and there are murders and South Africa and suffrage!

An Imaginary Life, David Malouf – Ovid cares for a feral child while in exile

Dusty Answer , Rosamond Lehmann – a very shocking book from the 1920s

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece , Jane Hamilton – a would-be writer and her husband write letters to a radio personality to make her fall in love with the husband

Somebody Else’s Daughter , Elizabeth Brundage – multiple points of view!

The 13 Clocks, James Thurber

The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Armin – four women rent an Italian castle for a month and it is rather like The Blue Castle

Nightingale Wood, Stella Gibbons – a young widow in Sussex has unpredictable and subversive adventures

Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, Ruby Ferguson – an old housekeeper tells an American couple the story of an old house they are seeing, and the lady who used to live there

The Moon in the Cloud, Rosemary Harris – a children’s book trilogy set in ancient Canaan and Egypt at the time of the flood

The Centaur, John Updike – if I ever decide to read John Updike, an anxious teenager and his depressed father set themselves in Greek myths to cheer themselves up

Moo , Jane Smiley – dry wit about life in an agricultural college

The Fur Person, May Sarton – all about how a cat finds a home, and what cats do and think and like (I miss my Shadow cat)

The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry – an old woman at a mental hospital, it’s unclear why she’s there or what happened with her incarceration, Protestant/Catholic tension, etc. etc.

A Meeting by the River, Christopher Isherwood – two brothers who have been out of touch for ages meet at the Ganges River and it’s all epistolary and they are totally different people

An Embarrassment of Riches, Gerald Hansen – a North Irish woman wins the lottery and a massive family comes looking to get some money

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh – it’s funny!  Evelyn Waugh is funny!

Life Sentences, Laura Lippman – a memoir writer searching for her next book hears of a childhood acquaintance on national TV

We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley Jarman – a book about Richard III and the Wars of the Roses from the povs of several different people

The Oracle Glass, Judith Merkle Riley – a little crippled girl gets raised by a proper French fortune teller or something, and she tries to find her place in the court of the Sun King

Unfinished Desires, Gail Godwin – boarding school girls that make friends in the 50s and then look back on their lives

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee – a professor in trouble for sleeping with a student goes to South Africa to live with his daughter; it is smoothly written and not super litrary

A Student of Weather, Elizabeth Hay – two Canadian sisters in the dustbowl are very different and a stranger comes to town and betrayal things happen

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, Lydia Peelle – stories about people’s daily lives in the vanishing agrarian South

Tragedy at Law, Cyril Hare – the poshest Englishest wearing-funny-wigs-est mystery of all time

Stone’s Fall, Iain Pears – a man dies and we go backwards in time to discover why; lots of twisty twists like Fingersmith

Margery Sharp – the same lady who wrote Rescuers has written many other things that are even more delightful!

Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald – story of four sisters in Canada who have long and complex lives

The Infinities, John Banville – a book about an alternate world, written from God’s point of view

A Thousand Cuts, Simon Lelic – a book about a school shooting in a London comprehensive school

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese – a nun gives birth to twins and then dies, and the twins grow up on the brink of revolution

My Cleaner, Maggie Gee – apparently not a stereotyped liberal angst-ridden bunch of foolishness but in fact very clever and delightful

The Great Perhaps, Joe Meno – a story about a family told from multiple points of view; the father hunts for squids, the mum studies pigeons, and the kids make bombs and discover Christianity

Reading by Lightning, Joan Thomas – a little girl grows up with a very religious family in Canada and then goes to England to live with cheerier relatives and then goes back again

The Loss Adjustor, Aifric Campbell – a woman who had some sort of unknown childhood trauma related to her two best friends living next door to her makes a new friend

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Boll – a woman briefly talks to a man wanted by the police and is subsequently the target of a smear campaign by a ruthless newspaper

The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver – a woman in a long-term relationship kisses someone or she doesn’t – alternate outcomes

After You, Julie Buxbaum – a woman goes to London to help her best friend’s daughter after her friend dies & they read The Secret Garden

The Ghost Orchid, Carol Goodman – a debut artist finds spooky scariness in a Victorian mansion on a Gothic retreat

Grange House, Sarah Blake – a ghostly haunted spooky hotel in 1896 Maine

Madeleine’s Ghost, Robert Girardi – a New Orleans grad students moves into a haunted apartment & the narrative goes between past and present

Spell of the Tiger, Sy Montgomery – all about Sundarbans and their relationships with tigers that hunt people (grrr)

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, Maaza Mengiste – story about a doctor & his family during a military uprising in Ethiopia in the 1970s

Kate Ross writes a series of mysteries about a dandy shady-background mystery-solver with dandyish British humor

Miss Mole, E.H. Young – a mischievous British housekeeper in her forties who acts uninteresting but it is secretly lively and humorous

Disturbing the Peace, Richard Yates – more domestic unbliss and also, mental illness!

The Paper House, Carlos Maria Dominguez – novella about a parcel that gets delivered for a dead girl, and there is book collecting stuff

Dismantled, Jennifer McMahon – four artists graduate arty college & adopt nihilism & stuff goes awry

Testament, Alis Hawkins – one of those modern-day/old-time stories with a painting that gets discovered

Six Acres and a Third, Fakir Mohan Senapati – very very funny satiric Indian village comedy

Cuckold, Kiran Nagarkar – beautifully written story set in the 16th-century Rajput kingdom of Mewar

Children of the Waters, Carleen Brice – two biracial sisters are raised by different families and then meet later on in life

Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar – a lonely woman moves to a mansion in Bristol and goes crazy inventing a new life for herself

The House Behind the Cedars, Charles W. Chestnutt – two mixed-race siblings try to pass for white in South Carolina

Cassandra at the Wedding, Dorothy Baker – one of a set of inseparable upper-class twins gets married and the other tries to stop it because she needs her twin

Picture the Dead, Adele Griffin – an old money family girl living in Boston during the Civil War encounters her fiance’s ghost and tries to learn what happened to him in the war; and it’s all with illustrations and a scrapbooking format

How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall – a wondrous book with interwoven narratives

Waiting for Columbus, Thomas Trofimuk – a nurse in a mental hospital becomes interested in a patient who thinks that he is Christopher Columbus and it’s all about the power of stories

Commencement, J. Courtney Sullivan – four dorm mates at Smith become friends and the story follows their lives

The Sopranos, Alan Warner – a group of Scottish teenagers go to Edinburgh for a singing competition

Mare’s War, Tanita S. Davis – two young black girls go on a road trip with their grandmother who tells a story about growing up in the forties

The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris – a story about five people to do with a dart league and they all have secrets and alternating viewpoints

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann – a totally shocking book about girls having self-destruction and eating lots of tranquilizers.  SHOCKING.

Heresy, S.J. Parris – not yet out, but a mystery set at Oxford in 1583 with an excommunicated monk spying for Catholics and hunting for a lost book

The Illusionist, Jennifer Johnston – a girl’s father dies and she gets her mother to tell her about their story, and the husband has a mysterious locked room and does illusions and prevents his wife from writing

The Still Point, Amy Sackville – an unhappily married woman reads through the archives of her polar explorer ancestor who disappeared leaving his wife behind forever

That Culture Thing I Like

In the Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf Soueif – a massive story about an Egyptian girl from the 1960s on

A Case of Exploding Mangoes – an espionage type novel about the death of a Pakistani dictator

Salaam Brick Lane, Tarquin Hall – a memoir about a dude who goes to live in the new East End and writes about the people there

Dreamers of the Day , Mary Doria Russell – a spinster travels to Egypt during the Cairo Peace Conference and meets all the relevant parties to the situation

Hearts and Minds, Amanda Craig – a book about immigration in modern London with five central characters whose lives intertwine in different ways

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, Shyam Selvadurai – a Sri Lankan adopted boy struggles to come to terms with his sexuality

Sweetness in the Belly, Camilla Gibbs – a white girl raised in Morocco and Ethiopia flees away to London where everything is strange

The Writing on My Forehead, Nafisa Haji – a girl called Saira discovered family secrets when she was sixteen, and grows up to be a journalist

The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper – a memoir of a wealthy Liberian girl with an adoptive sister that she lost when there was a big Liberian coup

Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger – a lady’s maid moves with her mistress to Egypt and she falls in love with the dragoman and it’s wonderful

Palace Walk and Palace of Desire and the third one, Naguib Mahfouz – very excellent series with Cairo and families

The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh – a family saga type book from 1885 to the World Wars about the British colonies in Burma and Malaysia

A History of Insects, Yvonne Roberts – a young girl growing up in Pakistan in the days of the Empire writes about her encounters with a Pakistani man and calls her notebook A History of Insects to stop grown-ups reading it

A Proper Education for Girls, Elaine Di Rollo – twins raised by a father with a weird collection of things and then one twin marries a missionary and goes to India and the other one stays home all oppressed at home

East of the Sun, Julia Gregson – three British women travel to India towards the end of the Raj

God is an Englishman, R. F. Delderfield – a Raj officer heads back to Victorian England to have a proper Victorian life with his wife and stuff

Into Suez, Stevie Davies – a book about Britain and Egypt and everything after World War II (that is fiction)

When I Lived in Modern Times, Linda Grant – a British Jewish girl called Evelyn goes to Palestine right when Israel is being formed

Climbing the Mango Trees , Madhur Jaffrey – a memoir of growing up in India, with WWII and Partition

Indian Summer, Alex von Tunzleman – a very excellent book about Partition in India

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, Edward Luce

The Butterfly Mosque, G. Willow Wilson – a woman raised in a madly secular household converts to Islam and moves to Egypt

Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, Paul Chaat Smith

Everything is Broken, Emma Larkin – an exceptionally good nonfiction book about Burma by a superb nonfiction author

The Obscure Logic of the Heart, Priya Basil – a young Muslim law student in London falls in love with a wealthy Kenyan boy. The lovers are star-crossed.

King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild – all about the Belgian occupation of the Congo and all the terrible things they did

Oleander Jacaranda, Penelope Lively – author’s memoir of her childhood in Cairo and then England in the 1930s

Victorians

The Dark Lantern , Gerri Brightwell – a Victorian woman takes a job as a maid, and her mistress uses her as a spy

The Beth Book, Sarah Grand – a book that is apparently better than Jane Eyre but we’ll see

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, Deborah Lutz

The Leavenworth Chair, Anna Katharine Green – a Victorian mystery with multiple points of view that was way the shit too melodramatic and cuckoo for Aarti

Beautiful for Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street, Helen Rappaport – a nonfiction book about a Victorian cosmetician and crook lady who got eventually put on trial (trials! yay!)

Victorian Feminists, Barbara Caine – an intellectual group biography of the awesome Victorian feminists

Forlorn Sunset, Michael Sadleir – a 1947 novel about the Victorian underworld with characters from all walks of life

Strange and Secret Peoples, Carole Silver – nonfiction book about what Victorians thought about fairies

Ghost Hunters, Deborah Blum – nonfiction book about Victorian spiritualists and the people who researched them

Wild Romance, Chloe Schama – a nonfiction book about a Victorian woman and letters and a ship and a lawsuit.  WIN WIN WIN

The Arsenic Century, James C. Whorton – a nonfiction book all about arsenic in Victorian England

Kept: A Victorian Mystery , D.J. Taylor – read this over!

The Journal of Dora Damage , Belinda Starling – a woman in the 1800s takes over her husband’s bookbinding business and binds pornographic books

Alas, Poor Lady, Rachel Ferguson – a large upper-class Victorian family have lots of single girls and fall upon hard times

The Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins – a woman sets out to prove that her husband is innocent of poisoning his first wife

Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism , Barbara Weisberg

The Taste of Sorrow, Jude Morgan – a novel about the Bronte sisters

World Wars

Unicorn Sisters, Ursula Holden – three sisters are sent to a boarding school run by eccentric spinsters during World War II

Citizens of London, Lynne Olson – World War II citizens of London

The Novel in the Viola, Natasha Solomons – an Austrian girl comes to England in 1938 to be a parlormaid (yay)

A Fierce Radiance, Lauren Belfer – an American photographer for Life magazine is asked to do a feature on penicillin trials during WWII

While England Sleeps, David Leavitt – a love affair between two men of different classes set against the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s

The German Woman, Paul Griner – an intricate tale of an Englishwoman and a German-extracted American during the two World Wars

Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War, ed. Peter Conradi – Murdoch’s letters from WWII

The Tortoise and the Hare, Elizabeth Jenkins – right after WWII a barrister’s wife gets cheated on and everybody is sympathetic

City of Thieves, David Benioff – in Russia during WWII, a boy gets caught looting a German paratrooper corpse and then must find a dozen eggs for the Russian colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake

Saplings, Noel Streatfeild

My Father’s Moon, Elizabeth Jolley – an unwed mum working at a boarding school pines for her lost love, a nurse she fell in love with during World War II

House-Bound , Winifred Peck – a 1942 woman can’t find a housekeeper so she decides to keep her own house

Daughters of Eden , Charlotte Bingham – story of four different British women during WWII

Cloud of Bone , Bernice Morgan – intertwined stories of WWII Navy guy, native tribes of Newfoundland, and present-day anthropologist

Address Unknown, Katherine Kressman Taylor – an epistolary novel written in 1938 between a German and a Jewish American, showing how the German gradually becomes a Nazi

Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson – a book all full of anecdotes about the women during and after the Great War and how they all managed

Don’t You Know There’s a War On?, Jonathan Croall

Out of Harm’s Way, Jessica Mann – all about children being evacuated during WWII, based on letters and journals

Operation Mincemeat, Ben MacIntyre – a story about an exciting and absurd espionage case by Britain in WWII

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes – what it says, very exciting and sad

Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, Peter Hopkirk – how the Germans & Turks tried to stir up rebellion against the British in Afghanistan & India during the first World War

Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker – record of events and decisions leading up to WWII; in speeches and diaries and letters and things

The Zookeeper’s Wife, Diane Ackerman – nonfiction book about a husband and wife running a zoo in Warsaw who helped Polish Jews to escape from Warsaw

Stranger in the House, Julie Summers – history of WWII veterans returning to their homes and how it affected their wives; based on journals, letters, and interviews

Doreen, Barbara Noble – a young working-class girl gets evacuated from London to live with a posh family in Oxfordshire

Debs at War, Anne de Courcy – exactly what it sounds like!

Children of War , Susan Goodman – looks at WWII from the memories of the children alive then

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien – the best comic novel of all the comic novels, set in Ireland right before WWII

Retelling Stories

Swan’s Wing, Ursula Synge – a retelling of the six swans story!

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King – darkly comic retellings of Bible stories with a critique of exoticization of race

Boating for Beginners, Jeanette Winterson – retelling of the Noah story

The Water Song, Suzanne Weyn – adaptation of The Princess and the Frog that is set in Belgium in World War I

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, Louise Murphy – really dark unsettling telling of this story, set in Nazi Poland

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin – a story narrated by Aeneas’s wife that isn’t Creusa, v. lovely

The Autumn Castle , Kim Wilkins – a faery story with Grimm themes

Speculative Fiction

Enchanter Night, Steven Millhauser – stories about all the residents of a small Connecticut town when magic starts happening there

In Great Waters, Kit Whitfield – mermaids in Venice and monarchs in England and all sorts of other nice things

Starcrossed, Elizabeth Bunce – a young thief is stuck (because of  blizzardiness) in a manor house full of young rich people who have all kinds of awesome machinationy secrets

Dreadful Skin, Cherie Priest – a Brit comes back from India a werewolf, and an ex-Irish nun monster hunter happens

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow – a geeky kid gets put through a slightly dystopian San Francisco criminal justice system and everything gets all crazy

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville – another alternate London story

Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman – a science fiction novel about a society where they have neuters and there are gender and class issues all over the place as a neuter character tells its story to a xenologist

Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey – a near-future dystopic military society with an excellent heroine

A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski – a scifi book that nobody ever reads

Black No More, George S. Schuyler – a satire book about a world where they invent a surgery to turn black people white and it’s satirical

The Einstein Intersection, Samuel Delany – an amazing sci-fi book endorsed by Neil Gaiman by a guy with an amazing beard

The Unnameables, Ellen Booraem – a dystopian fiction book about an outcast boy on a very orderly island

Stephen Lawhead’s Song of Albion trilogy

Inside Out, Maria Snyder – a brilliant twisty dystopian novel with good characters

The Alchemy of Stone, Ekaterina Sedia – a superb steampunk book about a society of Alchemists vs. Mechanists, where the main character is an automaton

Nation, Terry Pratchett

Pashazade, Jon Courtenay Grimwood – the Germans won WWI, and a half-American half-Emir (Emirs are fun!) is supposed to be married off but there’s crime and it’s fun

Chris Priestley writes Gothic tales

The Sorcerer’s House, Gene Wolfe – an epistolary fantasy novel about a dude who gets out of prison and inherits an old empty house

Dragonsbane, Barbara Hambly

Ariel, Steven R. Boyett – a guy and a lady and a unicorn all team up to fight evil in a post-apocalyptic world

Far World , J. Scott Savage – everyone but this one girl can do magic in one world; and in another world, a boy is the only one who can

The Stone Gods , Jeanette Winterson – a dystopian future myth

Spirit Gate , Kate Eliott – an extra good fantasy saga

Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lomora et. seq.

David Webber – exciting and good space opera series

Nightwalker , Jocelyn Drake – a vampire who can start fires teams up with a vampire hunter to eliminate a monster threat

YA/Kids

Linda Buckley Archer’s time books – complex time travel stories!  The Time Travelers, The Time Thief, The Time Quake

A Lemon and a Star, E.C. Spykman – an Melendyish book about a family of four kids living at the turn of the century and having all sorts of jolly adventures

The 10 PM Question, Kate de Goldi – a kid with anxiety problems makes a new friend and it’s all about families

Tuesdays at the Castle, Jessica Day George – a book that is not unlike Diana Wynne Jones

Framed, Frank Cottrell Boyce – a children’s book about art theft

A Beautiful Lie, Irfan Master – Goodbye Lenin with Partition in India rather than the fall of the Berlin Wall

Between the Forest and the Hills, Ann Lawrence – a novel about Roman Britain with talking ravens and a mysterious one-eyed traveler

The Clockwork Three, Matthew J. Kirby – three children with music and clockwork and tenements all come together and do powerful stuff together with automatons

Neal Shusterman – writes excellent fantasy YA that is fun and nice

The Box of Delights, John Masefield – an excellent spooky midwinter book about children whose parents are snowed in and there is a box that lets its owner change sizes and travel through time

A.S. Peterson – he writes books about a girl called Phinea Button who leaves her home in Georgia and goes off to sea!

Violet Needham – writes exciting, high-drama stories for children that are also grim and Ruritanian

Once a Witch, Carolyn MacCullough – a YA book about a girl called Tamsin from a family of witches with a skilled big sister and there is time travel also

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair – 1900s orphan gets adopted by mysterious old woman

Bad Faith, Gillian Philip – a super duper extra triple bleak dystopian YA book

Wake, Lisa McMann – YA novel about a girl who gets sucked into people’s dreams

Bleeding Violet, Dia Reeves – a bipolar biracial girl comes to a scary-ass town in Texas with monsters and doors to other worlds

Candor, Pam Bachorz – addictive propaganda gets broadcasted into everybody’s brains and nobody can be sure if they’re making real choices or what

Jacky Faber books by LA Meyer, starting with Bloody Jack - most wondrous heroine ever

The Magic Thief , Sarah Prineas – kid picks an old guy’s pocket and finds magic things

Flora Segunda , Ysabeau Wilce – a good book with a library and a butler and a good heroine

The Old Country, Mordecai Gerstein – a little girl gets transformed into a fox and must figure out how to get switched back.  During war.

Bella, Anne and Edward Syfreet – a frightening antique doll enmeshes two girls in scary things

Amy’s Eyes, Richard Kennedy – a little girl with a sailor doll turns into a doll herself and goes off on piratey adventures

The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, Michele Young-Stone – a young girl gets struck by lightning and she has visions and there’s an orphan boy who’s written a book about lightning strike survivors and it is completely wonderful

Blessing’s Bead, Debby Dahl Edwardson – a story about an Eskimo girl in 1989 and her grandmother in 1907, & the ways their lives are changing

Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, Rachel Cohn and David Levithan – two best friends struggle with sexuality and feelings and all sotrs of things

The Anybodies, N.E. Bode – a very sweet friendly book about a little girl with dull parents who had been swapped at birth

Time Switch, Matt Chamings – time travel and steampunkish Victorians, and two kids in a house with a ghost boy (sort of)

Keeping Time, Colby Rodowski – uses “Greensleeves” to travel back and forth in time

The Floating Island, Elizabeth Haydon – an excellent fantasy novel with Brett Helquist illustrations and ships and nonhumans

Audrey, Wait!, Robin Benway – a girl called Audrey breaks up with a musician and he writes a song about it that becomes famous

James Bow – writes a series about two people who meet book characters and travel in time and have other good adventures

The Secret Hour, Scott Westerfield – a group of kids have special powers and get an extra hour at midnight that nobody else gets and they fight evil

The Thirteen Treasures, Michelle Harrison – a girl who can see fairies gets shipped off to her grandmother’s rambling old manor house

Crossing, Andrew Xia Fukuda – a Chinese-born student in an American school tries to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of several students, and the end will make you question the rest of it

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie – an Indian kid goes off the reservation to a white school

The Grounding of Group 6, Julian F. Thompson – five kids are being disposed of by their parents at a kids-disposal facility but this one group of kids doesn’t want to be disposed of

Trapped in Time, Ruth Chew – two little kids get transported back to Civil War times and there are illustrations!

Eyes Like Stars, Lisa Mantchev – a girl in a theatre company has to prove that she belongs there!

Another Faust, Daniel and Dina Nayeri – five teenagers with different powers in a Manhattan boarding school!

The Ship That Flew , Hilda Lewis – a boy gets a magic ship that can fly through place and time; written in 1939

The Magic Half – a little girl can time-travel through a piece of glass to her same house in another century, where another little girl lives and there is a wicked villain and time travel, hooray!

Last Days of Summer , Steve Kluger – epistolary YA novel about a kid who becomes penpals with a Giants third baseman

The Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl, Barry Lyga – a bullied kid who writes graphic novels meets a Goth chick

The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Dawkins, Barbara Kerley & Henry Selznick – an illustrated biography of a back-in-the-day guy who tried to show the public what dinosaurs would have looked like!!

Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It, Sundee T. Frazier – a curious child decides to discover why his mother does not talk to her father

Well Witched, Frances Hardinge (Verdigris Deep in the UK) – three children become responsible for granting a wishing well’s wishes, and it deals seriously with family issues and the writing is lovely

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff – a broken hearted sacked girl inherits her grandmother’s magic shop!

The Ghost in the Swing, Janet Patton Smith – a girl goes off to live at her aunt’s big spooky house and befriends a ghost

Libyrinth, Pearl North – a librarian called Haly lives in a place with book-burnings and she can hear books talking

Deva Fagan writes sci-fi books for tweens/teens

Plain Kate, Erin Bow – a girl called Kate’s father dies, and the townspeople think she’s a witch, and she has an adorable but not twee talking cat

Comics

Invisible People, Will Eisner – a clothes presser and a faith healer and a librarian with a sick father have loneliness and it is bleak and sad

The Recently Deflowered Girl, Hyacinthe Phipps – a book of etiquette for threshold-crossing moments with illustrations by Edward Gorey

The Sky over the Louvre, Bernard Yslaire & Jean-Claude Carriere

Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, Jacques Tardi

The Lodger, Karl Stevens

Essex County, Jeff Lemire – graphic novel set in a rural Toronto community and often mentioned in the same breath as Blankets

Stuck Rubber Baby, Howard Cruse – introduced by Tony Kushner, graphic novel about homophobia etc in the civil rights movement

Local, Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly – a graphic novel about a girl who moves all over and goes to a dozen different places

The Castaways, Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo – graphic novel about a boy in the Great Depression

Skim, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki – a graphic novel about growing up Asian and gay in Canada

Grandville, Bryan Talbot – amazing lush comic steampunk mystery set in Paris

Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children (graphic novel)

Vogelein, Jane Irwin – a graphic novel about a clockwork faerie that has become aware and can try to develop relationships with people

Lost at Sea, Bryan Lee O’Malley – a graphic novel about an eighteen-year-old girl who believes a cat stole her soul and she goes on a road trip with her friends

Goodbye, Chunky Rice , Craig Thompson – a little turtle goes on an adventure

Ballads, Charles Vess – retellings of ballads by people

Translation

The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon, trans Meredith McKinney

The Other City, Michal Ajvaz – a book about reading and seeing and a night-time Prague that uses the spaces regular Prague isn’t using

A Persian Requiem, Simin Daneshvar – a translated book about Iran in the 1940s and its country estate atmosphere but with looming war

Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco – a Filipino writer searches for clues to his friend’s supposed suicide in his friend’s manuscripts

The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Paolo Giordano – translated from Italian, story of an injured ex-skier who falls in love with a brilliant boy with a brain-damaged twin

The House of the Mosque, Kader Abdolah – a privileged family lives through the 1979 Iranian revolution

Silence, Shusako Endo – a Portuguese missionary in seventeenth-century Japan contemplates the silence of God

Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih – Arabic book with a story within a story and it deals with gender and colonialism and all sorts of things

Nonfiction

Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers, Stephanie Levine – a woman spends a year amongst Hasidic girls!  LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR JENNY.

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale, Catherine Orenstein

Becoming Shakespeare, Jack Lynch – the history of how Shakespeare became the undisputed king of litrature

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, Janet Soskice

Nine Parts of Desire, Geraldine Brooks – a book about Islam and women

Here’s Looking at Euclid, Alex Bellos – a charming wee book about math and all sorts of math concepts that you can easily understand

The Lord as Their Portion, Elizabeth Rapley – a true book about religious orders and how they shaped the world

Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth, Randi Hutter Epstein – a cultural history of childbirth

Rapunzel’s Daughters, Rose Weitz – a book about American women and their relationship to their hair

Chances Are, Michael and Ellen Kaplan – a witty book about statistics and probability

The Thoughtful Dresser, Linda Grant – collected essays about clothes and humanity and how they relate

Love Well the Hour: The Life of Lady Colin Campbell, Anne Jordan

The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, Judith Flanders

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago, Douglas Perry

Anything Goes, Lucy Moore: a biography of the Roaring Twenties

Jane’s Fame, Claire Harman – how people thought about Jane Austen over the many years

The Bronte Myth, Lucasta Miller – a book about the Brontes and what people have made of them over the years

Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines, Jeannine Davis-Kimball

Dark Remedy, Trent Stephens and Rock Brynner – a history of the epidemic of birth defects related to thalidomide

Mistress of the Elgin Marbles, Susan Nagel – biography of Mary Nesbit who went to Turkish seraglios and had a crazy divorce and all sorts of stuff in the early 1800s

Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick – stories about people in North Korea, taken from personal interviews

Napoleon of Crime, Ben McIntyre – a profile of the Victorian thief Moriarty was based on

The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, Hector Feliciano

Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss, Cynthia Saltzman

The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Edward Dolnick

The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft – Ulrich Boser

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, Laney Salisbury

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, Jonathan Lopez

Master Pieces: The Curator’s Game, Thomas Hoving

Museum of the Missing: The High Stakes of Art Crime, Simon Houpt

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy’s Art During World War II, Ilaria Dagnini Brey

Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, Sharon Waxman

The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art, Sandor Radnoti

Flow, Elissa Stein and Susan Kim – cultural history of menstruation

Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson – a dude takes minimum wage jobs for a year and writes about the wretched, wretched conditions

Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman – will totally change my perspective on time

America’s Prophet, Bruce Feiler – a nonfiction book about how America has been shaped by the story and example of Moses

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee – a look at body-mind links that is accessible to people who are not scientists

Religious Literacy, Stephen Protheroe – a book about how people need to learn some basic stuff about religion

The Straight State, Margot Canaday – a book that examines how American immigration, military, and welfare systems have treated the gays over the years

The Brain that Changes Itself , Norman Doidge – just what it sounds like

How We Choose to Be Happy , Rick Foster and Greg Hicks

Flawless, Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell – a nonfiction book about a massive diamond heist and all the crafty things the thieves did

And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in a Viral Culture, Bill Wasik – a book about viral things! I am so interested in viral things!

The Straight State, Margot Canaday – all about America and how it treats gay people

News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, Laurie Hertzel

Portrait of a Priestess, Joan Breton Connelly – a great big illustrated book all about ancient Greek priestesses

The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker – explores the question of women aspiring to meet some male-set standard, what women choose when they are free to choose, etc.

The Brethren, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong – insider account of the Burger Supreme Court

F.R. Leavis

Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium, Allen Cameron

The Narcissism of Minor Differences, Peter Baldwin – how Americans and Europeans are not that different

The American Enemy, Philippe Roger – about French anti-Americanism

Treacherous Alliance, Trita Parsi – the US and Iran and Israel and their weird screwed-up relationship

How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich – science nonfiction book about cognitive illusions that make us make mistakes

Counting Sheep, Dr. Paul Martin

The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James – just apparently very amazing

Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran – alternate realities experienced by victims of neurological damage

Seeing Further, Bill Bryson, ed. – a collection of essays on key issues that have come before the Royal Society and how those issues are relevant today

Society without God, Phil Zuckerman – a study of Scandinavia and how they are happy without religion

The Case for God, Karen Armstrong

Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer – reasons for going to war and when we should do it

A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power – America and how we have dealt (not dealt) with genocide

Home is Where We Start From, Donald Winnicott – one of the earliest psychoanalysts writes essays about mental health and accepting imperfection

Religion Is Not About God, Loyal Rue – about religion in society from an evolutionary psychology point of view

Parisians, Graham Robb – a lovely and witty book about Paris by the guy who wrote Strangers

Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, Robert C. Fuller

When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Paul S. Boyer

In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent – a book about languages that people made up, like Esperanto and Klingon

Shaking the World for Jesus, Heather Hendershot – academic exploration of Christian culture

The Trial: A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson, Sadakat Kadri

The Tyrannicide Brief, Geoffrey Robertson – all about the guy who prosecuted King Charles for randomly killing his subjects

All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein – the time has come.  Go forth and do so.

Good Times, Bad Times, Harold Evans – about Rupert Murdoch taking over the Times

Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, Julia Lesage and Linda Kintz

David Kynaston – an editor that brings together diaries and memoirs and records from British history about day-to-day life

Who Hates Whom, Bob Harris – Current events!  And who wants to blow up everyone else!

The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, Mike Madrid

Glamour, Carol Dyhouse – a history.  with footnotes and pictures from old timey magazines

How to Get Things Really Flat, Andrew Martin – an amusing and helpful book about housecleaning

The Hot Zone, Richard Preston – an exciting book about discovering Ebola

The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes – nonfic about the progress of science in the Georgian/Regency times

Love at Goon Park, Deborah Blum – a book about the “cloth monkey” primate research

The Age of Homespun, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich – a history of early American women’s objects that is completely glorious despite being about something I ordinarily wouldn’t care about

A Season in Mecca, Abdellah Hammoudi – nonfiction book all about the haj

The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar – a book about how we make choices, written after doing loads of nifty experiments

Old Masters, New Worlds, Cynthia Saltzman – all about how fancyposh Americans acquired works by the Old Masters & brought them here

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species, Sean Carroll – stories from the history of geology & zoology & all sorts of lovely things

Bonk, Mary Roach – light nonfiction about sexual research

Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World, Lawrence and and Nancy Goldstone

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer – all about how writers and artists anticipated scientific discoveries in interesting ways

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum – all about the government poisoning alcohol during Prohibition to catch bootleggers

Patsy Sims is a Southern writer of fantastic nonfiction

Is There No Place on Earth For Me?, Susan Sheehan – a nonfiction story about a woman with schizophrenia in various treatment facilities

The Meaning of Treason, Rebecca West – an exploration of WWII and Communist traitors

Waxing the Tadpole, Elizabeth Little – extremely hilarious book about words

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Allison Hoover Bartlett – nonfiction about a book thief being tracked down by a detective

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter – a book about how language changes and evolves over time

The Scramble for Africa, Thomas Pakenham – a nonfiction book about the colonization of Africa that sometimes says awkward things like “savages” but is nevertheless very thrilling

Liza Picard and her social histories

The Balfour Declaration, Jonathan Schneer – a wonderful book about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict

Barbara Shircliffe is a good writer about racial issues

Ethical Imperialism – all about IRBs and how they are not always a good thing

Historians in Trouble, Jon Weiner – a book about scandals in the field of history for stuff like plagiarism and research fraud, etc.

Grand Strategies, Charles Hill – the books that military leaders read and how they affect them

Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

Bluestockings, Jane Robinson – nonfiction about the first wave of women allowed in university

Reasonable Creatures, Katha Politt – a collection of excellent essays about women & feminism; also Virginity or Death!

The Stuff of Life, Mark Schultz et.al. – a graphic novel about genetics and DNA!!

Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World, Roger Atwood – yay!

The Secret Life of Words, Henry Hitchings – what it sounds like! apparently v. accessible and friendly

Bad Science , Ben Goldacre – lays out the basic principles of science so you’ll know when things are bullshit

The Blue Orchard, Jackson Taylor – a true story of a middle-aged nurse who gets arrested for assisting a black doctor with an abortion

Weeds in the Garden of Words , Kate Burridge – an interesting book all about the English language and how it’s developed

A Perfect Mess , Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman – a book about order in disorder
Sisters , John J. Fialka – nuns in the making of America

God Is Not One, Stephen Prothero – brief overview of eight major world religions and how they are different

Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians would Believe for the Next 1500 Years, Philip Jenkins

Is That a Fish in Your Ear, David Bellos – a wonderful book all about the difficulties of translation

Books about books

The Library at Night , Alberto Manguel – stuff about libraries

Enchanted Hunters, Maria Tatar – why kids like stories, how reading helps them, the role of horror

Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk – a nonfiction book with much criticism of comics and stuff about their theory and history and it’s interesting even though he doesn’t like Craig Thompson

A Short History of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James

Great Books, David Denby – a dude decides to read a bunch of canonical books and write about his experience

The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms, Helen Mirrick

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, Alex Beam

The Flourish, Heather Spears – a historical reconstruction of events leading up to the murder of a young woman in Scotland in the 1800s

Killing the Imposter God, Donna Freitas – book about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy

The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar – book about fairy tales, and how the Grimm brothers sanitized them!

The Shortest History of Europe, John Hirst – what it says on the box

The Bayeux Tapestry, Carola Hicks – a book all about the history of the Bayeux Tapestry in all the different time periods

Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande – written in the 1930s but still very relevant and explores the experience of being a writer

Quiet Please , Scott Douglass – a book all about libraries

Classics for Pleasure, Michael Dirda – book about books; namely, forgotten classics

Memoirs/Travel Writing

The Music Room, Namita Devidayal – a memoir about learning classical Indian music

Flyaway, Suzie Gilbert – a memoir about rehabbing wild birds that is far more interesting than you might think

Journey from the Land of No, Roya Hakakian – a memoir about a Jewish girl growing up in pre- and then post-revolutionary Iran

A Secret Gift, Ted Gup – an investigate journalist finds a suitcase full of letters with a dude who secretly gave money to people who needed it during the Depression

The Lunatic Express, Carl Hoffman – a memoir about a dude who went round traveling on all the most dangerous modes of transportation and then writing about it LIKE A CRAZY PERSON

Love in a Time of Homeschooling, Laura Brodie – an honest, witty book about a woman who decides to homeschool one of her daughters for a year

Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks – a memoir about her childhood pen friends & going to find them as an adult

Is There a Doctor in the Zoo ?, David Taylor – a zoo vet!

The Mighty Queens of Freeville , Amy Dickinson – memoir of an advice columnist with a wonderful family

Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper, Peter Hill – minding a lighthouse in 1973

The Call of the Weird , Louis Theroux – travels in American subcultures!

The Suicide Index , Joan Wickersham (she deals with her father’s suicide – in memoir form!)

James Lee-Milne is an incredibly funny and amazing diarist

Rupert Hart-Davis’s correspondence

The Midwife, Jennifer Worth – a memoir about a woman who was a midwife in London’s East End in the 1950s

Silvertown, Melanie McGrath – the author writes about her grandparents, who lived in the East End at the turn of the century

Waiter Rant , Steve Dublanica – just what it sounds like

My Old Man and the Sea , Daniel and David Hays – a father and son have alternating diary entries when they go sailing around Cape Horn in a boat they built themselves

Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee – a gentle slow book about growing up in a small English village

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Mark Bittner – all about how the author made friends with all these wild parrots and became their advocate and was super interested in them

Betty McDonald’s memoirs The Egg and I and Anybody Can Do Anything about being raised on a chicken farm and then growing up and trying to find office work

Tell Me Where It Hurts, Nick Trout – a memoir about being a modern-day veterinarian

Other People’s Dirt, Louise Rafkin – a book about being a housekeeper

Confessions of a Trauma Junkie, Sherry Jones Mayo – memoir of a paramedic

How Doctors Think, Jeremy Groopman – useful to know and not dull at all

Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, Melissa Plaut

A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor – a travel book where the guy stays at three separate monasteries

The Other Side of the Dale, Gervase Phinn – a James-Herriot-like book about a school inspector in the Dales

The Spiral Staircase and Through the Narrow Gate, Karen Armstrong – books about being a nun

Complications, Atul Gawande – a series of well-written essays about what it is like to be a doctor

In Her Own Sweet Time, Rachel Lehmann Haut – memoir and research about American women having children later in life

Beg, Borrow, Steal, Michael Greenberg – a memoir about a struggling writer in New York (collected columns really)

My Life in France, Julia Child – apparently quite delightful!

The Motion of the Ocean, Janna Cawrse Esarey – memoir about a husband and wife that go a-sailing just the two of them for a whole year

Negotiations with the Dead, Margaret Atwood – book on writers and writing

A Hack’s Progress, Phillip Knightley – all about being a British journalist over the years

The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, Virginia Woolf – collection of her essays about all sorts of things

Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It – travel essays by a rather world-weary dude in Detroit and North Africa and Cambodia and New Orleans and all sorts of places

Clinging to the Wreckage, John Mortimer – the Rumpole writer waxes humorous about his life

Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, Melissa Milgrom

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka, Adele Barker – a memoir about an Arizonian professor who goes to teach in Sri Lanka

In the Land of Believers, Gina Welch – a secular Jew’s memoir of living amongst evangelical Christians

Winging It, Jenny Gardiner – a memoir about adopting an insane parrot that wants to kill everyone

It’s a Don’s Life, Mary Beard – a collection of articles about being a classics lecturer at Cambridge

The Checkout Girl, Tazeen Ahmad – a book about being a checkout girl

Direct Red, Gabriel Weston – a woman’s memoir about becoming a surgeon

The Real James Herriot, Jim Wright – a biography of James Herriot by his little son

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen – a wonderful wonderful biography!

Hope-in-the-Mist, Michael Swanwick – biography of Hope Mirlees

No Man Knows My History , Fawn M. Brodie – an in-depth biography of Joseph Smith

The Good Women of China, Xinran – a collection of true stories assembled by a Chinese journalist who had to publish her book in England rather than China due to censorship and it’s terribly sad and upsetting BUT IMPORTANT

Burmese Days , George Orwell – novel based on Orwell’s time as an imperial officer in Burma

Someday My Prince Will Come , Jerramy Fine – a memoir about a girl who goes to London because she wants to become a princess

A Lucky Child, Thomas Buergenthal – a memoir of surviving Auschwitz that is beautifully written

The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw – memoir of growing up in 1970s Britain and having music hooray!

No Matter How Loud I Shout, Edward Humes – a journalist’s account of his year observing the juvenile court in California

Matthew Paul Turner writes books about evangelical culture as a former fundamentalist Christian himself

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain – an Oxford-educated girl’s memoir of living through the First World War, losing her fiance and brother, & becoming a nurse

Lit, Mary Karr – a memoir about religion and converting to Catholicism, by the author of The Liar’s Club

The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts – occasionally too academic but mostly very lovely

Stephen Fry in America – Stephen Fry goes to all the states and writes about them!

Where We Going, Daddy?, Jean-Louis Fournier, trans. Adriana Hunter – a father writes a memoir about his two disabled sons

One and the Same, Abigail Pogrebin – a memoir about an identical twin and how people try to differentiate themselves

College, Stephen Akey – memoir about the guy’s time in college

Antony Sher’s biographies / theater diaries, Year of the King, Beside Myself, and Woza Shakespeare!, with all his Shakespeare research and other nice things