Chemist Elizabeth Zott is a no-nonsense, self-assured, straight-forward, scientific genius. Only problem is it’s the 1950s, when no woman in science is taken seriously. She battles sexism, workplace inequality, sexual harassment and sexual assault. She is an unmarried single mother and unapologetic atheist. Her soulmate Calvin is a brilliant scientist who takes her work seriously and they have a child together. However, Calvin dies young in an accident and the unscrupulous Director of Chemistry Dr. Donatti finds out that Elizabeth is pregnant, fires Elizabeth, and takes credit for her work.

A TV producer, Walter Pine, meets Elizabeth. He is swept away by her charisma and offers her a job as a cooking host on an afternoon show Supper at Six. In her unique way of infusing chemistry lessons with cooking lessons she becomes very popular and uses her platform to expose inequality and sexism of its time.

While this book has all the ingredients to be a knock-out hit for women in STEM, the male-bashing was over the top. In an attempt to point-out the injustice women had to endure, Bonnie has her main character Elizabeth called a c**** twice and brutally raped as the reason she was kicked out of her PhD program. While there were men who stood by as allies, they often felt powerless in their role and did nothing for Elizabeth. I almost would rather the author call out the subtle ways women are subverted and reward characters who rally around others who fight for what’s right. As a woman surrounded by women in STEM, I feel like Bonnie’s interpretation was single minded and perhaps could have benefited from multiple women. I almost would have desired something of a Sex in Science (like Sex in the City.) Still… overall, this is a popular read, written by a woman for women.

Celebrities tend to garner hate, particularly when they project an image of a narcissistic, frivolous, over-paid, undereducated, ego maniac, using their “celebrity” status to lecture the rest of us. Admittedly, Harry epitomizes this stereotype of an entitled Prince who proclaims the desire for privacy in the same stroke of signing a multi-million dollar book deal, starring in a Netflix docuseries, and engaging in high profile interviews. However, I found this memoir to be compassion-inducing and candidly honest.

Imagine being born into a world of hyper-scrutiny, with the expectation that your life belongs to the country. Your mistakes are amplified and your most intimate moments are public. Privacy provides a sense of identity, freedom, trust, and safety when you may feel our most vulnerable. Through therapy and self-discovery, you realize that you should not have followed your family’s advice – to ignore the media which has misconstrued your narrative. The only way to rectify the misalignment between your public image and self-image is to tell your side of the story.

The book is separated into three sections, the first of which is focused on his grief in his teenage years, the second of which is focused on his military service; and the third of which is focused on his wife. Grief felt like the most constant theme, and Princess Diana’s life and death felt like a thread woven through each story told in the memoir. 

• One of the most shocking things was Prince Harry’s belief that his mother was still alive after her death and would return to him. The relationship between a parent and a child is undoubtedly one of the strongest human attachments. It was an absolutely heartbreaking view of childhood grief and the lack of proper support he needed to cope with her death.
• At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The military would allow him to disappear, avoid his struggles with academics, and find his own purpose in the world. Surprisingly, Harry reveals he killed 25 Taliban during two tours of duty in Afghanistan. Such an experience left him feeling more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks.
• Then he meets Meghan. He tries to protect their budding cinematic romance but not long after the media discovers their relationship and begin to prey on Meghan and her family. Enduring racist, classist, and misogynist remarks sparked by reporters, the couple looks to the royal family for protection. When their pleas are met with silence, they end up renouncing their royal titles.

Spare was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer. Moehringer won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his article “Resurrecting the Champ” and again in 2000 for his article “Crossing Over.” He also famously ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open: An Autobiography and Phil Knight’s memoir, Shoe Dog.

A large portion of you daily actions are driven by habits. Habits have been formed through repetition over the course of your entire life. Naturally there are healthy and productive ones that serve you, and negative ones that work against you, In either case, you are what you repeated do so you owe it to yourself understand your habits, how they are formed and how they are broken. This book is about showing how small adjustments can lead to massive transformation in your life. Here are some of the major takeaways:

1. Beware of the Motion vs Action Trap: “When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.“
2. We live in a delayed return environment: “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”
3. Identity change first, the rest will follow: “The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes a part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.“
4. The aggregation of marginal gains: Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous”
5. Winners and Losers have the same goals: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You rise to the level of your system.”

Anxious People is a story about a bank robbery gone wrong. The bank robber, having failed at robbing a bank, bursts upon an apartment viewing and proceeds to take a group of unfortunate strangers hostage. This group of mismatched folks, each with their secret fears and mistakes, slowly open their hearts to one another, and as a result, find their lives inexplicably changed for the better.

Reading this book feels like digging through a treasure trove, with wonderful surprises at every turn. This book is laugh-out-loud funny, filled with quirky characters and awkward situations. There’s even a mini mystery, when the police tries to reconstruct what happened, and the details don’t seem as straightforward as they initially thought. The mystery is a small part of the story, and even that is superbly done and managed to surprise and delight me.

At its heart, this is a story that speaks to the humanity in all of us. No matter our backgrounds or experiences, we each have done the best we can with what we are given. Backman knows how we feel at our lowest moments, during our biggest and smallest times of disappointment, grief, and despair. There is humor in how we feel and there is hope in low times. We’ve all made mistakes and all deserve second chances to redeem ourselves. That is what Backman has captured so deftly with his tale.

What if you were given the chance to design a new school from scratch? Diane Tavenner is the founder of Summit Public Schools, which operates some of the top-performing schools in the nation. In her book, Diane shares the story of how she designed a new kind of charter school with a simple but very ambitious goal: “We wanted to teach kids not just what they needed to get into college, but what they needed to live a good life.” Summit schools are rooted in the unshakeable belief that all students have the potential for success.

Summit’s unique model is built on three key elements:

• Self-directed learning: With the support of their teachers, all students are responsible for setting their own learning goals, developing learning plans, testing their knowledge, and assessing their performance. The personalized learning approach allows students to learn at their own pace. This is an incredibly important skill that will benefit them throughout their lives.
• Project-based learning: Summit schools emphasize hands-on project-based learning, allowing students to dive deep into a topic and collaborate with other students, building skills that employers are looking for in today’s workplace.
• Mentoring: All students have a dedicated mentor. More than a guidance counselor, these mentors meet regularly one-on-one with their students, building a deep relationship that can help students achieve their personal and academic goals.

What’s so striking about Diane is how incredibly modest she is about what she’s accomplished. And she doesn’t make any grand claims that she has all the answers. Much of the book is deeply personal. Diane shares stories of her childhood, growing up in a troubled family. She recounts her years as a young, idealistic teacher and administrator. And she opens-up about her own experience as a parent, raising her teenage son, Rett, as he navigates his path to adulthood. Preparing our kids for college, a career, and life is a long journey. And as any parent or teacher will tell you, it’s not always easy. Diane has written a wonderful guidebook to help all of us make the most of the adventure.

It’s 1969 in Brooklyn. A drunk cranky old deacon known as Sportcoat stumbles into the Cause Houses courtyard, pulls a .38 from his pocket and in front of everyone shoots Deems Clemens, the project’s drug dealer. The event is retold through Deems, the African-American and Latinx residents, white neighbors, local cops assigned to investigate, members of the Five Ends Baptist church, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters and Sportcoat himself. And the lives intertwine and overlap in unexpected ways.

I struggled reading the first half of the book. The slang, the nicknames, and the colloquialisms were unfamiliar to me, not to mention that when characters retold events the facts weren’t identical. The sentences seemed to go-on-and-on like ramblings of an old man, that by the time I got to the end of the thought, I felt tired. The writing itself was laborious. By the second half of the book, the frenzy and the clues started to come together. This book takes an engine of patience and affirms a faith in the idea that lost things will eventually be found. 

This book is a mystery crime novel, a portrait of the projects, a historical fiction that is witty and wise, violent and meditative, frightening and tender, disillusioned and romantic. McBride portrays a complex world that we so often associate with tragedy, yet through all the suffering the characters are filled with immense hubris that it ends up being a delightful comedy. Murders being bamboozled. A drunk who unintentionally evades the police. And cops stonewalled by entire community that seek to be the keepers of their own justice. A comedic plot, and all the clues are there if you read them right. When the truth emerges, new secrets are revealed and we learn that the best way to grow is to face your fears and that the seeds of hope lies in compassion and love.

Permission to Come Home is unlike any “self-help” book that I’ve read, not only because it is one of the firsts that I’ve read specifically targeted toward Asian Americans wanting to explore their mental health, but because of the compassionate, tender relationship between the author and the reader. This book reads like a long walk with a wise but comforting companion, as Wang not only guides you through various exercises of introspection and self-exploration but also includes her own personal experiences through thoughtful self-disclosure. Although she challenges the reader to reflect on the more harmful aspects of AAPI culture, it is done with nuance and respect for how these values may have helped our ancestors survive, but perhaps no longer serve those of us in later generations. Though this book challenged some harmful yet deeply-rooted beliefs, I nevertheless felt supported and encouraged throughout the entire reading and reflection journey.

The book is divided into ten sections, each one offering you permission to explore the various aspects of Asian American culture in all its nuances and complexities. Examples include Permission to Take Up Space, Permission to Fail, and Permission to Say No. In each section, Wang invites you to reflect on how society, culture, and family influenced your upbringing, values, and relationships with others and yourself. Each section includes little “rest stops” that invite the reader to take a moment of introspection to reflect on how various cultural values and lessons serve you (or not.)

Many passages resonated within me and stirred up deep emotions. By naming and describing the unspoken conditions, I was able to reflect and grow out of the experiences I endured growing up. The recognition of hurtful experiences bubbled up in forms of grief and overwhelmed me because after decades of neglect and punishment it is really difficult to admit I allowed it to happen, which in turned allowed me to forgive myself so that I may pass kindness onto others. Permission To Come Home encapsulates the tenderness of what Asian Americans need in order to heal and learn how to reclaim their mental health.

• Permission to Question: We might feel like questioning is a sign that we are ungrateful for what has been offered to us, especially when staying silent and not raising questions has been praised or encouraged.
• Indebtedness: A common barrier to asking for help from others is feeling like a burden or inconvenience to others, which has been framed as shameful or disrespectful. And beyond that, some of my clients have shared that they don’t ask for help because it means that they will “owe” for the favor. This relational indebtedness is something many of us were told to avoid at all costs. In many ways, you might have been taught that relationships were transactional instead of abundant and generous.
• Aspirations: So many people have revealed to me that once they are able to separate themselves from the expectations and aspirations of others, they actually have no idea what they want, because they have never been taught or encouraged to understand what they want.
• Being Seen: Somewhere along our life journey, we begin to receive messages that we are too loud, too opinionated, too strong, or just too much. We attempted to exert too much influence, and this was not acceptable to the outside world. In response, we make up rules for how we should show up and engage. We limit ourselves out of the fear of rejection or retaliation for taking up too much space. The dominant culture rewards us when our behavior fits their expectations and punishes us when we don’t play by their rules.
• Racism: The model minority myth says to other marginalized peoples, “See, if Asians can make it, why can’t you? The injustices can’t be that bad. Just work harder.” At the same time, Asians are also constantly being vilified as foreign and disease-carrying and told to go back to where they came from, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Praise and Celebration: Hard work and drive were the expected minimums; the only sort of acknowledgment was to ask, “Why didn’t you try harder for a loftier goal or accomplishment?” If success came easily, then it wasn’t believed to be worth as much. Success seemed to be tied with the need to suffer, and suffering was one way to prove oneself deserving of success. Even more so, success was never celebrated. There might even be a mistrust of praise or celebration because it was so rarely offered.
• Play: Play was discouraged. Play was indulgent. Play was irresponsible. Play was a waste of time and took away from the more serious stuff of life. … My daughter also made me realize that the enjoyment found within play was worthy enough of being a goal in itself. In fact, it was vital for her development, learning, and experience of boundless joy.

In his book Kids These Days, Harris believes that Millennials are producing lots of value but it is not reflected in their wages or job quality. He argues that education actually involves processes of labor capitalization we’ve simply cloaked in a “pedagogical mask.” He explains, when students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work. Childhood is the time to accumulate the skills and abilities necessary to compete in a tough adult job market, an arms race that pits kids and their families against each other in an ever-escalating battle for a competitive edge. Higher rewards for stars and increased competition for a smaller number of slots have led to intensified training.

From his perspective, increases in learning productivity gains should result in additional free play for students. Instead, kids are taking more AP classes and cramming their schedule with additional extracurriculars. Frustratingly, these additional measures of output is dubbed as “grade inflation” condemning students and the education system for improving the quality of education. I certainly remember having a little more than a handful of hours to sleep in high-school and feeling pressure to out-study my peers.

The rest of the book is a hit-or-miss. 1) He points out the feminization of labor involves a declining quality of life for both working men and women. Women having to do more for less and men competing with a larger labor pool. 2) He highlights that jobs for the working class are more precarious, less secure. 3) Juvenilization of poverty describes the processes by which children are at a higher risk for being poor, suffer consistent and long-term negative effects due to deprivation (physical, mental, and psychological), and are disproportionately affected by systemic issues that perpetuate poverty.

Many parts of the book are problematic or just plain wrong. He claims that parents instill classism at a young age by using playdates as part of networking. When he backs up his claims related to wealth creation, he only compares the bottom quartile of earners. He cherry picks statistics of accumulated debt. Overall, Harris makes the mistake of saying these trends will go on in perpetuity when in fact, many of them have already began to self-correct.

The message that Millennials were promised something they never got, is not something that is unique to this generation; it is a shared generational delusion. The dream of a national middle-class is a normative expectation in American Life, yet our political and economic state is not incentivized to make it a reality.

Leviathan Wakes is set in a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System. Earth’s UN and the Martian Congressional Republic act as competing superpowers, maintaining an uneasy military alliance in order to exert dual hegemony over the peoples of the Asteroid belt, known as “Belters”. Belters, whose bodies tend to be thin and elongated owing to their low-gravity environment, carry out the gritty, blue-collar work that provides the system with essential natural resources, and yet they are largely marginalized by the rest of the Solar System. The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), a network of loosely-aligned militant groups, seeks to combat the Belt’s exploitation at the hands of the “Inners”, who, in turn, have branded the OPA a terrorist organization.

Jim Holden is the Executive Office of the ice hauling ship Canterbury making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew respond to a distress signal and stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted.

Detective Miller is hired by a rich family to find their daughter, one girl in a system of billions. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything

Predestined to be made a major TV series, this is an epic sci-fi odyssey that entails empire building, evils of colonization, capitalism, and humanities’ survival. But it is also a personal journey for the dual-protagonists who represent polar opposites. One built on friendships and righteousness. He believes people are inherently good and can be trusted. The other is a story of redemption. He is a loner, tormented, misunderstood, and lives as though he has nothing to lose. Together, they uncover a secret that someone is willing to kill for—and kill on a scale unfathomable. War is brewing in the solar system unless they can find out who left the Scopuli and why.

“Convenience Store Woman,” a novel by the best-selling Japanese author Sayaka Murata, has touched a chord in Japan where it has sold more than 600,000 copies. This is the first of her ten novels to be translated into English. The book centers on a thirty-six-year-old woman named Keiko Furukura, an oddball who is endlessly puzzled by human behavior. She describes the condescension she experiences at the hands of men in her social circle as “fascinating.” She mimics her co-workers’ vocal inflections in order to fit in. She is blithely indifferent to sex or dating, and uninterested in leaving her dead-end job at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart. For the most part, her manner is that of a friendly alien scientist, but, at times, she swerves toward the psychopathic. Keiko occasionally endorses utilitarian violence: as a girl, she broke up a schoolyard fight by hitting one of her classmates over the head with a spade, and could not understand why her teachers were angry—after all, they’d said they wished the fight to end. And, when her sister Mami despairs that her baby won’t stop crying, Keiko idly marvels that no one has thought to stab it with a small knife. But Keiko finds purpose and acceptance at the Smile Mart, where she receives a uniform and a manual that outlines exactly how she is supposed to conduct herself, down to the scripted phrases approved for customer interactions. “This is the only way I can be a normal person,” Keiko realizes. It is a love story, in other words, about a misfit and a store.

Keiko’s counterpart, Shiraha, is an unreformed misogynist who gets fired from the Smile Mart because he refuses to carry out any of his tasks. Pressured by his own friends and family to find a girlfriend, Shiraha accepts Keiko’s offer to move in with her. He sleeps in the bathtub and lazes about. Keiko regards him as a pet and refers to his meals as “feeding time.” Shiraha is prone to lectures about the Stone Age, arguing: “Strong men who bring home a good catch have women flocking around them, and they marry the prettiest girls in the village. Men who don’t join in the hunt, or who are too weak to be of any use even if they try, are despised.” Like Keiko, Shiraha yearns to escape the homogenizing pressures of Japanese society; but if her solution is to lose herself in service, his is to succumb to uselessness, entitlement, and solipsism. When he complains, about his convenience-store gig, that “this sort of work isn’t suited to men,” Keiko responds, “Shiraha, we’re in the twenty-first century! Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers.”

One eerie achievement of “Convenience Store Woman” is that the reader is never entirely sure how to think about Keiko. Is she monstrous? Brave and eccentric? For all the creepiness of her cheerful obedience to the manual, she is, at least, choosing a different kind of conformity than the rest of society, which insists that she marry and pursue a conventional career path. Keiko embodies a demographic anxiety in Japan, which has been experiencing falling marriage rates and low birth rates for years. Articles have fretted over celibacy syndrome: an aversion, among Japanese young people, to sex and romance. The past decade has also seen a rise in hikikomori, men who withdraw from the public sphere and retreat into their homes, where they play video games, sleep, or stare at the ceiling. Keiko’s self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist dystopia.