Here are 9 books that Capsule fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up with a scientist dad who often discussed bits of research or new discoveries around the dinner table. I didn’t follow in his footsteps and get a Ph.D., but I did develop a fascination with scientific happenings, particularly of the weird or unexplained variety. In college, I worked as the science reporter for my university’s newspaper, where I wrote on topics like nanotech tweezers, poultry farm pollution, and the nighttime habits of spiders and snakes. I’m also the author of two science fiction books for young readers.
I love a good dystopian novel, and this hit all the right notes for me. At first, everything seems perfect in Jonas’s tightly-ordered world—only everyone is hiding something. Jonas is different, but he doesn’t know how.
I loved how thought-provoking The Giver was. It got me asking questions about what it means to be a part of a community, a friend, and a member of a family. What risks are we willing to take for the ultimate good, and what crosses the line?
I found Jonas’s story fascinating and felt genuinely concerned for him throughout the book.
THE GIVER is soon to be a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges, Katie Holmes and Taylor Swift.
Now available for the first time in the UK, THE GIVER QUARTET is the complete four-novel collection.
THE GIVER: It is the future. There is no war, no hunger, no pain. No one in the community wants for anything. Everything needed is provided. And at twelve years old, each member of the community has their profession carefully chosen for them by the Committee of Elders.
Jonas has never thought there was anything wrong with his world. But from the moment he is…
I, Ira Nayman, have been writing stories set in the multiverse for almost twenty years, first with the Alternate Reality News Service set of books, then with my Transdimensional Authority/Multiverse novels and, most recently, with multiverse triptychs (the spark for The Dance). One of the things that I recently realized about my writing is that a lot of it focuses on the factors that shape our lives and make us the people we are. My ongoing fascination with the multiverse is because it is a great vehicle for exploring this idea by showing us how our lives could have turned out if circumstances or our choices had been different.
There is a certain kind of literature that takes my breath away. In my experience, there is nothing more exhilarating than reading a book that you think is contemporary that veers, with the reader hardly noticing, into the speculative. I adore books that take the ordinary world and sprinkle it with magic and possibilities.
With this book, Matt Haig answers a question many of us contemplate: What if? What if I’d taken the other fork in the road? This book answers that question for one flawed, beautiful character, and I was enthralled with every page.
The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year
"A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."-The Washington Post
The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of…
I chose these stories because as a Black woman, seeing characters like me in stories as the main character instead of the sidekick or friend is always so refreshing. Like the main characters of my own novels, Black women taking charge is something to be celebrated.
Prepare yourself for a future where death no longer exists. In the world of Scythe, humanity is now governed by a computer system so advanced that poverty, illness, and mortality no longer plague the human race. Instead, a group of people known as Scythes decides who lives and who dies in an attempt at population control.
Enter Citra…a young woman with a good head on her shoulders. She boldly accepts the opportunity to be trained as a scythe. Citra must decide just what kind of executioner she wants to be and if she has what it takes to judge the value of human life.
"A true successor to The Hunger Games." Maggie Stiefvater
In a perfect world, what is there left to fear? A chilling and thought-provoking sci-fi novel from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman.
A dark, gripping and witty thriller in which the only thing humanity has control over is death.
In a world where disease, war and crime have been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed ("gleaned") by professional scythes. Citra and Rowan are teenagers who have been selected to be scythes' apprentices, and despite wanting nothing to do with the vocation, they must learn…
I am a dystopian author who loves using writing to spread awareness about different social issues in society. As an avid reader, I feel like nowadays, the quality of literature has decreased. Authors have been focusing more on how close to trending topics and easy-to-read a book is than on its depth, themes, or any kind of element that is crucial in storytelling. This is why many recently published books have been difficult for me to connect with. As an author myself, I want that to change. Here’s a list of books that are so well written that it’ll feel like you’re riding a rollercoaster—of emotions.
I’m not lying when I say that this book saved my life. I was going through a particularly difficult moment when I read it, and let’s say that it made me find the beauty in life once again. After reading The Anthropocene Reviewed, my once monochrome world burst with colors. This essay collection points out ideas about things in daily life that an average person would never notice. It makes you smile dumbly at the ceiling and say, “this world is beautiful.”
Goodreads Choice winner for Nonfiction 2021 and instant #1 bestseller! A deeply moving collection of personal essays from John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down.
“The perfect book for right now.” –People
“The Anthropocene Reviewed is essential to the human conversation.” –Library Journal, starred review
The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale—from…
I readTinker Tailor Soldier Spyfor the first time many years ago, while traveling aboard a Canadian National Railway train from Montreal to British Columbia. Something about the contrast between the majestic Canadian Rockies and the dark alleys of John Le Carré’s Berlin brought the Cold War fully to life and set me on the path to writing a novel of my own set during that time. (Living through some of those tense years of superpower stand-offs didn’t hurt.) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spyis told in third-person, but many Cold War novels written in the first person do a masterful job of evoking that troubled era.
This group of interconnected stories—set mostly in Russia and Chechnya—take place before, during, and after the Cold War. In the opening story, “The Leopard,” Anthony Marra perfectly captures the suffocating terror of life under Stalin.
The narrator is a disillusioned Soviet censor whose job is editing images of disgraced victims of Stalinist show trials out of official photographs and despoiling many other works of art for propaganda purposes.
Lines between work and life start to blur. The censor finds it increasingly hard to discern fact from fiction.
Things turn deadly when he himself becomes a victim and the truth (as he knows it) becomes irrelevant in the struggle against counter-revolutionaries.
From these troubled origins the Cold War began. The ability to discern truth from falsehood seems in our present times more pressing than ever.
*** A Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 ***
The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau,…
I am an anthropologist who has written or edited more than a dozen books on topics that range from the lives of trans sex workers, to the anthropology of fat. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Scandinavia. I work at Uppsala University in Sweden, where I am a Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, and where I direct a research program titled Engaging Vulnerability.
As befitting the cheeky title, this book – about what it means to be, and to become, a gay man – is incisive, erudite, and a lot of fun to read. A pioneer of queer theory (and with this intervention, I suspect, a renegade from it), David Halperin is an unapologetic camp. He challenges received wisdom about how gay sensibility supposedly is misogynist, passé, irrelevant or dead, and his reflections on everything from Joan Crawford’s pizazz,to the current state of gay marriage, vacillate between being capacious and withering. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” he sniffs at one point, dispensing a delightful, and typically barbed, aperçu.
No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as…
I have spent my entire adult life wondering if my world would be different if I hadn’t spent my teens and twenties on antidepressants. What I know for sure is that the person I am after psychiatric drugs is wildly different than the person I was while medicated, which has led me down a path of understanding the history and cultural significance of psychiatric drugs to understand my own story. Now, I am an advocate for safe psychiatric drug deprescribing education. My goal is to teach patients and parents how to ask their doctors the right questions, encourage true informed consent, and make prescribers aware of the signs and symptoms of over-medication and psychiatric drug withdrawal.
It took me a long time to understand how my mother’s well-intentioned decision to send me to a child psychologist derailed my whole life, but Bad Therapy finally put the pieces together. In being diagnosed with depression and anxiety as a teen—and consequently medicated for it—a message was sent by the adults around me: I did not have the capacity to help myself.
That unspoken message haunted me for the next fifteen years, leading me down a path of self-induced victimhood, fragility, and, paradoxically, more depression. I see this happening with an entire generation, and this book explains why—a must-read for every parent or medicated kid.
From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?
In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s…
As a writer, I’ve found that learning about other writers and their processes helps me. Over the years, I’ve devoured the memoirs and letters of writers like Madeleine L’Engle, Audre Lorde, and Zora Neal Hurston. In 2006, when I started a writing program for young people in my city, I brought these writers’ words to use as writing prompts. When I researched my book, Mightier Than the Sword, I read dozens of anthologies to find people who used writing to make a difference in their fields—science, art, politics, music, and sports. I will always be grateful for those anthologies—because they broadened my knowledge and introduced me to so many interesting people.
The first generation of young people raised on the internet has faced gun violence, climate change, and a pandemic. They also understand diversity, are adept at digital platforms, and want to change the world. The inspiring stories in this book gave me the good kind of chills. These young people are marching for social justice, working to change laws, giving speeches, starting nonprofits, and more. But they need your help. After you read this, you’ll be inspired to make a difference, too.
An illustrated celebration of Gen Z activists fighting to make our world a better place.
Gen Z is populated-and defined-by activists. They are bold and original thinkers and not afraid to stand up to authority and conventional wisdom. From the March for Our Lives to the fight for human rights and climate change awareness, this generation is leading the way toward truth and hope like no generation before.
Generation Brave showcases Gen Z activists who are fighting for change on many fronts: climate change, LGBTQ rights, awareness and treatment of mental illness, gun control, gender equality, and corruption in business…
I became fascinated with retirement plans and policy when I realized that my 401(k)-like retirement plan with a high rate of savings and investment returns would still come up way short in terms of the retirement income needed for me and my family. That led me to initiate a winning campaign to allow those of us in that plan to switch to our employer’s pension plan. In leading that struggle, I had to learn everything possible, beyond what I already knew, about retirement plans. I have a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin and have studied retirement plans in Latin America and Europe as well as the United States.
This is the place to start since it treats the base of our national retirement system—our national pension. I don’t think there’s anybody who knows more about Social Security than Altman and Kingson. They are the founders of the advocacy organization by the same name, Social Security Works. It is their job, and they do it well, to explain why Social Security works as well as it does despite the claims of its right-wing enemies and what we have to do to protect it from attempts to privatize it or reduce its benefits. This is not just a manifesto, it contains a ton of clearly-written information about how Social Security as a social insurance system works and what can be done to make it better.
A growing chorus of prominent voices in Congress and elsewhere are calling for the expansion of our Social Security system. Social Security Works! amplifies these voices and offers a powerful antidote to the three-decade long, billionaire- funded campaign to make us believe that this vital institution is destined to collapse. It isn't. From the Silent Generation to Baby Boomers, from Generation X to Millennials and Generation Z, everyone now has a stake in understanding the real story about Social Security. Destined to be a game-changer, setting a strategy to benefit all.
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