[* = recommended; ~ = favorite!]
- ~The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right — Atul Gawande
- Designing Your Life: Build a Life Works for You — Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
- Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work — Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal
- When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
- *The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World — Jeff Goodell
- A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design — Frank Wilczek
- Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves — George Church & Ed Regis
- *How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking — Jordan Ellenberg
- The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life — David Quammen
- The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Natural World—and Us — Richard O. Prum
- *The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization — Vince Beiser
- From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador to Putin’s Russia — Michael McFaul
- Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think — Peter H. Diamandis & Steven Kotler
- The Snow Leopard Project: And Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation — Alex Dehgan
- The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Drive and a Vanishing Way of Life — Doug Bock Clark
- Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Spiritual and Scientific View of Our Minds
- ~The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming — David Wallace-Wells
- The River of Consciousness — Oliver Sacks
- Shock of the Anthropocene — Christophe Bonnuil & Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
- *A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty — Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
- The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane
- Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature — Alva Noë
- *The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload — Daniel J. Levitin
- When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon — Joshua . Mezrich
- *Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter
- *Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution — Menno Schilthuizen
- ~The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups — Daniel Coyle
- The Swerve: How the World Became Modern — Stephen Greenblatt
- *The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age — David N. Schwartz
- Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World — Marcia Bjornerud
- Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives — Mark Miodownik
- *She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity — Carl Zimmer
- *The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing Your Body’s Natural Defenses — Daniel M. Davis
- The Common Good — Robert B. Reich
- How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them — Jason Stanley
- *Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages — Gaston Dorren
- Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It — Adam Savage
- On the Nature of Things — Lucretius
- ~Fascism: A Warning — Madeleine K. Albright
- A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age — Daniel J. Levitin
- *Losing Earth: A Recent History — Nathaniel Rich
- ~How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain — Lisa Feldman Barrett
- *Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery — Scott Kelly
- Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen — Mary Norris
- *Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know — Alexandra Horowitz
- Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past — David Reich
- ~The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring — Richard Preston
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution — Klaus Schwab
- *The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of he Future of Our Planet — Charles C. Mann
- ~The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America — Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Control of Nature — John McPhee
- Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell — Alexandra Horowitz
- ~Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel — Carl Safina
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
- The Kingdom of Speech — Tom Wolfe
- *The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future — Jon Gertner
- Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? — Bill McKibben
- I’ve Been Thinking… Reflections, Prayers, and Meditations for a Meaningful Life — Maria Shriver
- ~On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes — Alexandra Horowitz
- Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
- *The Death and Life of the Great Lakes — Dan Egan
- Once a Wolf: The Science Behind our Dogs’ Astonishing Genetic Evolution — Bryan Sykes
- *The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World — Simon Winchester
- The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them — Lucy Jones
- ~The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts — Joan Biskupic
- In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation, and Adventures Beneath the Waves — Bill Streever
- *This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know — John Brockman
- Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone — Brian Switek
- How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy — Jenny Odell
- ~Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — David Epstein
- *How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence — Michael Pollan
- *Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People — Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein
- *Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration — Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
- Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries — Safi Bahcall
- ~The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer — Siddharta Mukherjee
- The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast — Andrew Blum
- From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds — Daniel C. Dennett
- *Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them — Donovan Hohn
- *The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior — Stefano Mancuso
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine — Michael Lewis
- An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives— Matt Richtel
- Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson
- Small Fry: A Memoir — Lisa Brennan-Jobs
- Haiti: After the Earthquake — Paul Farmer
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life — Jane Sherron De Hart
- Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation — Alan Burdick
- Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone — Juli Berwald
- ~Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene — Natalie Angier
- Energy: A Human History — Richard Rhodes
- My Patients and Other Animals: A Veterinarian’s Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope — Suzy Fincham-Gray
- Moneyball — Michael Lewis
- The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands — Eric Topol
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything — Joshua Foer
- ~Lab Girl — Hope Jahren
- Pacific: The Ocean of the Future — Simon Winchester
- H is for Hawk — Helen Macdonald
- The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy — Paige Williams
- Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams — Matthew Walker
- The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth — Jeremy Rifkin
- ~A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism — Adam Gopnik
- ~The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals — Michael Pollan
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants — Robin Wall Kimmerer
- *Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know — Malcom Gladwell
- The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World — Amanda Little
- We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast — Jonathan Safran Foer
- Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality — Anil Ananthaswamy
- Good Morning, Midnight — Lily Brooks-Dalton
- Exit West — Mohsin Hamid
- The Incendiaries — R.O. Kwon
- The Immortalists — Chloe Benjamin
- The Way We Eat Now — Bee Wilson