Jennifer Doudna and CRISPR; Isaacson on the gene-editing race.
John Harrison's clocks solve the problem that sank ships; Dava Sobel's short classic.
Alex Ross on the twentieth century through its classical music, Strauss to Adams.
David Byrne on why music sounds the way the room lets it.
Keith Richards remembers more than he should; the rock memoir.
Bob Dylan's memoir, mostly about the years nobody asked about.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel; the memoir of a friendship.
Vasari on Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo; art history begins in 1550.
John Berger on how oil painting and advertising teach us to look; the BBC series as a book.
Gombrich from cave paintings to the present; the art history book with no jargon, eight million copies.
Bittman's 2,000 recipes in plain instructions; the kitchen reference.
Julia Child's 1961 book that taught Americans to make boeuf bourguignon.
Samin Nosrat's four elements of cooking, with drawings instead of photos.
Michael Pollan follows four meals from field to plate, starting with corn.
Kurlansky on the mineral that built cities, paid soldiers and started revolutions.
Harari's human story redrawn as a comic; the same argument in pictures.
Sogyal Rinpoche's Buddhist guide to death for Western readers.
Freud's royal road to the unconscious, from 1899.
Kuhn's paradigm shifts; the book that gave the phrase to everyone.
Hofstadter on self-reference in logic, art and music, and where minds come from; the Pulitzer nobody finishes.
Anne Lamott on shitty first drafts and taking writing one bird at a time.
Stephen King's half memoir, half toolbox; kill your darlings and the accident that nearly killed him.
Strunk and White's eighty pages on writing plainly; omit needless words.
A father and son ride from Minnesota to California while Pirsig asks what quality is.
Anthony Bourdain on what really happens in restaurant kitchens; do not order fish on Monday.
Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.
Maya Angelou's childhood in Arkansas and the years of silence after the rape; the first of seven memoirs.
Michelle Obama from the South Side of Chicago to the White House.
Trevor Noah on being the mixed-race child of an illegal union in apartheid South Africa.
Tara Westover, raised by survivalists in Idaho without school, ends up at Cambridge.
Infobox
