Britt's Staff Picks


Showing 1 - 20 of 64  There are a total of 170 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The three-body problem"
Star rating for The three-body problem
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multple-award-winning phenemonenon from China's most beloved science fiction author. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the...
Book cover for "Guardian angels & other monsters"
Star rating for Guardian angels & other monsters
Book cover for "Manhunt"
Star rating for Manhunt
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate. Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: Other people aren't safe. After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of suvivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics-all...
Book cover for "The cretaceous past"
Star rating for The cretaceous past
Author:
Description:
When a Tyrannosaurus rex suffers pain from meat trapped between its enormous teeth, a nearby colony of ants risks entering the great creature's maw to make their own repast from the remains of the dinosaur's most recent meal. From this humble beginning, over the course of millennia, a symbiotic civilization achieves amazing advances, reaching dizzying heights in countless endeavors scientific and social, facing dangers and exploiting opportunities...
Book cover for "They were here before us"
Star rating for They were here before us
Description:
From the author of the viral sensation Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke comes They Were Here Before Us, a novella written in pieces, designed to be consumed as a single, thematically cohesive work. The only thing more brutal than nature is love.
Book cover for "Bloodbath nation"
Star rating for Bloodbath nation
Description:
"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...
Book cover for "No longer human"
Star rating for No longer human
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being." Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his...
Book cover for "Under the broken sky"
Star rating for Under the broken sky
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
When Soviet troops invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria during the last days of World War II, twelve-year-old Natsu Kimura must care for her younger sister as they struggle to survive and return to Japan.
Book cover for "Laziness does not exist"
Star rating for Laziness does not exist
Author:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
A social psychologist uncovers the psychological basis of the "laziness lie", which originated with the Puritans and has ultimately created blurred boundaries between work and life with modern technologies and offers advice for not succumbing to societal pressure to "do more".
Book cover for "The good son"
Star rating for The good son
Description:
"Who can you trust if you can't trust yourself? Early one morning, twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell, and a phone call from his brother asking if everything's all right at home--he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can't remember much about the night before; having suffered...
Book cover for "The disordered cosmos"
Star rating for The disordered cosmos
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of the leading physicists of her generation, at work on the origins of spacetime at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics. She is also one of the fewer than one hundred Black women to earn a PhD in physics. In [this book], Prescod-Weinstein shares with readers her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest...
Book cover for "When they call you a terrorist"
Star rating for When they call you a terrorist
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Book cover for "Several people are typing"
Star rating for Several people are typing
Description:
"A mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm finds his consciousness uploaded into the company's internal Slack channel"--
Book cover for "The darkness outside us"
Star rating for The darkness outside us
Series:
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"Two boys, alone in space: sworn enemies sent on the same rescue mission. Ambrose wakes up on the Coordinated Endeavor with no memory of a launch. There's more that doesn't add up: evidence indicates strangers have been on board, the ship's operating system is voiced by his mother, and his handsome, brooding shipmate has barricaded himself away. But nothing will stop Ambrose from making his mission succeed--not when he's rescuing his own sister. In...
Book cover for "The secret talker"
Star rating for The secret talker
Author:
Description:
"Hongmei is the perfect Asian wife: beautiful, diligent, and passive. She lives a quiet life in Northern California with her husband, Glen, an intelligent and caring college professor. But when a mysterious person begins to email her, Hongmei can't resist and soon finds herself enthralled in a psychological cat-and-mouse game. Who is stalking her? And why does s/he know her deepest, darkest secrets? As Hongmei is forced to confront her own dark past...
Book cover for "Plastic"
Star rating for Plastic
Description:
Relates the near-crisis status of the world's usage of plastic and the environmentally harmful disposal of it through the story of eight familiar plastic objects--a comb, a chair, a Frisbee, an IV bag, a disposable lighter, a grocery bag, a soda bottle, and a credit card.
Book cover for "The goldfinch"
Star rating for The goldfinch
Author:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld. Composed with the skills...
Book cover for "Being mortal"
Star rating for Being mortal
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families of the terminally ill.
Book cover for "Circe"
Star rating for Circe
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Follows Circe, the banished witch daughter of Helios, as she hones her powers and interacts with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals.
Book cover for "Prosper's demon"
Star rating for Prosper's demon
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In a botched demonic extraction, they say the demon feels it ten times worse than the man. But they don't die, and we do. Equilibrium. The unnamed and morally questionable narrator is an exorcist with great follow-through and few doubts. His methods aren't delicate but they're undeniably effective: he'll get the demon out--he just doesn't particularly care what happens to the person. Prosper of Schanz is a man of science, determined to raise the...