Berlin-Peck Library Offers 'How To' Books For Reading Challenge

Press release from the Berlin-Peck Memorial Library:

BERLIN, CT — The Berlin-Peck Memorial Library recently released several titles that will help participants in the library's 2025 reading challenge.

One of those challenges at the library, which is located at 234 Kensington Road, Berlin, is to read a book with "how to" in the title.

These titles are perfect for completing April’s theme in our All-Year Reading Challenge,

However, you don’t need to stick with this booklist to complete the challenge! You can choose your own books, fiction or non-fiction, as long as they fit the month’s theme.

Fiction

How To Love Your Daughter

Hilah Blum

The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling conundrum: What damage do we do in the blindness of love? Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years. At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss-a mother besotted with her only child-arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it-and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.

How To Save A Life

Eva Carter

What does it take to make a hero? Junior doctor Kerry Smith is addicted to rescuing others. Eighteen years ago, on the eve of the millennium, she saved the life of teenage footballer Joel Greenaway who ‘died’ for eighteen minutes. But life after death doesn’t guarantee a happy ending.

How To Fall Out Of Love Madly

Jana Casale

Joy and Annie are friends and roommates with decent jobs, crushing student loans, and an extra bedroom in need of an occupant-ideally someone they don’t hate. Theo instantly fits the bill, and soon, Joy and Theo are platonically nesting over movie nights and midnight hijinks. When Annie moves out, Joy happily gets to work creating a cozy home for Theo and herself. Then he brings home Celine, a girlfriend he’s never mentioned and quite possibly the most perfect woman Joy has ever seen. Joy is soon tying herself in knots trying to maintain her fantasy that she and Theo are meant to be. Annie is worried about Joy, but she has her own troubles. After moving in with her boyfriend, she realizes that she’s become an actress constantly performing his approved-of version of herself. Then, when she receives an anonymous letter accusing her brilliant, supportive boss of sexual assault, she is forced to decide who and what she’s willing to stand up for. Meanwhile, Celine may look perfect on the outside, but she’s wrestling with some inner demons of her own.

How To Be Human

Paula Cocozza

One summer’s night, Mary comes home from a midnight ramble to find a baby lying on her back-door step. Has Mary stolen the baby from next door? Has the baby’s mother, Mary’s neighbor, left her there in her acute state of post-natal depression? Or was the baby brought to Mary as a gift by the fox who is increasingly coming to dominate her life? So opens How to Be Human, a novel set in a London suburb beset by urban foxes. On leave from work, unsettled by the proximity of her ex, and struggling with her hostile neighbors, Mary has become increasingly captivated by a magnificent fox who is always in her garden. First she sees him wink at her, then he brings her presents, and finally she invites him into her house. As the boundaries between the domestic and the wild blur, and the neighbors set out to exterminate the fox, it is unclear if Mary will save the fox, or the fox save Mary. In this masterful debut, Paula Cocozza weaves together a penetrating portrait of marital breakdown, a social novel of wit and nuance, and an obsessive love story that crosses new boundaries.

How To Be An American Housewife

Margaret Dilloway

The story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI, and her grown daughter, Sue, a divorced mother whose life as an American housewife hasn’t been what she’d expected. When illness prevents Shoko from traveling to Japan, she asks Sue to go in her place. The trip reveals family secrets that change their lives in dramatic and unforeseen ways.

How To Build A Boat

Elaine Feeney

Jamie O’Neill loves the color red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.

How To Order The Universe

Maria Jose Ferrada

A richly imaginative debut, detailing a girl and her father finding their way -and themselves – while they work as traveling hardware salesmen in Pinochet-era Chile, is a rare work of magic and originality. For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D’s life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies amid the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As she becomes part of a tight-knit community of fellow salesmen and grifters, M is regaled with parables and anecdotes that inform her parallel education, D’s excuse for letting her skip school without M’s mother’s knowledge. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work, until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the whimsical life they’ve created.

How To Party With An Infant

Kaui Hart Hemmings

A hilarious and charming story about a quirky single mom in San Francisco who tiptoes through the minefields of the Mommy Wars and manages to find friendship and love.

How To Marry Keanu Reeves In 90 Days

K.M. Jackson

Bethany Lu Carlisle is devastated when the tabloids report actor Keanu Reeves is about to tie the knot. What?! How could the world’s perfect boyfriend and forever bachelor, Keanu not realize that making a move like this could potentially be devastating to the equilibrium of…well…everything! Not to mention he’s never come face to face with the person who could potentially be his true soulmate–her. Desperate to convince Keanu to call off the wedding, Lu and her ride-or-die BFF Truman Erikson take a wild road trip to search for the elusive Keanu so that Lu can fulfill her dream of meeting her forever crush and confess her undying love. From New York to Los Angeles, Lu and True get into all sorts of sticky and romantic situations, mimicking scenes from some of the most memorable Keanu blockbusters. Will Lu be able to find Keanu and convince him she’s the one for him? Or maybe she’ll discover true love has been by her side all along.

How To Start A Fire

Lisa Lutz

A trio of former college friends reunite 20 years later to share the stories of their adventures, rivalries, secrets and losses while reevaluating the events of a single night that shaped all of them.

How To Read The Air

Dinaw Mengestu

Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father’s trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents’ youth to his life in the America of today.

How To Find Your Way In The Dark

Derek B Miller

1938. Twelve-year old Sheldon Horowitz is still recovering from the tragic loss of his mother only a year ago when a suspicious traffic accident steals the life of his father near their home in rural Massachusetts. Sheldon, who was in the truck, emerges from the crash an orphan hell-bent on revenge. He embarks on a new life under the roof of his buttoned-up Uncle Nate in Hartford. Sheldon, his teenage cousins Abe and Mirabelle, and his best friend, Lenny, will contend with tradition and orthodoxy, appeasement and patriotism, mafia hit-men and angry accordion players, all while World War II takes center stage alongside a hurricane in New England and comedians in the Catskills.

How To Build A Girl

Caitlin Moran

After she shames herself on local television, Johanna Morgan reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde– a fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero– until two years later, while eviscerating bands as a music critic, she realizes she’s built Dolly with a fatal flaw.

How To Be Famous

Caitlin Moran

Johanna Morrigan (aka Dolly Wilde) has it all: she is nineteen, lives in her own flat in London, and writes for the coolest music magazine in Britain. Her star is rising, just not quickly enough for her liking. Then John Kite, Johanna’s unrequited love, has an album go to number one. Suddenly John exists on another plane of reality: that of the Famouses, a world of rabid fans and VIP access. Johanna lacks the traditional trappings of fame (famous parents, mind-scorching hotness, exotic scandals, etc.), so she does the only thing a self-respecting Lady Sex Adventurer can do. She starts a magazine column critiquing the lives and follies of the Famouses around her. But as Johanna skyrockets to fame herself, she begins to realize that with celebrity comes sacrifice, and hers may mean giving up the one person she was determined to keep. For anyone who has been a girl or known one, who has admired fame or judged it, How to Be Famous is a big-hearted, hilarious tale of fame and fortune–and all that they entail.

How To Keep A Secret

Sarah Morgan

Lauren, Jenna, their mother, Nancy, and Lauren’s daughter, Mack, are not so close. But when they are thrown together for a summer on Martha’s Vineyard, these very different women must relearn how to be a family. And while unraveling their secrets might be their biggest challenge, the rewards could be infinite.

How To Leave The House

Nathan Newman

This is the story of twenty-four hours in the life of Natwest, and his small-town odyssey in pursuit of [a] missing package. And yet it’s also the story of a middle-aged dentist who dreams of being a respected artist–but the only thing he can seem to paint is the human mouth. And it’s the story of a tortured imam involved in a quasi-romantic entanglement with the local vicar and an octogenerian mourning the death of her secretive husband and a troubled teenager whose nudes have leaked on the Internet. It’s the story of Natwest’s obnoxious ex-boyfriend, and his class-traitor mother and her childhood boyfriend, and the life-changing secrets he knows about Natwest’s past.

How To Make An American Quilt

Whitney Otto

Meeting at their quilting circle every week, the women of the small town of Grasse share their personal stories, beginning a tradition that encompasses a half century of American history.

How To Age Disgracefully

Clare Pooley

When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign–but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide. When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door–as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog–to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.

How To Find Your Way Home

Katy Regan

What if the person you thought you’d lost forever walked back into your life? A warm, life-affirming novel about what happens when a sister discovers that the brother she hasn’t seen in more than a decade is homeless, and in reconnecting with him learns the true meaning of belonging, from the author of Little Big Love. When they were children, Emily and her brother Stephen were inseparable. Running wild through the marshes of Canvey Island, it was Stephen who taught her to look for the incandescent flash of a bird’s wings, who instilled within her a love and respect for nature’s wonders. But one June day, their lives came crashing down around them and fate forced them apart. Fifteen years later, Emily should be happy. She has a sun-filled garden flat, a lovely boyfriend, and a job that is supposed to let her make a difference. But instead she’s lost, always on the lookout for her brother’s face, and worn down, spending her days working at the local housing offices having to turn away more applicants than she can help. And then one day, her brother walks through the door, homeless and in need of help. Stephen has been living in and out of shelters for the last decade and the baggage between them is heavy. But Emily is overjoyed to see her brother again and invites him to come live with her. In an attempt to rebuild their relationship, they embark on a birding adventure together. Amid the soft calls of the marsh birds, they must confront the secrets of all that stands between them-even as they begin to realize that home may just be found within.

How To Be Both

Ali Smith

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real–and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

How To Read A Book

Monica Wood

Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed. When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland-Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman-their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways. How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.

Non-Ficiton: Biography and Memoir

How To Create The Perfect Wife
Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor And His Enlightened Quest To Train The Ideal Mate

Wendy Moore

Wendy Moore’s exploration of British writer Thomas Day’s mission to groom his ideal mate captures the radicalism–and deep contradictions–at the heart of the Enlightenment.

How To Stay Married
The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

Harrison Scott Key

From Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, How to Stay Married tells the hilarious, shocking, and spiritually profound story of one man’s journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage.

How To Succeed In Business Without Really Crying

Carol Leifer

For many years, television comedy was an exclusive all boys’ club–until a brilliant comedian named Carol Leifer came along, blazing a trail for funny women everywhere. From Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld, The Ellen Show, and Modern Family, Carol has written for and/or performed on some of the best TV comedies of all time. This hilarious collection of essays charts her extraordinary three-decade journey through show business, illuminating her many triumphs and some missteps along the way–and offering valuable lessons for women and men in any profession. Part memoir, part guide to life, and all incredibly funny,How to Succeed in Business without Really Crying offers tips and tricks for getting ahead, finding your way, and opening locked doors–even if you have to use a sledgehammer.

How To Murder Your Life

Cat Marnell

From Cat Marnell, ‘New York’s enfant terrible’ (The Telegraph), a candid and darkly humorous memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America–and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a ‘doctor shopper’ who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything–anything–to sleep. This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school–and with a prescription for Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Conde Nast building (where she rides the elevator alongside Anna Wintour) to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell shows–like no one else can–what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no. Combining lightning-rod subject matter and bold literary aspirations, How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.

How To Be Alone
If You Want To, And Even If You Don’t

Lane Moore

Lane Moore is a fool for love. From her addiction to romantic comedies to her tendency to form instant soulmate connections with strangers, Lane has a way of romanticizing everything and everyone. But her romantic nature belies a decidedly unromantic childhood, one that sent her down a long and difficult road. Lane considers herself an orphan, though she has two living parents. Her estrangement from her family was a catalyst for her to build a new one with a community of friends, comedians, and oddball roommates in Los Angeles and then New York City. With an intoxicating blend of dark wit and relentless positivity, Lane sheds light on an often-stigmatized condition and reveals how she harnessed and drew strength from her loneliness to become the creative powerhouse she is today.

How To Forget
A Daughter’s Memoir

Kate Mulgrew

In this profoundly honest and examined memoir about returning to Iowa to care for her ailing parents, the star of Orange Is the New Black and New York Times bestselling author of Born with Teeth takes us on an unexpected journey of loss, betrayal, and the transcendent nature of a daughter’s love for her parents. They say you can’t go home again. But when her father is diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer and her mother with atypical Alzheimer’s, New York-based actress Kate Mulgrew returns to her hometown in Iowa to spend time with her parents and care for them in the time they have left. The months Kate spends with her parents in Dubuque–by turns turbulent, tragic, and joyful–lead her to reflect on each of their lives and how they shaped her own. Those ruminations are transformed when, in the wake of their deaths, Kate uncovers long-kept secrets that challenge her understanding of the unconventional Irish Catholic household in which she was raised. How to Forget is a considered portrait of a mother and a father, an emotionally powerful memoir that demonstrates how love fuses children and parents, and an honest examination of family, memory, and indelible loss.

How To Weep In Public
Feeble Offerings On Depression From One Who Knows

Jacqueline Novak

In her hilarious memoir-meets-guide-to-life, comedian (and depressed person) Jacqueline Novak reveals depression’s hidden pleasures, advises readers on how to make most of a cat hair-covered life, and helps them summon the strength to shed that bathrobe and face the world. Exhausted? Rundown? Filled with a vague sense of ennui, an occasional twinge of regret, or a hell of a lot of mood stabilizers? Then this is the book for you. How to Weep in Public is both a tongue-in-cheek advice guide (from a person who has no business giving advice to anyone!) and one woman’s breathless journey to consistently put on pants, or at least get out of bed in the morning. Beginning with her earliest blue moments of infancy, and hop-scotching through her exploration of the world of pharmaceuticals, before bounding right back to her parents’ couch, Jacqueline Novak will introduce you to the ABC’s (Adderall! Benzos! Catatonia!) of depression and reveal, funnily enough, that a lot can happen even when you’re standing still. Or, as it happens, lying down. Whether you’re coping with the occasional down day, or thrive fully in Picasso’s blue period, How to Weep in Public is the perfect place to regroup between those nagging Tony Robbins tapes and that exhausting amount of Leaning In. So sit back, relax, and let Jacqueline Novak teach you how to carpe depressem with the rest of them.

How To Say Babylon

Safiya Sinclair

This stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her strict Rastafarian upbringing ruled by a father whose rigid beliefs, rage and paranoia led to violence shows how she found her own power and provides a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we know little about.

Fiction: Mystery and Thriller

How To Be A Good Wife

Emma Chapman

Marta’s husband has always taken care of her, and she has always done everything she can to be a good wife–as advised by a dog-eared manual given to her by Hector’s aloof mother on their wedding day. But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can’t recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember–or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta’s visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it’s unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself .

How To Kill Your Best Friend

Lexie Elliott

If you suspected your best friend, the person you were closest to in the whole world, was a murderer, what would you do? Would you confront her? Would you help keep her secret? Or would you begin to feel afraid? Most importantly, why don’t you feel safe now that she’s dead? From the author of The French Girl comes a novel full of secrets, suspense, and deadly twists. Georgie, Lissa, and Bronwyn have been inseparable since dominating their college swim team swimming has always been an escape from their own problems, but now their shared passion has turned deadly. How can it be true that Lissa, the strongest swimmer they know, drowned? Granted, there is something strange about Kanu Cove, where Lissa was last seen, swimming off the coast of the fabulous island resort she owned with her husband. Lissa’s closest friends gather at the resort to honor her life, but Georgie and Bron can’t seem to stop looking over their shoulders. Danger lurks beneath the surface of the crystal-clear water, and even their luxurious private villas can’t help them feel safe. As the weather turns ominous, trapping the funeral guests together on the island, nobody knows who they can trust. Lissa’s death was only the beginning…

How To Knit A Murder

Sally Goldenbaum

The mysterious Rose Chopra arrives in picturesque Sea Harbor, Massachusetts, and the Seaside Knitters welcome her into their world, until a controversial entrepreneur winds up dead and Rose becomes the prime suspect.

How To Book A Murder

Cynthia Kuhn

To help save her family’s floundering Colorado bookstore, Starlit Bookshop, Emma Starrs agrees to plan a mystery-themed dinner party for her wealthy friend Tabitha Baxter. Tabitha’s husband Tip hosts the affair, in the guise of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin. When Tip is murdered, Emma and her aunt Nora become suspects. When celebrated author Calliope Nightfall implores Emma to create a Poe-themed launch event for her latest tome, another shocking crime occurs. Someone in this charming artistic community has murder on the mind!

How To Solve Your Own Murder

Kristen Perrin

A dual narrative, feel good mystery in which a woman, Frances, spends a lifetime trying to prevent her murder as predicted by a fortune teller at a country fair when she was just 17. When she is in fact murdered nearly 60 years later, her great niece Annie must solve the crime to avenge her great aunt’s death, and in so doing uncovers the dark heart of the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, where she might just find herself in the path of the killer.

How To Raise An Elephant

Alexander McCall Smith

The next book in the perennially adored No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series sees Precious Ramotswe calling upon all her maternal instincts when she’s faced with a two-ton case. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but can Mma Ramotswe and the rest of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency come together to raise a pipsqueak pachyderm? We may find out in this novel. We may not. Who can say?

Fiction: Romance

How To Be A Scottish Mistress

Adrienne Basso

When newly widowed Lady Fiona Libourg flees to Scotland in need of protection, Lord Gavin McLendon is powerless to refuse the British beauty. Especially when she offers herself in exchange.

How To Catch A Duke

Grace Burrowes

Vowing to keep Miss Abigail Abbott safe, Lord Stephen Wentworth offers her a marriage of convenience and a chance to escape her dangerous enemies, which gives him a chance to prove that his love for her is real.

How To Love A Duke In Ten Days

Kerrigan Byrne

Famed and brilliant, Lady Alexandra Lane has always known how to look out for to herself. But nobody would ever expect that she has darkness in her past-one that she pays a blackmailer to keep buried. Now, with her family nearing bankruptcy, Alexandra strikes upon a solution: Get married to one of the empire’s most wealthy eligible bachelors. Even if he does have the reputation of a devil. Piers Gedrick Atherton, the Duke of Redmayne, is seeking revenge and the first step is securing a bride. Winning a lady’s hand is not so easy, however, for a man known as the Terror of Torcliff. Then, Alexandra enters his life like a bolt of lightning. When she proposes marriage, Piers knows that, like him, trouble haunts her footsteps. But her gentleness, sharp wit, independent nature, and incredible beauty awakens every fierce desire within him. He will do whatever it takes to keep her safe in his arms.

How To Walk Away

Katherine Center

Margaret Jacobsen is just about to step into the bright future she’s worked for so hard and so long: a new dream job, a fiance she adores, and the promise of a picture-perfect life just around the corner. Then, suddenly, on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life, everything she worked for is taken away in a brief, tumultuous moment. In the hospital and forced to face the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again, Maggie must confront the unthinkable. First there is her fiance, Chip, who wallows in self-pity while simultaneously expecting to be forgiven. Then, there’s her sister Kit, who shows up after pulling a three-year vanishing act. Finally, there’s Ian, her physical therapist, the one the nurses said was too tough for her. Ian, who won’t let her give in to her pity, and who sees her like no one has seen her before. Sometimes the last thing you want is the one thing you need. Sometimes we all need someone to catch us when we fall. And sometimes love can find us in the least likely place we would ever expect.

How To Catch A Queen

Alyssa Cole

When Shanti Mohapi weds the king of Njaza, her dream of becoming a queen finally comes true. But it’s nothing like she imagined. Shanti and her husband may share an immediate and powerful attraction, but her subjects see her as an outsider, and everything she was taught about being the perfect wife goes disastrously wrong. A king must rule with an iron fist, and newly crowned King Sanyu was born perfectly fitted for the gauntlet, even if he wishes he weren’t. He agrees to take a wife as is required of him, though he doesn’t expect to actually fall in love. Even more vexing? His beguiling new queen seems to have the answers to his country’s problems–except no one will listen to her. By day, they lead separate lives. By night, she wears the crown, and he bows to her demands in matters of politics and passion. When turmoil erupts in their kingdom and their marriage, Shanti goes on the run, and Sanyu must learn whether he has what it takes both to lead his people and to catch his queen.

How To Tame Your Duke

Juliana Gray

England, 1889. Quiet and scholarly Princess Emilie has always avoided adventure, until she’s forced to disguise herself as a tutor in the household of the imposing Duke of Ashland, a former soldier disfigured in battle and abandoned by his wife. When chance draws her into a secret liaison with the duke, Emilie can’t resist the opportunity to learn what lies behind his forbidding mask, and find out what adventure really means ….

How To Master Your Marquis

Juliana Gray

Masquerading as a plain clerk on the behest of the most honorable barrister in England, breathtakingly beautiful Princess Stefanie uses the disguise to her advantage to consort unchaperoned with her employer’s dashing nephew, the Marquess of Hatherfield.

How To Lose A Duke In Ten Days

Laura Lee Guhrke

When the Duke of Margrave accepts her proposal of a marriage of convenience, Edie, transformed from a ruined American heiress to English duchess, enjoys their arrangement until he returns from overseas, determined to win her heart and make their marriage real.

How To Stop Time

Matt Haig

A man with a secret rare condition that has enabled him to survive for centuries moves to London to become a high-school history teacher and considers defying his protective guardians’ rule against falling in love when he becomes entranced by a captivating colleague.

How To Run With A Naked Werewolf

Molly Harper

A tracker by profession, werewolf Caleb Graham must choose between his job and his heart after coming to the rescue of his pack’s new doctor Anna Moder when her past collides with his current assignment.

How To Catch A Prince

Rachel Hauck

Prince Stephen came to America to escape responsibility. But what he found complicates his life more than ever. Corina Del Rey is happy with her life in Melbourne, Florida. She spends her days engrossed in her career as a journalist and has her sights set on climbing the corporate ladder–if for no other reason, to distract herself from her dissolving family. But when she is confronted with the past she fought so hard to put behind her, she struggles to make sense of her future. Prince Stephen of Brighton Kingdom has moved on since the tragic death of his buddies in Afghanistan. A star professional rugby player, he has no intention of looking over his shoulder at what could’ve been. But when a notice arrives in the mail requiring his and his wife’s appearance before the courts to dissolve their marriage, he must deal with the questions rumbling around in his heart. He thought his marriage had been annulled long ago, but his memories of Corina Del Rey remain close. Does he still love her? Can he even find her? Above all, can he tell her the truth about that fateful night in Afghanistan seven years ago? If he does, he might really lose her forever.

How To Capture A Countess

Karen Hawkins

Urged by her favorite nephew, the intimidating Duchess of Roxburghe agrees to transform a thorny Scottish rose into a lovely bloom. But even she isn’t prepared for fiery Rose Balfour.

How To Find Love In A Bookshop

Veronica Henry

Nightingale Books, nestled on the main street in an idyllic little village, is a dream come true for book lovers–a cozy haven and welcoming getaway for the literary-minded locals. But owner Emilia Nightingale is struggling to keep the shop open after her beloved father’s death, and the temptation to sell is getting stronger. The property developers are circling, yet Emilia’s loyal customers have become like family, and she can’t imagine breaking the promise she made to her father to keep the store alive.

How To Knit A Love Song

Rachael Herron

The first in a heartwarming new knitting romance series from debut author Rachael Herron.

How To Be A Wallflower

Eloisa James

Miss Cleopatra Lewis visits a costume emporium specially to order unflattering dresses guaranteed to put off any prospective suitors–and ends up purchasing the establishment. Powerful and charismatic American Jacob Astor Addison is furious when a she-devil masquerading as an English lady steals Quimby’s Costume Emporium from under his nose. Jake strikes a devil’s bargain, offering to design her wallflower wardrobe and giving Cleo the chance to design his. Cleo can’t resist the fun of clothing the rough-hewn American in feathers and flowers. And somehow in the middle of their lively competition, Jake becomes her closest friend. It isn’t until Cleo becomes the toast of all society that Jake realizes she’s stolen his fiercely guarded heart. But unlike the noblemen at her feet, he doesn’t belong in her refined and cultures world. Caught between the demands of honor and desire, Jake would give up everything to be with the woman he loves–if she’ll have him!

How To End A Love Story

Yulin Kuang

Helen Zhang hasn’t seen Grant Shepard once in the thirteen years since the tragic accident that bound their lives together forever. Now she’s in Los Angeles, where the two have to work together. The result is messy, and electrifying.

How To Forget A Duke

Vivienne Lorret

The Duke of Rydstrom requires a wife. Preferably one with a large fortune and a complete lack of curiosity. The last thing he needs is a meddling matchmaker determined to dig up his dark family secrets. All Jacinda wants is to find a bride for a duke. How hard could that be? He’s handsome, enigmatic…and hiding something … Determined to discover what it is, she travels to his crumbling cliffside estate. Yet, by the time she washes up on his beach, she can no longer remember who she is or why the duke is so familiar to her. All she knows is that his kisses are unforgettable–and she intends to use every skill she can to discover whats in his heart.

How To Survive A Scandal

Samara Parish

Forced into a marriage of convenience with Lady Amelia, Benedict Asterly is stunned when the elegant beauty defies all his expectations. If he’s not careful, she’ll break down the walls around his guarded heart.

How To Deceive A Duke

Samara Parish

Fiona McTavish is an engineer, a chemist, a rebel–and no one’s idea of a proper lady. She prefers breeches to ballrooms, but her new invention–matches–will surely turn as many heads. There’s just a little matter of her being arrested for a crime she didn’t commit. And the only person she can turn to for help is the man who broke her heart years ago. Edward Stirling, Duke of Wildeforde, will do anything to restore his family’s name and put his father’s scandalous death behind them. But when Fiona needs his help getting released from prison, he can’t deny her–even though it means she must live with him as a condition of her freedom. With the desire between them rekindling as fast as the gossip about their arrangement is spreading among the ton, Edward will have to choose what matters most to him–his reputation or his heart.

How To Hack A Heartbreak

Kristin Rockaway

By day, Mel Strickland is an underemployed help-desk tech at a startup incubator, Hatch, where she helps entitled brogrammers who can’t even fix their own laptops, but are apparently the next wave of startup geniuses. By night, she goes on bad dates with misbehaving dudes she’s matched with on the ubiquitous dating app Fluttr. After one inappropriate pic too many, Mel has had it. Using her coding skills, she designs an app of her own, one that allows users to log harassers and abusers in online dating space.

How To Save A Life

Liz Fenton, Lisa Steinke

Dom is having a very bad day–one he literally can’t escape. When Dom bumps into Mia, his ex-fiancee whom he hasn’t seen in almost a decade, he believes they’ve been given a second chance and asks her out. When Mia dies tragically on their date, Dom makes a desperate wish: to be given the chance to save her life. And when he wakes the next morning to the shock that she’s alive, he thinks his wish may have been granted. But day after day, no matter what he changes about their time together, she still meets a terrible fate. Dom frantically searches for answers to save his beloved Mia and rekindle their former love. But the further he digs, the more obsessed he becomes, making him realize that slowing down time may be the only way to see things clearly. As he’s forced to confront the truth about himself and those he’s closest to, Dom vows that he’ll watch Mia die a thousand times if it means he can save her once.

How To Love Your Neighbor

Sophie Sullivan

Interior Design School? Check. Cute little house to fix up? Also check. Sexy, grumpy neighbor who is going to get in the way of all your plans? Check. Unfortunately. Grace Travis definitely has it all figured out. In between finishing interior design school and working a million odd jobs, she’ll get her degree. She’ll have her dream job. And most importantly, she’ll have a place to belong, something her cold, manipulative mother could never make for her. When an opportunity to fix up-and live in-an adorable little house on the beach comes along, Grace is all in. Until her biggest roadblock moves in next door. Noah Jansen knows how to make a deal. A real estate developer with a knack for betting and winning big, he’s not one to let a good opportunity slip away. So when a beachside house with great bones is ripe for a remodel and flip, Noah doesn’t hesitate. Except in order to spruce it up properly (is it even a beach house if it doesn’t have a pool?), he’ll need to take over the house next door. The house with the willful and combative and way-too-intriguing woman living in it. With the rules for being neighborly going out the window, Grace and Noah are in an all-out feud. But sometimes, your nemesis can turn out to be the person who shows you that home is always where the heart is.

How To Fake It In Hollywood

Ava Wilder

A talented Hollywood starlet and a reclusive A-lister enter into a fake relationship . . . and discover that their feelings might be more than a PR stunt in this sexy debut for fans of Beach Read and The Unhoneymooners. Grey Brooks is on a mission to keep her career afloat now that the end of her long-running teen show has her (unsuccessfully) pounding the pavement again. With a life-changing role on the line, she’s finally desperate enough to agree to her publicist’s scheme: fake a love affair with a disgraced Hollywood heartthrob who needs the publicity, but for very different reasons. Ethan Atkins just wants to be left alone. Between his high-profile divorce, struggles with drinking, and grief over the death of his longtime creative partner and best friend, Ethan slowly has let himself fade into the background. But if he ever wants to produce the last movie he and his partner wrote together, Ethan needs to clean up his reputation and step back into the spotlight. A gossip-inducing affair with a gorgeous actress might be just the ticket, even if it’s the last thing he wants to do. Though their juicy public relationship is less than perfect behind the scenes, it doesn’t take long before Grey and Ethan’s sizzling chemistry starts to feel like more than just an act. But after decades in a ruthless industry that requires bulletproof emotional armor to survive, are they too used to faking it to open themselves up to the real thing?

How To Fail At Flirting

Denise Williams

One daring to-do list and a crash course in flirtation turn a Type A overachiever’s world upside down. When her flailing department lands on the university’s chopping block, Professor Naya Turner’s friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she’ll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect opportunity to check off the items on her list. Let the guy buy her a drink. Check. Try something new. Check. A no-strings-attached hookup. Check … almost. Jake makes her laugh and challenges Naya to rebuild her confidence, which was left toppled by her abusive ex-boyfriend. Soon she’s flirting with the chance at a more serious romantic relationship–except nothing can be that easy. The complicated strings around her dating Jake might destroy her career. Naya has two options. She can protect her professional reputation and return to her old life or she can flirt with the unknown and stay with the person who makes her feel like she’s finally living again.

Fiction: Speculative Fiction

How To Be Eaten

Maria Adelmann

In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy-tale ending. And Raina’s love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed… What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue one another?

How To Sell A Haunted House

Grady Hendrix

Louise’s parents have passed away, and she’s returning to Charleston, where she grew up, to get their house ready to sell. She doesn’t want to deal with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. And she doesn’t want to spend time with her younger brother, Mark: their old grudges make that a terrifying prospect. But childhood hurts pale in comparison to the dangers posed by what still lives inside the house. Some houses don’t want to be sold… and Louise and Mark’s home has other plans for both of them.

How To Fracture A Fairy Tale

Jane Yolen

Fantasy icon Jane Yolen (The Devil’s Arithmetic, Briar Rose, Sister Emily’s Lightship) is adored by generations of readers of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.

Non-Fiction: Art

How To Look At A Painting

Francoise Barbe-Gall

Presents advice on ways to examine a painting to gain a better understanding of its meaning.

How To Sell Your Art Online
Live A Successful Creative Life On Your Own Terms

Cory Huff

An essential guide for every kind of artist that teaches them how to skip the gallery system, find their niche, and connect directly with collectors to profitably sell their art. For years, galleries have acted as gatekeeper separating artists and collectors. But with the explosion of the Internet, a new generation of savvy, independent artists is connecting with buyers and making a substantial living doing what they love. How to Sell Your Art Online shows any artist how to make a successful living from their work. Cory Huff dispels the myth of the starving artist and provides the effective business strategies necessary to make artistic creations pay. He helps individual artists find their niche outlines the elements essential for an effective website and provides invaluable advice on e-mail marketing, blogging, social media marketing, and paid advertising,’ explaining how to tie all these online activities into offline success.

How To Mix Colors

Gabriel Martin Rig

Art students and amateur painters alike will find advice and instruction in Barron’s popular Pocket Art Guides series. Each title focuses on a specific aspect of painting or drawing, and includes tips that even experienced professionals will find helpful. These information-packed books are handy artists’ companions for the reference shelf, but are also small enough to carry along with art supplies on field trips. How to Mix Colors explores the fundamentals of choosing and mixing colors as it applies to watercolors, acrylics, and oils. Includes captioned color illustrations and notes on how famous artists solved specific problems.

How To See
Looking, Talking, And Thinking About Art

David Salle

How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle’s incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide range of Salle’s friends and contemporaries?from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others?How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres.

How To Be An Artist

Jerry Saltz

Irreverent and inspiring advice for awakening your creative potential, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic. This beautiful and useful small-format hardcover-teeming with full-color art, sidebars, and contributions from art-world legends and everyday creatives-How to Be an Artist is a book for anyone who’s ever yearned to make the arts a part of their life.

Non-Fiction: Food

How To Squeeze A Lemon
1,023 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, And Handy Techniques

A collection of ingenious cooking tidbits, culled from the pages of Fine Cooking magazine. These savvy shortcuts and essential technques will answer questions asked by home cooks everywhere.

How To Cook Everything The Basics
All You Need To Make Great Food

Mark Bittman

The next best thing to having Mark Bittman in the kitchen with you. Mark Bittman’s highly acclaimed, bestselling book How to Cook Everything is an indispensable guide for any modern cook. With How to Cook Everything The Basics he reveals how truly easy it is to learn fundamental techniques and recipes. From dicing vegetables and roasting meat, to cooking building-block meals that include salads, soups, poultry, meats, fish, sides, and desserts, Bittman explains what every home cook, particularly novices, should know.More than 1,000 beautiful and instructive photographs throughout the book reveal key preparation details that make every dish inviting and accessible. With clear and straightforward directions, Bittman’s practical tips and variation ideas, and visual cues that accompany each of the 171 recipes, cooking with The Basics is like having Bittman in the kitchen with you. This is the essential how-to cookbook, with more than 1,000 beautiful and helpful photos of step-by-step techniques and finished recipes Special Basics pages cover essentials like equipping a kitchen and stocking a pantry, what to look for when buying produce, how to tell when food is done, and more Tips and variations let home cooks hone their skills and be creative How to Cook Everything The Basics is an absolutely essential beginner’s cookbook and an irresistible and invaluable guide for accomplished cooks.

How To Bake Everything
Simple Recipes For The Best Baking

Mark Bittman

A simple, all-encompassing baking reference collects more than 2,000 recipes for a wide variety of classic, trendy and international options and variations, sharing illustrated how-to instructions as well as advice for adapting recipes for vegan and other customizable needs.

How To Grill Everything
Simple Recipes For Great Flame-Cooked Food

Mark Bittman

Here’s how to grill absolutely everything–from the perfect steak to cedar-plank salmon to pizza–explained in Bittman’s straightforward style.With practical advice on all the grilling basics, this book is an exploration of the grill’s nearly endless possibilities. Discover just how simple–and versatile–grilling can be.

How To Cook Everything
2,000 Simple Recipes For Great Food

Mark Bittman

Updated to incorporate the latest tastes and cooking trends, a step-by-step guide to cooking includes more than two thousand contemporary recipes complemented by how-to information, tips on cooking techniques, and an expanded coverage of healthy foods.

How To Taste Coffee
Develop Your Sensory Skills And Get The Most Out Of Every Cup

Jessica Easto

Home coffee-making authority introduces you to the wide world of coffee flavor.

How To Be A Conscious Eater
Making Food Choices That Are Good For You, Others, And The Planet

Sophie Egan

A radically practical guide to making food choices that are good for you, others, and the planet. Is organic really worth it? Are eggs ok to eat? If so, which ones are best for you, and for the chicken–Cage-Free, Free-Range, Pasture-Raised? What about farmed salmon, soy milk, sugar, gluten, fermented foods, coconut oil, almonds? Thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or somewhere in between? Using three criteria–Is it good for me? Is it good for others? Is it good for the planet?–Sophie Egan helps us navigate the bewildering world of food so that we can all become conscious eaters. To eat consciously is not about diets, fads, or hard-and-fast rules. It’s about having straightforward, accurate information to make smart, thoughtful choices amid the chaos of conflicting news and marketing hype. An expert on food’s impact on human and environmental health, Egan organizes the book into four categories–stuff that comes from the ground, stuff that comes from animals, stuff that comes from factories, and stuff that’s made in restaurant kitchens. This guide offers bottom-line answers to your most top-of-mind questions about what to eat.

How To Grow Food
A Step-By-Step Guide To Growing All Kinds Of Fruit[S], Vegetables, Salads And More

Richard Gianfrancesco

This practical book features a comprehensive directory of recommended plants to suit all growing conditions in all regions. Thorough instructions and a month-by-month calendar of tasks describe how to cultivate more than 125 crops, from traditional choices to more unusual varieties. Gardeners can choose from roots and tubers leafy crops seed and fruit crops grains peppers and chilies stem and flower crops tree fruits soft, bush and cane fruits tender fruits nuts herbs and edible flowers.

How To Grow Your Own Food
An Illustrated Beginner’s Guide To Container Gardening

Angela S Judd

Did you know you could grow vegetables, fruits, and herbs in containers? Well, now you can take your houseplants to the next level by growing home-grown produce and seasoning that will taste delicious in all of your favorite dishes. How to Grow Your Own Food identifies 50 common, easy-to-grow edible plants from herbs to vegetables, along with detailed care instructions and beautiful illustrations of each plant. You’ll find everything you need to know about building your container garden including: -How to choose the right size container for each plant -How to water (and feed!) your plants for optimal growth -When to harvest your crops for the best flavor -And much more! It’s time to turn your decorative plants into ones that will keep you happy and healthy! No matter how much or how little space you have in your apartment, you can enjoy everything-from basil to onions to strawberries-with this practical guide to container gardening.

How To Eat
All Your Food And Diet Questions Answered

Mark Bittman, David L Katz

What is the best diet? Do calories matter? And when it comes to protein, fat, and carbs, which ones are good and which are bad? Food writer and cook Mark Bittman and health expert David Katz, MD, answer all these questions and more in a lively and easy-to-read Q&A format. Inspired by their viral hit article in Grub Street–one of New York magazine’s most popular and most-shared articles–here Bittman and Katz share their clear, no-nonsense perspective on food and diet, answering real questions covering everything from basic nutrients to superfoods to fad diets. Topics include dietary patterns (Just what should humans eat?) grains (Aren’t these just carbs ? Do I need to avoid gluten?) meat and dairy (How much meat should I eat? Does grass-fed matter?) alcohol (Are there benefits to drinking?) and more. Throughout, Bittman and Katz filter the science of diet and nutrition through a lens of common sense, delivering straightforward advice with a healthy dose of wit.

How To Roast Everything
A Game-Changing Guide To Building Flavor In Meat, Vegetables, And More

America’s Test Kitchen

With over 175 foolproof recipes covering everything from simple roast chicken and pork loin to top sirloin roast, rack of lamb, and lobster, this authoritative volume offers a master class in the timeless art and science of roasting.

How To Instant Pot
Mastering All The Functions Of The One Pot That Will Change The Way You Cook

Daniel Shumski

Master the revolutionary appliance that is changing the way we cook! The only Instant Pot cookbook that is organized by function, How to Instant Pot is both a guide to understanding the Instant Pot basics and a foodie’s creative collection of over 100 recipes specially crafted to take advantage of the Instant Pot’s many virtues, from cooking perfect risotto in six minutes, no stirring required, to five kinds of yogurt, to creating one-hour killer chili and soups from scratch, using dried beans. Here’s how to make incredible hands-off meals like Ziti and Italian Sausage, Maple-Mustard Pork Shoulder, and Korean-Style Short Ribs, plus plenty of sides, breakfasts, and desserts. In addition to a set of recipes for each function and master recipes with three variations each, there are surprising shortcuts–basics like quick pickles, perfect hard-boiled eggs, and a 30-minute baked potato. It’s the essential purchase for every instant pot owner.

Non-Fiction: Garden

How To Plant A Room And Grow A Happy Home

Morgan Doane, Erin Harding

Whether you’re a total novice, a newly minted plant parent or an experienced indoor gardener, this book will help you take the next step to having a well-planted home. Featuring cool plant projects and styling ideas to make the most of your houseplants, this friendly guide will help you discover how to make a mounted wall garden, a kokedama and an air plant mobile. Create enviable shelf displays, terrariums and hanging plant features. The fun and easy projects are beautifully photographed in steps and accompanied by inspirational images of plant displays in the home.

How To Create A Wildlife Garden
Encouraging Birds, Bees, Butterflies And Bugs Into Your Outside Space

Christine Lavelle

A guide to the best plants to grow where, garden plans to suit your location, and natural gardening techniques for wildlife-friendly habitats.

Non-Fiction: Grief and Illness

How To Say Goodbye
The Wisdom Of Hospice Caregivers

Wendy MacNaughton

As artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project Guest House, Wendy MacNaughton experienced firsthand how difficult it is to know what to do when we’re sharing final moments with a loved one. In this tenderly illustrated guide to saying goodbye, with a foreword by renowned physician and author BJ Miller, MacNaughton shows how to make sure those moments are meaningful. Using a framework of the five things taught to her by a professional caregiver, How to Say Goodbye provides a model for having conversations of love, respect, and closure: with the words I forgive you, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you, and Goodbye, each oriented toward finding mutual peace and understanding when it matters most. How to Say Goodbye features MacNaughton’s drawn-from-life artwork from both the Zen Hospice Project Guest House and her own aunt’s bedside as she died, each paired with hospice caregivers’ gentle advice on creating a positive sensory experience, acknowledging what you can’t control, and sharing memories and gratitude. A poignant guide to embracing the present and deepening relationships during great vulnerability, How to Say Goodbye shows that just as there is no one right way to live a good life, there is no one right way to say goodbye. Whether confused, scared, or uncertain, this book is a starting point.

How To Be A Friend To A Friend Who’s Sick

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Inspired by her own experiences, renowned author and journalist Letty Cottin Pogrebin offers new insights and concrete advice on how to relate to, and help, our sick friends.

How To Heal A Grieving Heart

Doreen Virtue, James Van Praagh

When you’re grieving, you need support and comfort, and How to Heal a Grieving Heart provides practical and spiritual help. Each page of this small, full-color gift-style book (a companion to the soon-to-be-published Talking to Heaven Mediumship Cards) contains a comforting message to help grieving people come to terms with their loss. The content is simple and direct, because the authors know and respect that grieving people often have difficulty concentrating and following through on what they read. The reader can open up to a random page, designed with beautiful colors and typeset in attractive fonts, and meditate upon the entry.

Non-Fiction: History

How To Hide An Empire
A History Of The Greater United States

Daniel Immerwahr

A history of the United States’ overseas possessions, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines and beyond, and what they reveal about the true meaning of American empire.

How To Win An Information War
The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

Peter Pomerantsev

From one of our leading experts on disinformation, this inventive biography of the rogue WWII propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer confronts hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can’t fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And–most importantly–Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war. Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer’s story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he’s learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin’s tyranny and lies. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.

Non-Fiction: Literature, Film, and TV

How To Read Now
Essays

Elaine Castillo

How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico. At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman’s reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy–within ourselves, and with each other.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel
Essays

Alexander Chee

From the author of The Queen of the Night, an essay collection exploring how we form our identities in life, in politics, and in art.

How To Write Like Tolstoy
A Journey Into The Minds Of Our Greatest Writers

Richard Cohen

Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers faced–and how they surmounted them.

How To Live What To Do
In Search Of Ourselves In Life And Literature

Josh Cohen

Focusing on some of the best known characters in all of literature – chosen to trace the arc from childhood to old age – a brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature shows how our inner lives become at once stranger and more familiar when seen through the prism of fiction. In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual profession, Josh Cohen illuminates a new way to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll’s Alice or Harper Lee’s Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education instanced in Jane Eyre or Sandy Stringer in The Prime of Miss Jane Brody the need for adolescent rebellion dramatized by John Grimes in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe’s Young Werther and Sally Rooney’s Frances have in common, or not, as they experience first love how Jay Gatsby helps us to understand ambition, Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke the vicissitudes of marriage, and Mrs. Dalloway the inexorability of disappointment. As for old age and death, he explores what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead or Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. From maddening jealousy to unbearable grief, from transcendent love to bottomless hatred, How to Live, What to Do invites us to ponder deep questions about the human experience – about the ties that bind us all.

How To Be A Heroine
Or, What I’ve Learned From Reading Too Much

Samantha Ellis

Debating literature’s greatest heroines with a friend, playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation– My whole life, I’d been trying to be Cathy, when I should have been trying to be Jane. With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies–the characters and the writers–whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to later idolizations of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Reflecting on the girls, the women, and the books that she loves the most, here a life-long reader explores how these heroines have shaped all of our lives.

How To Read Literature Like A Professor
A Lively And Entertaining Guide To Reading Between The Lines

Thomas C Foster

What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey? Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface–a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character – and there’s that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you. In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy and gratifying it is to unlock those hidden truths, and to discover a world where a road leads to a quest a shared meal may signify a communion and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just rain. Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, How to Read Literature Like a Professor is the perfect companion for making your reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

How To Read Poetry Like A Professor
A Quippy And Sonorous Guide To Verse

Thomas C Foster

No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree–a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history–and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers–intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually–than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children’s books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more.

How To Behave Badly In Elizabethan England
A Guide For Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, And Braggarts

Ruth Goodman

Every age and social strata has its bad eggs, rule-breakers, and nose-thumbers. As acclaimed popular historian and author of How to Be a Victorian Ruth Goodman shows in her madcap chronicle, Elizabethan England was particularly rank with troublemakers, from snooty needlers who took aim with a cutting ‘thee,’ to lowbrow drunkards with revolting table manners. Goodman draws on advice manuals, court cases, and sermons to offer this colorfully crude portrait of offenses most foul. Mischievous readers will delight in learning how to time your impressions for the biggest laugh, why quoting Shakespeare was poor form, and why curses hurled at women were almost always about sex (and why we shouldn’t be surprised). Bringing her signature ‘exhilarating and contagious’ enthusiasm (Boston Globe), this is a celebration of one of history’s naughtiest periods, when derision was an art form.

How To Read A Poem
And Fall In Love With Poetry

Edward Hirsch

This volume presents an exploration of poetry and feeling, introducing poems selected by the author as emblematic because they suggest something crucial about the nature of poetry itself, and offering his insights on how the poems should be read. In this guide, the author reaches out to all those who may be disaffected by the mere mention of poetry and instructs the reader to focus on a personal, emotional response.

How To Save A Life
The Inside Story Of Grey’s Anatomy

Lynette Rice

The first inside story of one of TV’s most popular and beloved dramas, Grey’s Anatomy. More than 15 years after its premiere, Grey’s Anatomy remains one of the most beloved dramas on television and ABC’s most important property. It continues to win its time slot and has ranked in the Top 20 most watched shows in primetime for most of its 17-season run. It currently averages more than 9 million viewers each week. More than that, it’s been a cultural touchstone. It introduced the unique voice and vision of Shonda Rhimes, it made Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh and T.R. Knight household names, and injected words and phrases into the cultural lexicon like ‘McDreamy,’ ‘seriously,’ and ‘you’re my person.’ And the behind-the-scenes drama has always been just as juicy as what was happening in front of the camera, from the high-profile firing of Isaiah Washington to Katherine Heigl’s fall from grace and Patrick Dempsey’s shocking death episode. The show continued to hemorrhage key players, but the beloved hospital series never skipped a beat. Lynette Rice’s How to Save A Life takes a totally unauthorized deep dive into the show’s humble start, while offering exclusive intel on the behind-the-scenes culture, the most heartbreaking departures and the more polarizing plotlines.

How To Tell A Story
The Essential Guide To Memorable Storytelling From The Moth

Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness,, Kate Tellers

Over the past twenty-five years, the directors of The Moth have worked with people from all walks of life – including astronauts, rock stars, Nobel Prize-winners, high school students, dental hygienists, and a retired pickpocket – to develop true personal stories that have moved and delighted millions of listeners on the Moth’s Peabody Award-winning radio hour and podcast. A leader in the modern storytelling movement, The Moth also inspires thousands of people around the globe to share their stories each year. Now, with ‘How to Tell a Story’, you will learn how to uncover and craft your own unique stories, like Moth storytellers such as Mike Birbiglia, Rosanne Cash, Darryl DMC McDaniels, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Gopnik, Amanda Gorman, Padma Lakshmi, Hasan Minhaj, Tig Notaro, Boots Riley, Molly Ringwald, Krista Tippett, John Turturro, and more. Whether your goal is to make it to The Moth stage, deliver the perfect wedding toast, wow clients at a business dinner, give a moving eulogy, ace a job interview, be a hit at parties, or simply connect more deeply to those around you, stories are essential… The Moth team will help you present your most authentic self to the world – and tell stories that will forge lasting connections with coworkers, clients, friends, and family.

How To Watch A Movie

David Thomson

A critic shares professional insights into how to derive more from a film experience, analyzing a range of iconic films to reveal metaphorical artistry techniques in the acting, filming, dialogue, and music.

How To Promote Your Book
A Practical Guide To Promoting Your Own Title

Jan Yager

Written for self-published book authors as well as commercially published authors who want to participate in promoting their own book, How to Promote Your Book guides the reader through every aspect of promotion, including creating sales sheets, press releases, and press kits obtaining blurbs and reviews getting coverage from both traditional and Internet-based media getting speaking engagements using social media attending and exhibiting at book fairs and trade shows and more.

Non-Fiction: Parenting

How To Raise An Adult
Break Free Of The Overparenting Trap And Prepare Your Kid For Success

Julie Lythcott-Haims

In How to Raise an Adult, Lythcott-Haims draws on research, conversations with educators and employers, and her own insights as a mother and student dean to highlight the ways in which over-parenting harms children and their stressed-out parents. She identifies types of helicopter parents and, while empathizing with parents’ universal worries, offers practical alternative strategies that underline the importance of allowing children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner determination necessary for success. Relevant to parents of toddlers as well as of twentysomethings, this book is a rallying cry for those who wish to ensure that the next generation can take charge of their own lives with competence and confidence.

How To Entertain, Distract, And Unplug Your Kids!
Tricks, Tools, And Spontaneous Screen-Free Activities

Matthew Jervis

A fun and practical guide to keeping kids engaged and off your phone.

How To Be A Family
The Year I Dragged My Kids Around The World To Find A New Way To Be Together

Dan Kois

What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids’ lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children’s time wisely, and when they weren’t arguing over screen time, the Kois family–Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters–could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren’t families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois’ go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home–but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. How To Be A Family brings readers along as the Kois girls–witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper–hike through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family’s lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, How To Be A Family will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.

How To Raise Kind Kids
And Get Respect, Gratitude, And A Happier Family In The Bargain

Thomas Lickona

As our culture grows ever more abrasive and divided, we all want our kids to be kind. But that is not the same as knowing what to do when you catch your son being unkind. A world-renowned developmental psychologist, Dr. Thomas Lickona has led the character education movement in schools for forty years. Now he shares with parents the vital tools they need to bring peace and foster cooperation at home. Kindness doesn’t stand on its own. It needs a supporting cast of other essential virtues–like courage, self-control, respect, and gratitude. With concrete examples drawn from the many families Dr. Lickona has worked with over the years and clear tips you can act on tonight, learn how to give and get respect, hold family meetings to tackle persistent problems, discipline in a way that builds character, and improve the dynamic of your relationship with your children while putting them on the path to a happier and more fulfilling life.

How To Raise A Reader

Pamela Paul, Maria Russo

Do you remember your first visit to where the wild things are? How about curling up for hours on end to discover the secret of the Sorcerer’s Stone? Combining clear, practical advice with inspiration, wisdom, tips, and curated reading lists, How to Raise a Reader shows you how to instill the joy and time-stopping pleasure of reading. Divided into four sections, from baby through teen, and each illustrated by a different artist, this book offers something useful on every page, whether it’s how to develop rituals around reading or build a family library, or ways to engage a reluctant reader. A fifth section, ‘More Books to Love: By Theme and Reading Level,’ is chockful of expert recommendations. Throughout, the authors debunk common myths, assuage parental fears, and deliver invaluable lessons in a positive and easy-to-act-on way. It’s an indispensable guide to welcoming children to the reading life. –From back cover.

Non-Fiction: Relationships

How To Care For Aging Parents
A One-Stop Resource For All Your Medical, Financial, Housing, And Emotional Issues

Virginia Morris

How to Care for Aging Parents is an authoritative, clear, and comforting source of advice and support for the ever-growing number of Americans–now 42 million–who care for an elderly parent, relative, or friend. And now, in its third edition, it is completely overhauled and updated, chapter-by-chapter and page-by-page, with the most recent medical findings and recommendations. It includes a whole new chapter on fraud details on the latest aging in place technologies more helpful online resources and everything you need to know about current laws and regulations. Also new are fill-in worksheets for gathering specifics on medications caregivers’ names, schedules, and contact info doctors’ phone numbers and addresses and other essential information in one handy place at the back of the book. From having that first difficult conversation to arranging a funeral and dealing with grief–and all of the other important issues in between–How to Care for Aging Parents is the essential guide.

How To Know A Person
The Art Of Seeing Others Deeply And Being Deeply Seen

David Brooks

Drawing from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history and education, one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators helps us become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen.

How To Fall In Love With Anyone
A Memoir In Essays

Mandy Len Catron

In a series of candid essays, Mandy Len Catron takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world.

How To Walk Into A Room
The Art Of Knowing When To Stay And When To Walk Away

Emily P Freeman

A Podcast host, spiritual director and best-selling author offers guidance to help readers recognize when to leave situations that are no longer useful, including how to navigate endings without closure and differentiate between peace and discomfort avoidance.

How To Be The Love You Seek
Break Cycles, Find Peace + Heal Your Relationships

Nicole LePera

In How to Be the Love You Seek, #1 New York Times bestselling author Dr. LePera–whose integrative, holistic approach to psychology has attracted an international audience of millions–offers a new path to healing our relationships. Harnessing the latest scientific research, she teaches us to recognize how unmet needs from our earliest relationships create our current, dysfunctional relationship patterns, and leave us in a state of constant internal threat, even with those closest to us. This book, the last in her How To trilogy, illuminates the way out of trauma bonds and into relationships rooted in mutual respect and compassion. In it, you will learn how to create safety in your own body and mind identify your unmet needs develop emotional resilience cultivate heart coherence to build deep emotional connections with others and maintain healthy interdependence in our communities.

How To Be Married
What I Learned From Real Women On Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year Of Marriage

Jo Piazza

At age thirty-four, Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Galápagos Islands and was engaged three months later. But before long, Jo found herself riddled with questions. How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married? How does an independent, strong-willed feminist become someone’s partner–all the time? In the tradition of writers such as Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Gilbert, award-winning journalist and nationally bestselling author Jo Piazza writes a provocative memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look at matrimony. A travel editor constantly on the move, Jo journeys to twenty countries on five continents to figure out what modern marriage means. Throughout this stunning, funny, warm, and wise personal narrative, she gleans wisdom from matrilineal tribeswomen, French ladies who lunch, Orthodox Jewish moms, Swedish stay-at-home dads, polygamous warriors, and Dutch prostitutes. Written with refreshing candor, elegant prose, astute reporting, and hilarious insight into the human psyche, How to Be Married offers an honest portrait of an utterly charming couple. When life throws more at them than they ever expected–a terrifying health diagnosis, sick parents to care for, unemployment–they ultimately create a fresh understanding of what it means to be equal partners during the good and bad times. Through their journey, they reveal a framework that will help the rest of us keep our marriages strong, from engagement into the newlywed years and beyond.

How To Not Die Alone
The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love

Logan Ury

Love, as the saying goes, make fools of us all. But behavioral scientist and dating coach Logan Ury wants to fix that. A lasting, loving relationship doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a series of decisions: when to date, who to date, who to settle down with, if you should break up, and everything in between. Very often, we don’t understand why we’re making certain decisions, and that causes us to make mistakes. And our current dating environment-with its overwhelming amount of options and constant pressure to make the right choice-only makes those decisions harder. Logan studied psychology at Harvard and spent years researching relationships. Here, she explains expectations, emotions, and other invisible forces that drive our faulty decision-making. But awareness on its own doesn’t lead to action. (Knowing you shouldn’t date bad boys or manic pixie dream girls doesn’t make them any less appealing.) You have to do something. And Logan shows you how. Each chapter focuses on a different decision, from the first date on, and includes big ideas from behavioral science, original research, hands-on exercises, and stories about people just like you, to help you find-and keep-love. You’ll learn: -What’s really holding you back in dating-it’s not what you think (and how to overcome it) -How to meet people in real life (and how to not come off as creepy) -Why your current dating app filters won’t find a great match (and how to fix them) -Why you should always go on a second date (unless you’re getting serious serial killer vibes) -Why The One doesn’t exist (but you’ll find love anyway) … and much more!;”A lasting, loving relationship doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a series of decisions: when to date, who to date, who to settle down with, if you should break up, and everything in between. Our current dating environment, with its overwhelming amount of options and constant pressure to make the right choice, only makes those decisions harder. Ury spent years researching relationships, and here explains expectations, emotions, and other invisible forces that drive our faulty decision-making. You have to do something. And Ury shows you how. – adapted from info provided”

Non-Fiction: Relax

How To Train A Wild Elephant
And Other Adventures In Mindfulness

Jan Chozen Bays

A growing body of research is showing that mindfulness can reduce stress, improve physical health, and improve our overall quality of life. Jan Chozen Bays, physician and Zen teacher, has developed a series of simple practices to help us cultivate mindfulness as we go about our ordinary, daily lives.

How To Relax

Thich Nhat Hanh

How to Relax is part of The Mindfulness Essentials series of how-to titles by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, introducing beginners and reminding seasoned practitioners of the essentials of mindfulness practice. Pocket-sized, with original two color illustrations by Jason DeAntonis, How to Relax shows how critical it is to regularly interrupt the hub-bub and routine of our lives to stop, relax mindfully, and recharge. Thich Nhat Hanh says that when we relax, we become calm water, and we will reflect reality as it is. If we’re not calm, the image we reflect will be distorted. When the image is distorted by our minds, it’s not the reality, and it causes lots of suffering. With sections on healing, relief from nonstop thinking, transforming unpleasant sounds, solitude, being peace, and more, How to Relax includes meditations you can do to help you achieve the benefits of relaxation no matter where you are. It’s a unique gift for those who want a simple guide to achieving deep relaxation, controlling stress, and renewing mental freshness and clarity, appropriate for those practicing in any spiritual tradition, whether seasoned practitioners or new to meditations. With fifteen two color drawings by celebrated artist Jason DeAntonis.

How To Let Things Go
99 Tips From A Zen Buddhist Monk To Relinquish Control And Free Yourself Up For What Matters

Shunmyo Masuno

Feeling overwhelmed? Step away from life’s mounting demands and free yourself up for what matters with this succinct and sensible guide by the Zen Buddhist author of the international bestsellers The Art of Simple Living and Don’t Worry. Amid the relentless cycle of news, social media, emails, and texts, it can be hard to know when, if ever, we can step away from everything clamoring for our attention. Renowned monk Shunmyo Masuno offers us a radical message: We can leave it all be, and indeed sometimes the best thing we can learn is how to do nothing. A few of the things How to Let Things Go teaches us: Lesson #2: Give people space-being caring and being nosy are not the same thing. Lesson #13: Follow your goen to good opportunities. Lesson #15: Remember that social media is a tool and nothing more. Lesson #19: Let farewells be, and leave your relationships to nature. Lesson #40: Think of letting things go not as throwing them away, but setting them free. Lesson #75: Make decisions in the light of the morning–don’t rush into them. Lesson #90: Take more breaks the busier you become. With these and ninety-two other practical tips, we can abandon the futile pursuit of controlling everything in our lives and unlock the key to a fulfilling social life, individual well-being, and a calmer, more focused mind.

Non-Fiction: Retirement

How To Retire With Enough Money
And How To Know What Enough Is

Teresa Ghilarducci

Here is a single-sit read than can change the course of your retirement. Written by Dr. Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor, a retirement and savings specialist, and a trustee to two retiree health-care trusts worth over $54 billion, How to Retire with Enough Money cuts through the confusion, misinformation, and bad policy-making that keeps us spending or saving poorly. It begins with acknowledging what a person or household actually needs to have saved–the rule of thumb is eight to ten times your annual salary before retirement–and how much to expect from Social Security. And then it delivers the basic principles that will make the money grow, including a dozen good ideas to get current expenses under control. Why to get rid of your guy –those for-fee (or hidden-fee) financial planners that suck up valuable assets. Why it’s always better to pay off a loan or a mortgage. There are no gimmicks, no magical thinking–just an easy-to-follow program that works.

How To Make Your Money Last
The Indispensable Retirement Guide

Jane Bryant Quinn

With How to Make Your Money Last, you will learn how to turn your retirement savings into a steady paycheck that will last for life. Today, people worry that they’re going to run out of money in their older age. That won’t happen if you use a few tricks for squeezing higher payments from your assets–from your Social Security account (find the hidden values there), pension (monthly income or lump sum?), home equity (sell and invest the proceeds or take a reverse mortgage?), savings (should you buy a lifetime annuity?), and retirement accounts (how to invest and–critically–how much to withdraw from your savings each year?). The right moves will not only raise the amount you have to spend, they’ll stretch out your money over many more years. You will also learn to look at your savings and investments in a new way. If you stick with super-safe choices the money might not last. You need safe money to help pay the bills in your early retirement years. But to ensure that you’ll still have spending money 10 and 20 years from now, you have to invest for growth, today. Quinn shows you how. At a time when people are living longer, yet retiring with a smaller pot of savings than they’d hoped for, this book will become the essential guide.

How To Retire The Cheapskate Way
The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Guide To A Better, Earlier, Happier Retirement

Jeff Yeager

The popular blogger outlines strategies for retiring earlier and enjoying a more fulfilling retirement, demonstrating frugal spending practices while providing coverage of topics ranging from health care to travel.

How To Retire Happy, Wild, And Free
Retirement Wisdom That You Won’t Get From Your Financial Advisor

Ernie J Zelinski

‘How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free’ offers inspirational advice on how to enjoy like to its fullest. The key to achieving an active and satisfying retirement involves a great deal more than having adequate financial resources it also encompasses all other aspects of life–interesting leisure activities, creative pursuits, physical well-being, mental well-being, and solid social support.

Non-Fiction: Science

How To Build A Time Machine
The Real Science Of Time Travel

Brian Clegg

A pop science tour of time-travel technology profiles the work of Albert Einstein, Ronald Mallett and present-day innovators, providing coverage of such topics as quantum entanglement, superluminal speeds and wormholes to assess the endeavor’s plausibility and potential.

How To Build An Android
The True Story Of Philip K Dick’s Robotic Resurrection

David F Dufty

The stranger-than-fiction story of the creation and loss of an artificially intelligent android of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Readers get a fascinating inside look at the scientists and technology that made this amazing android possible.

How To Make A Spaceship
A Band Of Renegades, An Epic Race, And The Birth Of Private Space Flight

Julian Guthrie

Alone in a spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world’s largest governments had done before. From the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, Peter Diamandis’s singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned spaceflight, he set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private spaceflight industry himself. In the 1990s, this idea was the stuff of science fiction. Undaunted, Diamandis found inspiration in the golden age of aviation. He discovered that Charles Lindbergh had made his transatlantic flight to win a $25,000 prize. The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man on Earth and galvanized the airline industry. Why, Diamandis thought, couldn’t the same be done for spaceflight? The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne and of the other teams in the hunt for a $10 million prize [XPRIZE] is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible. In the end, as Diamandis dreamed, the result wasn’t just a victory for one team it was the foundation for a new industry and a new age..

How To
Absurd Scientific Advice For Common Real-World Problems

Randall Munroe

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. Munroe has created a guide to the third kind of approach. He provides highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Cartoonist Randall Munroe (xkcd) explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you’re a baby boomer or a 90’s kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you’re done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth’s mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible and helps us better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.

How To Speak Whale
A Voyage Into The Future Of Animal Communication

Tom Mustill

What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill–the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak–asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication. When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size. On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend, just off the coast of California. It was cold, but idyllic–until a humpback whale breached, landing on top of them, releasing the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. He was certain he was about to die, but both he and his friend survived miraculously unscathed. In the interviews that followed the incident, Mustill was left with one question: What could this astonishing encounter teach us? Drawing from his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker, Mustill started investigating human-whale interactions around the world. When he met two tech entrepreneurs, who told him they wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode animal communication, Mustill embarked on a journey where big data meets big beasts, using animal eavesdropping technologies to train AI–originally designed to translate human languages–to discover patterns in the conversations of animals. There is a revolution taking place in biology, as the technologies we’ve developed to explore our own languages are turned to nature. From seventeenth-century Dutch inventors, to the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, to the cutting edge of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale looks at how scientists and start-ups around the world are decoding animal languages. Whales, with their giant mammalian brains, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human-animal interaction be? We’re about to find out.

How To Clone A Mammoth
The Science Of De-Extinction

Beth Shapiro

Looking at the very real and compelling science behind an idea once seen as science fiction, the author demonstrates how de-extinction will redefine conservation’s future.

How To Astronaut
An Insider’s Guide To Leaving Planet Earth

Terry Virts

Former NASA astronaut Terry Virts offers an insider’s guide to astronauting–a behind-the-scenes look at the training, the basic rules, lessons, and procedures of space travel, including how to deal with a dead body in space, what it’s like to film an IMAX movie in orbit, what exactly to do when nature calls, and much more.

Non-Fiction: Self Help and Self Improvement

How To Sew A Button
And Other Nifty Things Your Grandmother Knew

Erin Bried

Waste not, want not with this guide to saving money, taking heart, and enjoying the simple pleasures of life. Nowadays, many of us outsource basic tasks. Food is instant, ready-made, and processed with unhealthy additives. Dry cleaners press shirts, delivery guys bring pizza, gardeners tend flowers, and, yes, tailors sew on those pesky buttons. But life can be much simpler, sweeter, and richer-and a lot more fun, too! As your grandmother might say, now is not the time to be careless with your money, and it actually pays to learn how to do things yourself! Practical and empowering, How to Sew a Button collects the treasured wisdom of nanas, bubbies, and grandmas from all across the country-as well as modern-day experts-and shares more than one hundred step-by-step essential tips for cooking, cleaning, gardening, and entertaining, including how to: polish your image by shining your own shoes grow your own vegetables (and stash your bounty for the winter) sweeten your day by making your own jam use baking soda and vinegar to clean your house without toxic chemicals feel beautiful by perfecting your posture roll your own piecrust and find a slice of heaven fold a fitted sheet to crisp perfection waltz without stepping on any toes. Complete with helpful illustrations and brimming with nostalgic charm, How to Sew a Button provides calm and comfort in uncertain times. By doing things yourself, with care and attention, you and your loved ones will feel the pleasing rewards of a job well done.

How To Disappear
Notes On Invisibility In A Time Of Transparency

Akiko Busch

Vivid, surprising, and utterly timely, Akiko Busch’s How to disappear explores the idea of invisibility in nature, art, and science, in search of a more joyful and peaceful way of living in today’s increasingly surveilled and publicity-obsessed world. In our increasingly networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been both more enchanting and yet fanciful. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and self-promote. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but vast and pervasive technology companies, which want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life–for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world’s most exotic and remote places–from the Cayman Islands to Iceland–she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared and to the way Virginia Woolf’s fictional Mrs. Dalloway feels a flickering of personhood as an older woman, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness. A unique and exhilarating accomplishment, How to disappear is a shimmering collage of poetry, cinema, memoir, myth, and much more, which overturns the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness.

How To Be A Better Person
400+ Simple Ways To Make A Difference In Yourself–And The World

Kate Hanley

This fun, enlightening book features 300 everyday activities to help you become a better person and make a positive impact on the people around you. How to Be a Better Person is a unique and practical guide that can help you easily turn your good intentions into meaningful actions. Each activity serves as a daily inspiration for you to make a positive impact in your home, community, and relationships. With exercises designed to foster cheerfulness, kindness, generosity, gratitude, acceptance and inclusion, integrity, and honesty, you can learn how easy it is to be the person you’ve always wanted to be.

How To Hold A Grudge
From Resentment To Contentment: The Power Of Grudges To Transform Your Life

Sophie Hannah

Argues that readers can use grudge-holding to be their happiest, most optimistic, and most forgiving selves.

How To Be A Person In The World
Ask Polly’s Guide Through The Paradoxes Of Modern Life

Heather Havrilesky

By the author of the popular advice column Ask Polly, featured weekly on New York Magazine’s The Cut, this is a collection of brand new, impassioned, and inspiring letters.

How To Survive
Self-Reliance In Extreme Circumstances

John Hudson

Gripping stories of near disaster and survival-and the lessons to be gleaned from them-from the British military’s chief survival instructor. When faced with near death, your survival instincts kick in. Instincts can only take you so far, however it’s preparation and planning that can make the difference between living and dying. In How to Survive, readers will hear harrowing tales of survival and learn from them. These stories are broken down and studied, whether it’s the experience of a teenager hiking to safety as the only survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian Amazon, a fisherman drifting for more than 400 days in an open boat across the Pacific Ocean, or a US Air Force fighter pilot forced to eject from his stealth fighter thousands of feet above the earth. John Hudson, a military survivor instructor, introduces the mindset that he feels is imperative for success: the Survival Triangle. This combination of effort, hope, and goals, along with a few practical skills, provides a premade planning template that can be used to jumpstart the whole survival process.

How To Hygge
The Nordic Secrets To A Happy Life

Signe Johansen

The Danish coziness philosophy is fast becoming the new French living in terms of aspirational lifestyle books and blogs. There are countless viral articles comparing the happiness levels of Americans versus Danes. Their homes are more homey their people are more cheerful. It’s an attitude that defies definition, but there is a name for this slow-moving, stress-free mindset: hygge (pronounced hoo-ga ). Hygge values the idea of cherishing yourself: candlelight, bakeries, and dinner with friends a celebration of experiences over possessions, as well as being kind to yourself and treasuring a sense of community.

How To Winter
Harness Your Mindset To Thrive On Cold, Dark, Or Difficult Days

Kari Leibowitz

A blend of mindset science, original research and cultural insights into cultivating a positive wintertime mindset, to cure winter blues and learn to find joy and comfort in dark times year-round. Do you dread the end of Daylight Savings each year and grouch about the long, chilly season of gray skies and ice? Do you reach for a lightbox to get you through January and February each year? What if there were a way to rethink this time of year? Psychologist and winter expert Kari Leibowitz’s galvanizing HOW TO WINTER uses mindset science to help readers embrace winter as a season to be enjoyed, not endured–and in turn, learn powerful lessons that can impact our mental wellbeing throughout the year. Kari Leibowitz travelled to the places on earth with the coldest, darkest, longest and most intense winters, expecting to research the season’s negative effects on mental health–only to find that inhabitants actually looked forward to it with vigor and enthusiasm. In Earth’s most intense winters, Leibowitz discovered the power of the wintertime mindset –impactful adaptations that can teach us not just about braving the dark, cold months of the year, but also the darker and more difficult seasons of life. In Tokyo, Japan, communities gather around hot pot and extra-sweet snow-radishes, embracing the special magic of cozy rituals. In Edmonton Canada, getting outside into well-below-freezing weather is an exercise on honing attention to nature’s moodier offerings, correlated with an increase in positive emotions like awe and inspiration. In Tromsø, Norway people celebrate the beginning of the monthslong Polar Night–embracing the seasonal fluctuations in our energy and behavior (just like any other animal)–and the life-sustaining importance of rest. Inspired by the latest research as well as those who find warmth and joy in winter’s extremes, HOW TO WINTER provides readers with concrete tools for making winter wonderful wherever they live, and in the process harnessing the power of small mindset changes with big impact, for every season of life.

How To Do The Work
Recognize Your Patterns, Heal From Your Past, And Create Your Self

Nicole LePera

From Dr. Nicole LePera, creator of the holistic psychologist – the online phenomenon with more than 2M followers on Instagram – comes a revolutionary approach to self-improvement, integrating the tools of various modalities and disciplines with traditional psychology to offer a practical program that guides readers to create radical change.

How To Be Well
The Six Keys To A Happy And Healthy Life

Frank Lipman

From celebrity health guru and New York Times best-selling author Dr. Frank Lipman, the definitive guide to total wellness. In his best-selling book, The New Health Rules, Dr. Frank Lipman laid out a modern manifesto for living a healthy and fulfilling life. How to Be Well is the essential follow up: a hands-on manual to mastering the habits, routines, and tactics that will help readers improve their health and establish the pillars of lifelong vitality. In How to Be Well, Lipman has created The Good Medicine Mandala–a new map for a new era of medicine. The Good Medicine Mandala is illustrated by a circular system of six rings that contain simple steps to what really works to improve and strengthen resilience, functioning, and overall health. The Six Rings are: How to Eat: Mastering the very building blocks of life: food. How to Sleep: Restoring one of our most fundamental needs. How to Move: Helping the body move in the ways that nature intended. How to Protect: Mitigating and preventing the invisible assaults of everyday toxins. How to Unwind: Consciously switching off to allow for mental reprieve. How to Connect: Awakening and enhancing a sense of belonging and meaning. For anyone interested in health, wellness, and happiness, this gorgeously illustrated book is a must-have.

How To Teach Philosophy To Your Dog
Exploring The Big Questions In Life

Anthony McGowan

Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realizes it’s high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog. Taking his lead from Monty’s canine antics, McGowan takes us on a hilarious and enlightening jaunt through the major debates of philosophy. Will Kant convince Monty to stop stealing cheesecake? How long will they put up with Socrates poking holes in every argument? In this uniquely entertaining take on morality and ethics, the dutiful duo set out to uncover who–if anyone–has the right end of the ethical stick and can tell us how best to live one’s life.

How To Be Fine
What We Learned From Living By The Rules Of 50 Self-Help Books

Jolenta Greenberg, Kristen Meinzer

A humorous and insightful look into what it means to transform yourself, by the co-hosts of the popular (and industry favorite) By the Book podcast.

How To Change
The Science Of Getting From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be

Katherine Milkman

Award-winning Wharton Professor and Choiceology podcast host Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the study of behavior change. In this ground-breaking book, Milkman reveals a proven path that can take you from where you are to where you want to be, with a foreword from psychologist Angela Duckworth, the best-selling author of Grit. Set audacious goals. Foster good habits. Create social support. You’ve surely heard this advice before. If you’ve ever tried to change or encourage it–to boost exercise or healthy eating, to prevent missed deadlines or kick-start savings–then you know there are thousands of apps, books, and YouTube videos promising to help and offering sound guidance. And yet, you’re still not where you want to be. This trailblazing book from award-winning behavioral scientist and Wharton Professor Katy Milkman explains why. In a career devoted to uncovering what helps people change, Milkman has discovered a crucial thing many of us get wrong: our strategy. Change, she’s learned, comes most readily when you understand what’s standing between you and success and tailor your solution to that roadblock. If you want to work out more but find exercise difficult and boring, downloading a goal-setting app probably won’t help. But what if, instead, you transformed your workouts so they became a source of pleasure instead of a chore? Turning an uphill battle into a downhill one is the key to success. Drawing on Milkman’s original research and the work of her dozens of world-renowned scientific collaborators, How to Change shares an innovative new approach that will help you change or encourage change in others. Through case studies, engaging stories, and examples from cutting-edge research, this book illustrates how to identify and overcome the barriers that regularly stand in the way of change. How to Change will teach you: Why timing can be everything when it comes to making a change How to turn temptation and inertia into assets that can help you conquer your goals That giving advice, even if it’s about something you’re struggling with, can help you achieve more Whether you’re a manager, coach, or teacher aiming to help others change for the better or are struggling to kick-start change yourself, How to Change offers an invaluable, science-based blueprint for achieving your goals, once and for all.

How To Be A Good Creature
A Memoir In Thirteen Animals

Sy Montgomery

A naturalist and adventurer discusses the personalities and quirks of thirteen animals who have profoundly affected her, exploring themes of learning to become empathetic, creating families, coping with loss, and the otherness and sameness of people and animals.

How To Be
Life Lessons From The Early Greeks

Adam Nicolson

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus, in Ephesus, was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the early lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus asked themselves, How can I be true to myself? On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. The award-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels with us through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Enhanced with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be is an expedition into early ideas. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions? It is an enthralling, exhilarating journey.

How To Do Nothing
Resisting The Attention Economy

Jenny Odell

When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as . . . doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.

How To Stop Feeling Like Sh*t
14 Habits That Are Holding You Back From Happiness

Andrea Owen

How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t is a straight-shooting approach to self-improvement for women, one that offers no-crap truth-telling about the most common self-destructive behaviors women tend to engage in. From listening to the imposter complex and bitchy inner critic to catastrophizing and people-pleasing, Andrea Owen–a nationally sought-after life coach–crystallizes what’s behind these invisible, undermining habits. With each chapter, she kicks women’s gears out of autopilot and empowers them to create happier, more fulfilling lives. Powerfully on-the-mark, the chapters are short and digestible, nicely bypassing weighty examinations in favor of punch-points of awareness.

How To Change Your Mind
What The New Science Of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, And Transcendence

Michael Pollan

Presents an investigation into the medical and scientific revolution currently taking place in the field of psychedelic drugs, tracing the criminalization of such substances as LSD and psychedelic mushrooms and how they may offer treatment options for difficult health challenges.

How To Lead
Wisdom From The World’s Greatest Ceos, Founders, And Game Changers

David M Rubenstein

The essential leadership playbook. Learn the principles and guiding philosophies of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Warren Buffet, Oprah, and many others through illuminating conversations about their remarkable lives and careers.

How To Be Perfect
The Correct Answer To Every Moral Question

Michael Schur

From the creator of The Good Place and the co-creator of Parks and Recreation, a hilarious, thought-provoking guide to living an ethical life, drawing on 2,500 years of deep thinking from around the world. It’s not always easy to determine what’s good or bad–especially in a world filled with complicated choices and bad advice. Schur starts off with easy ethical questions and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face– and does it with wit and deep insight, so that we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

How To Be Old
Lessons In Living Boldly From The Accidental Icon

Lyn Slater

A personal memoir in which Lyn Slater, known on Instagram as Accidental Icon, brings her characteristic style, optimism, forward-thinking, and rules-are-meant-to-be-broken attitude to the question of how to live boldly at any age. When Lyn Slater started her fashion blog, Accidental Icon, at age sixty-one, she discovered that followers were flocking to her account for more than just her A-list style. As Lyn flaunted gray hair, wrinkles, and a megadose of self-acceptance, they found in her an alternative model of older life: someone who defied the stereotypes, refused to become invisible, and showed that all women have the opportunity to be relevant and take major risks at any stage of their life. Youth is not the only time we can be experimental. How to Be Old tells the ten-year story of Lyn’s sixties, the sometimes-glamorous, sometimes-turbulent decade of Accidental Icon. This memoir is about the hopeful and future-oriented process of reinvention. It shows readers that while you can’t control everything, what you can control is the way you think about your age and the creative ways you respond to the changes in your mind and body as they happen. Rather than trying to meet standards of youth and beauty as a measure of successful aging, Lyn promotes a more inclusive and empowering standard to judge our older selves by. In this paradigm-shifting memoir, Lyn exemplifies that even with its unique challenges, being old is just like any new beginning in your life and can be the best and most invigorating of all of life’s phases, full of rebellion and reinvention, connection and creativity.

How To Survive And Thrive When Bad Things Happen
9 Steps To Cultivating An Opportunity Mindset In A Crisis

Jim Taylor

Few of us go through life without experiencing some sort of crisis, whether health, financial, relationship, career, or personal safety. Crises happen and they are often out of our control. But the one thing we can control is how we respond to them. Yet, our natural instincts often hinder us as we confront today’s crises that are complex, amorphous, and not readily solvable. Changing our reaction to a crisis is an immense challenge, yet with powerful lessons provided in these pages, anyone can turn crises into opportunities for reflection, positive action, and growth. A crisis mentality can overwhelm you when bad things happen. Turning crises into opportunities empowers you to overcome the darkness that can engulf you in troubled times and allow you to seek the light that can guide you through hard times. Exploring the essential psychological, emotional, and interpersonal factors that most impact your reaction to a crisis, Jim Taylor provides you with deep insights and practical tools that help you move from a crisis mentality of fear, pessimism, and panic that controls you to an opportunity mindset of calm, confidence, and courage that you control in a crisis. He offers compelling examples, both recent and historical, well-known and unfamiliar, to bring these issues to life. Illustrations from government, large and small business, and ordinary people will highlight who responded well and who did not. Break free from the crisis mentality and embrace an opportunity mindset with nine strategies that will not only help you to survive, but actually thrive, when bad things happen.

How To Be Weird
An Off-Kilter Guide To Living A One-Of-A-Kind Life

Eric Wilson

A guidebook for cultivating the surprising joys that come from living an off-kilter life. We crave the weird–the quirky, the eccentric, the peculiar, the freaky, the far-out-because it takes us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, nullifies our old conceptual maps with which we navigate our lives, and propels us into uncharted regions. Or to put it more simply: weirdness is essential to an interesting life. In How to Be Weird, Eric G. Wilson offers 99 fun and philosophically rich exercises for embracing all the weird in the world around us–taking aimless walks, creating a reverie nook, exploring the underside of bridges, making tombstone rubbings, finding your own Narnia, and more. With brief digestible entries on how to make sense of the random, guidelines on how to defamiliarize familiar objects through meditation, and exercises for locating weird states and phenomena for ourselves, How to Be Weird is an invitation to lean into the weird and to live a fuller life.

Non-Fiction: Social Issues

How To Be Secular
A Call To Arms For Religious Freedom

Jacques Berlinerblau

Weary of religious conservatives urging defense of marriage and atheist polemicists decrying the crimes of religion? Sick of pundits who want only to recast American life in their own image? Americans are stuck in an all-or-nothing landscape for religion in public life. What are reasonable citizens to do? Seen as godless by the religious and weak by the atheists, secularism mostly has been misunderstood. In How to Be Secular, Berlinerblau argues for a return to America’s hard-won secular tradition the best way to protect religious diversity and freedom lies in keeping an eye on the encroachment of each into the other.

How To Be An Everyday Philanthropist
330 Ways To Make A Difference In Your Home, Community, And World–At No Cost

Nicole Bouchard Boles

Offers 330 concrete, direct ideas for making a difference–all of which have nothing to do with the size of your checkbook and everything to do with using the hidden assets that are already a part of your life.

How To Have Difficult Conversations About Race
Practical Tools For Necessary Change In The Workplace And Beyond

Kwame Christian

How to Have Difficult Conversations About Race equips you with the skills you need to make crucial conversations about race easier and more productive.

How To Be Less Stupid About Race
On Racism, White Supremacy, And The Racial Divide

Crystal Fleming

How to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics. Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist, even as white supremacy and racial injustice are more visible than ever before. Combining no-holds-barred social critique, humorous personal anecdotes, and analysis of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on systemic racism, sociologist Crystal M. Fleming provides a fresh, accessible, and irreverent take on everything that’s wrong with our national conversation about race. Drawing upon critical race theory, as well as her own experiences as a queer black millennial college professor and researcher, Fleming unveils how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance–and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change. Searing, sobering, and urgently needed, How to Be Less Stupid About Race is a truth bomb and call to action for everyone who wants to challenge white supremacy and intersectional oppression. If you like Issa Rae, Justin Simien, Angela Davis, and Morgan Jerkins, then this deeply relevant, bold, and incisive book is for you.

How To Be Human
An Autistic Man’s Guide To Life

Jory Fleming

A remarkable and unforgettable memoir from the first man with autism to attend Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, revealing what life is really like inside a world constructed for neurotypical minds while celebrating the many gifts of being different.

How To Survive A Plague
The Inside Story Of How Citizens And Science Tamed Aids

David France

From the creator of and inspired by the seminal documentary of the same name–an Oscar nominee–the definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, and the powerful, heroic stories of the gay activists who refused to die without a fight. Intimately reported, this is the story of the men and women who, watching their friends and lovers fall, ignored by public officials, religious leaders, and the nation at large, and confronted with shame and hatred, chose to fight for their right to live. We witness the founding of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), the rise of an underground drug market in opposition to the prohibitively expensive (and sometimes toxic) AZT, and the gradual movement toward a lifesaving medical breakthrough. With his unparalleled access to this community David France illuminates the lives of extraordinary characters, including the closeted Wall Street trader-turned-activist the high school dropout who found purpose battling pharmaceutical giants in New York the South African physician who helped establish the first officially recognized buyers’ club at the height of the epidemic and the public relations executive fighting to save his own life for the sake of his young daughter. Expansive yet richly detailed, this is an insider’s account of a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights.

How To Avoid A Climate Disaster
The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates

Bill Gates shares what he’s learned in more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address the problems, and sets out a vision for how the world can build the tools it needs to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. Bill Gates explains why he cares so deeply about climate change and what makes him optimistic that the world can avoid the most dire effects of the climate crisis. Gates says, We can work on a local, national, and global level to build the technologies, businesses, and industries to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. His interest in climate change is a natural outgrowth of the efforts by his foundation to reduce poverty and disease. Climate change, according to Gates, will have the biggest impact on the people who have done the least to cause it. As a technologist, he has seen firsthand how innovation can change the world. By investing in research, inventing new technologies, and by deploying them quickly at large scale, Gates believes climate change can be addressed in meaningful ways. According to Gates, to prevent the worst effects of climate change, we have to get to net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases. This problem is urgent, and the debate is complex, but I believe we can come together to invent new carbon-zero technologies, deploy the ones we have, and ultimately avoid a climate catastrophe.

How To Prevent The Next Pandemic

Bill Gates

The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over. But even as governments around the world try to get it under control, they’re also starting to talk about what happens next. How can we prevent another pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy? Can we even hope to accomplish this? Bill Gates believes the answer is yes, and he has written a largely upbeat book that lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should learn from COVID-19, explains the science of fighting pandemics, and suggests what all of us can do to help prevent another one. Given the worldwide success of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (which debuted at #1 on the New York Times best seller list), Gates is more respected than ever for his approach to solving the world’s biggest challenges.

How To Cool The Planet
Geoengineering And The Audacious Quest To Fix Earth’s Climate

Jeff Goodell

Right now, scientists are working on ways to minimize the catastrophic impact of global warming. But they’re not designing hybrids or fuel cells or wind turbines. They’re trying to lower the temperature of the entire planet–with huge contraptions that suck CO2 from the air, machines that brighten clouds and deflect sunlight, even artificial volcanoes that spray heat-reflecting particles into the atmosphere. This is the radical and controversial world of geoengineering, which only five years ago was considered to be fringe. But as Jeff Goodell points out, the economic crisis, combined with global political realities, is making these ideas look sane, even inspired. Goodell himself started out as a skeptic, concerned about tinkering with the planet’s thermostat. There are certainly risks, but Goodell believes the alternatives could be worse. In the end, he persuades us that geoengineering may just be our last best hope–a Plan B for the environment.description.

How To Be An Antiracist

Ibram X Kendi

The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it–and then dismantle it. Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America–but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.

How To Raise An Antiracist

Ibram X Kendi

The tragedies and reckonings around racism that have rocked the country have created a specific crisis for parents and other caregivers: how do we talk to our children about it? How do we guide our children to avoid repeating our racist history? While we work to dismantle racist behaviors in ourselves and the world around us, how do we raise our children to be antiracists? After he wrote the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, readers asked Ibram Kendi, How can I be antiracist? After the bestsellers How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, readers began asking: How do I raise an antiracist child? Dr. Kendi had been pondering the same ever since he became a teacher–but the question became more personal and urgent when he found out his partner, Sadiqa, was pregnant. Like many parents, he didn’t know how to answer the question–and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He didn’t want to educate his child on antiracism he wanted to shield her from the toxicity of racism altogether. But research and experience helped him realize that antiracism has to be taught and modeled as early as possible–not just to armor our children against the racism still indoctrinated and normalized in their world, but to remind adults to build a more just future for us all. Following the model of his bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines vital scholarship with a compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent to create a work whose advice is grounded in research and relatable real-world experience. The chapters follow the stages of child development and don’t just help parents to raise antiracists, but also to create an antiracist world for them to grow and thrive in.

How To Be A Woman

Caitlin Moran

Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven’t been burned as witches since 1727, life isn’t exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Caitlin Moran interweaves provocative observations on women’s lives with laugh-out-loud funny scenes from her own, from the riot of adolescence to her development as a writer, wife, and mother. With rapier wit, Moran slices right to the truth–whether it’s about the workplace, strip clubs, love, fat, abortion, popular entertainment, or children–to jump-start a new conversation about feminism. With humor, insight, and verve, How To Be a Woman lays bare the reasons why female rights and empowerment are essential issues not only for women today but also for society itself.

How To Make A Killing
Blood, Death And Dollars In American Medicine

Tom Mueller

An investigative researcher discusses how the optimism of the a lifesaving technique, dialysis, invented in the 1950s that made kidney failure manageable and not a death sentence has proliferated into a dystopia of skyrocketing costs and worsening care.

How To Stand Up To A Dictator
The Fight For Our Future

Maria Ressa

From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, an impassioned and inspiring memoir of a career spent holding power to account.;”Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rappler crowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections. Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?”

How To Argue With A Racist
What Our Genes Do (And Don’t) Say About Human Difference

Adam Rutherford

Racist pseudoscience can be hard to spot, but its toxic effects on society are plain to see: feeding nationalism, fueling hatred, endangering lives, and corroding our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp–and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, these misconceptions are multiplying even as scientists make unprecedented discoveries in human genetics. Rutherford dismantles outdated notions of race by illuminating what modern genetics actually can and can’t tell us about human difference. The racial categories still dividing us do not align with observable genetic differences–in fact, our differences are so minute that, most of all, they serve as evidence of our shared humanity.

How To Be Black

Baratunde Thurston

Have you ever been called too black or not black enough ? Have you ever befriended or worked with a black person? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you. Raised by a pro-black, Pan-Afrikan single mother during the crack years of 1980s Washington, DC, and educated at Sidwell Friends School and Harvard University, Baratunde Thurston has over thirty years’ experience being black. Now, through stories of his politically inspired Nigerian name, the heroics of his hippie mother, the murder of his drug-abusing father, and other revelatory black details, he shares with readers of all colors his wisdom and expertise in how to be black. Beyond memoir, this guidebook offers practical advice on everything from How to Be The Black Friend to How to Be The (Next) Black President to How to Celebrate Black History Month. To provide additional perspective, Baratunde assembled an award-winning Black Panel–three black women, three black men, and one white man (Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like)–and asked them such revealing questions as: When Did You First Realize You Were Black? How Black Are You? Can You Swim? The result is a humorous, intelligent, and audacious guide that challenges and satirizes the so-called experts, purists, and racists who purport to speak for all black people. With honest storytelling and biting wit, Baratunde plots a path not just to blackness, but one open to anyone interested in simply how to be.

Non-Fiction: Spiritual

How To Read The Bible

Harvey Cox

Renowned religion expert and Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox deepens our experience of the Bible, revealing the three primary ways we read it, why each is important, and how we can integrate these approaches for a richer understanding and appreciation of key texts throughout the Old and New Testaments. The Bible is the heart of devotional practice, a source of guidance and inspiration rich with insightful life lessons. On the other side of the spectrum, academics have studied the Bible using scientific analysis to examine its historical significance and meaning. The gap between these readings has resulted in a schism with far-reaching implications: Without historical context, ordinary people are left to interpret the Bible literally, while academic readings overlook the deeply personal connections established in church pews, choir benches, and backyard study groups. In How To Read the Bible, Cox explores three different lenses commonly used to bring the Bible into focus: Literary–as narrative stories of family conflict, stirring heroism, and moral dilemmas History–as classic texts with academic and theological applications Activism–as a source of dialogue and engagement to be shared and applied to our lives. By bringing these together, Cox shows the Bible in all its rich diversity and meaning and offers us a contemporary activist version that wrestles with issues of feminism, war, homosexuality, and race. The result is a living resource that is perpetually evolving as our understanding changes and deepens from generation to generation.

How To Read The Bible And Still Be A Christian
Struggling With Divine Violence From Genesis Through Revelation

John Dominic Crossan

The acclaimed Bible scholar and author of The Historical Jesus and God & Empire–the greatest New Testament scholar of our generation (John Shelby Spong)–grapples with Scripture’s two conflicting visions of Jesus and God, one of a loving God, and one of a vengeful God, and explains how Christians can better understand these passages in a way that enriches their faith. Many portions of the New Testament, introduce a compassionate Jesus who turns the other cheek, loves his enemies, and shows grace to all. But the Jesus we find in Revelation and some portions of the Gospels leads an army of angels bent on earthly destruction. Which is the true revelation of the Messiah–and how can both be in the same Bible? How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian explores this question and offers guidance for the faithful conflicted over which version of the Lord to worship. John Dominic Crossan reconciles these contrasting views, revealing how different writers of the books of the Bible not only possessed different visions of God but also different purposes for writing. Often these books are explicitly competing against another, opposing vision of God from the Bible itself. Crossan explains how to navigate this debate and offers what he believes is the best central thread to what the Bible is all about. He challenges Christians to fully participate in this dialogue, thereby shaping their faith by reading deeply, reflectively, and in community with others who share their uncertainty. Only then, he advises, will Christians be able to read and understand the Bible without losing their faith.

How To Pray When You’re Pissed At God
Or Anyone Else For That Matter

Ian Punnett

Provides insight into why some oftentimes feel angry and resentful of God, offering practical advice on how to deal with the pain and blame that accompanies these emotions to have a better spiritual relationship with God and loved ones.

How To Talk About Places You’ve Never Been
On The Importance Of Armchair Travel

Pierre Bayard

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we’ve never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room. Bayard examines the art of the non-journey, a tradition that a succession of writers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have employed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find himself having to speak about places he’s never been, and he chronicles some of his own experiences and offers practical advice.

How To Suffer Outside
A Beginner’s Guide To Hiking And Backpacking

Diana Helmuth

Humorous, approachable guide for aspiring backpackers, part critique of modern backpacking culture and part how-to guide.

This press release was produced by the Berlin-Peck Memorial Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.