Books I Have Read Recently

Around the start of COVID times I became interested in keeping a better record of books I’ve read, realizing that my memory isn’t what it used to be - nor was it ever really. I often found myself wanting to recommend a book, being able to picture it in my mind, remember many details, but have no fucking clue what the title or who the author was. I found it immensely helpful to have a list of books I’ve read, approximately in chronological order (because I can also usually remember around what time I read it). I tried a variety of apps but they were all more than I needed. But I wanted something (1) easy to update and (2) accessible anywhere. Time for a list in markdown published on my website. This is not intended to be particularly useful to others, unless “what has Jaime read lately” is a criterion for recommendations for you. I have finished all of these books - I don’t add books I don’t finish, and I don’t finish books I don’t like. It’s going to always mostly be non-fiction. I will add books from the top. Books I find myself recommending particularly frequently are bolded.

Football by Chuck Klosterman (2026)
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh The Powers Perversions And Potential Of Heredity by Carl Zimmer (2018)
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives by Daisy Fancourt (2026)
Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done by Rebecca Hinds (2026)
Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement ed. by Pamela Horowitz & Jeanne Theoharis (2021)
The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice by Jennifer Doleac (2026)
Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds by Patty Krawec (2025)
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer by Dean Jobb (2021)
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler (2022)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000)
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate; Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben (2016)
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman (2022)
The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-Of-The-Century America by David Baron (2025)
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (2025)
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
Understanding the Nature‒Nurture Debate by Eric Turkheimer (2024)
Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones (2013)
Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus (2023)
The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan (2019)
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (2021)
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (2024)
The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff (2015)
Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of our National Identity by Donald Yacovone (2022)
I want to Die but I want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee (2018, translated by Anton Hur 2022)
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts (1987)
Cher: the Memoir Part One by Cher (2024)
Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham (2024)
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick with William S. Simon (2011)
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World by Deb Chachra (2023)
Who’s Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler (2024)
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson (2003)
The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey (2020)
Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector by Amit Katwala (2022)
Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Julie Melinek and T.J. Mitchell (2014)
Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics by Aaron Panofsky (2014)
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks (1994)
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy (2020)
Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart by Nancy L. Segal (2021)
A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg (2017)
The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmstead and the Origin of National Parks by Dennis Drabelle (2021)
The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson (2016)
Edible Landscaping: Now You Can Have Your Gorgeous Garden and Eat It Too! by Rosalind Creasy (2010)
The Child Code: Understanding Your Child’s Unique Nature for Happier, More Effective Parenting by Danielle Dick (2021)
The Genealogical Sublime by Julia Creet (2020)
The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo (2019)
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (2019)
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change by Thor Hanson (2021)
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara (2018)
Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich (2016)
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden (2021)
How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don’t) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford (2020)
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016)