The Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada, illustrated by Ko Hyung-Ju. This graphic memoir tells the story of Kim Hyun Sook's college activism under a repressive regime in South Korea in....

Lysistrata , by Aristophanes (translated by Douglass Parker) . Humor is difficult to translate, from another language or another era. Fortunately, this play is about the funniest possible subject:...

Orwell's Roses, by Rebecca Solnit. This book is hard to describe. My library shelved it as a biography. Some critics called it an essay collection. Elsewhere, Solnit noted approvingly that one critic....

Louder: We Can't Hear You (Yet!): The Political Poems of Marge Piercy , by Marge Piercy. My attention span doesn't usually do well with audio books. Poetry turns out to be an exception, which is...

The Canterville Ghost and Other Stories , by Oscar Wilde. This collection has four of Wilde's stories, two almost novelette-length and two shorter. The title story is sort of a 19th-century...

The Bandit Queens , by Parini Shroff. This is a delightfully over-the-top dark comedy where very bad men get what's coming to them, but you know the dog will be fine. In a small village in...

LAURA RUTH LOOMIS

been  The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue , by Mackenzi Lee. There are unlikeable narrators, and then there's Henry "Monty" Montague. It's the early 1700s, and Monty, the 18-year-old son of an...

Exit Strategy , by Martha Wells. This is the fourth book in the Murderbot Diaries series. While they can be read as standalones, it really helps to read this series in order, starting with All...