 Ah, my bookshelves are so disorganized, must recadalogue soon, but there's no time because pizza mistarts in six days. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Let's talk about books. Specifically some great books you probably haven't read, beginning with some fiction. Want to spend some peaceful hours enjoying a great mystery series? Crash Course co-founder Stan Muller introduced me to Anne Swinfinn's novels. This book, The Bookseller's Tale, is the first in my favorite series. It's set in Oxford in 1353, and the world of medieval bookmaking is just such a great backdrop. If you want to belly laugh and be truly astonished by linguistic acrobatics, I recommend Tough by Paul Beatty. Now, Beatty is more famous for his books The White Boy Shuffle and The Booker Award-winning The Sellout, but I first read this book 20 years ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. A book that makes me both sob and feel hopeful, Jacqueline Woodson's Miracle Boys. This novel is ostensibly for kids 10 and up, and I know many kids who've loved it, but I am a 44-year-old person, and I also love it. It's about impoverishment and grief and surviving loss, but above all, it is about brothers. And Hank, as you know, I love a book about brotherhood, and this one might be my favorite. Okay, on to Infectious Disease, because that's where my brain always goes. I really love the book The Black Death by Rosemary Horrocks. It's a collection of first-person accounts of the four-year period in which approximately half of all Europeans died of plague. Another disease book I love is Frank Snowden's Epidemics and Society. It helped me understand that infectious disease has like always been one of the most important historical forces. Like we think about Alexander the Great and Cleopatra and whatever, but it's mostly microbes. And the book also explores how racism and other forms of discrimination shape disease burden, which in turn shapes history. It's a reminder that disease does not treat people equally, unless society treats people equally. A physics book, I Love the Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescott Weinstein. I think about it every day. This book taught me that we don't know why there is matter in the universe, from which I have not recovered. It also helped me to understand the Big Bang and Dark Energy and lots of other stuff, even though I have like a fourth grade level of physics, but it is also a book about gender identity and race and lots of other stuff. It is just brilliant. I have never read anything like it. Another book that acknowledges that we are not like observers of reality, but participants in it, Phosphorescence by Julia Baird. It's about living with cancer and creatures that make their own light and the science of human joy, and it is so, so good. All right, a sports book. I realize I'm biased here, but altogether now by longtime AFC Wimbledon CEO Eric Samuelson is so enjoyable. I mean, it is the greatest underdog sports story of all time told by one of the people who made it happen. Essays, I know Mary Oliver is famous for her poems, but I love her essays, especially the ones collected in upstream. I dogged almost every page of this book, but one quote especially stuck with me. I read the way a person might swim to save his or her life. Speaking of that kind of reading, I love Pilgrim Bell, the new book of poems by Kava Akbar. He writes the kind of poems that get richer and more interesting the more time you spend with them, and in the last month I have read this book over and over, and it just keeps giving me new gifts. Lastly, you have probably not read this 1945 cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese by Buwei Yangchao, a Chinese physician who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s. This book has been out of print for decades, but it is a wonderfully postmodern cookbook, like one of the first sentences in it is, I did not write this book. It is also hugely historically important. It introduced many Americans to Chinese cooking techniques and coined English language terms like stir fry and pot stickers, and it is full of these pithy litisms, like you know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. Somebody put it back in print. What are some books I probably haven't read that you would recommend to me? Let me know in comments. Also, I made a bookshop.org list with all of these books. If you're interested, plus a couple other recommendations, link in the doobly-doo below. Hank, I will see you on Friday, and then you will see me on Monday.