Pithy Books
Long, detailed book summaries written from the perspective of someone who actually read the book and is telling you what happened, what worked, and what did not.
3,079 summaries · 673 series · 1,517 authors
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Charles C. Mann gathers archaeology, ecology, and demography to argue that the Americas before Columbus were older, fuller, and more deliberately shaped than…
2,712-word summary · 12 min read
Four strangers meet on a London rooftop on New Year's Eve, each planning to jump, and end up making a pact to stay alive until Valentine's Day.
2,145-word summary · 10 min read
Two people in Chicago agree to six conversations, and the experiment becomes a love affair that is also a study of bipolar disorder, obsession, and the shape…
2,713-word summary · 12 min read
In 1817 Edinburgh, a noblewoman who wants to be a surgeon disguises herself to study anatomy and falls for the grave robber who supplies her with bodies.
2,031-word summary · 9 min read
A lonely Russian immigrant falls into a well, befriends the ghost trapped there, and discovers that the ghost's help comes with a dangerous price.
2,001-word summary · 9 min read
A New York graphic designer obsessed with Mr. Darcy inherits a trip to a Jane Austen theme park, where the fantasy of Regency romance collides with the men…
2,030-word summary · 9 min read
Three cartoon cousins are run out of Boneville, separated by locusts, and dropped into a valley where rat creatures and an old grudge are waiting.
2,155-word summary · 10 min read
Jacqueline Woodson retells her childhood in verse, moving from Ohio to South Carolina to Brooklyn while the civil rights movement reshapes the world around her.
2,727-word summary · 12 min read
Recovering from a failed raid that killed his officers, Gamache investigates a murder in a Quebec City library while Beauvoir reopens a case in Three Pines.
2,022-word summary · 9 min read
Rysn sails toward forbidden Akinah to save her dying larkin and finds a Dawnshard guarded by the Sleepless.
3,229-word summary · 14 min read
Charley Davidson is a private investigator in Albuquerque and the grim reaper. When three murdered lawyers come back as ghosts, her two jobs collide.
2,770-word summary · 12 min read
A rhyming bedtime book for adults in which an exhausted father narrates the fourth hour of a toddler's stalling, one profane couplet at a time.
2,291-word summary · 10 min read
A paranormal vlogger in a cult-run town summons a bound demon, and the only way to survive the god beneath the mine is to give him her soul.
2,089-word summary · 9 min read
Fifteen centuries after Leto II, the Bene Gesserit raise a new Duncan Idaho while the Honored Matres return and Rakis burns.
2,673-word summary · 12 min read
A two-thousand-year-old druid runs a bookshop in Arizona, hides from an Irish god who wants his sword back, and talks to his dog.
2,159-word summary · 10 min read
Gamache investigates the murder of the last Ouellet quintuplet while the Sûreté he served is dismantled from inside by the man who took his protégé.
2,279-word summary · 10 min read
The final Inkworld novel sends Mo into the land of the dead, leaves Meggie choosing between two boys, and ends the Adderhead's immortality with three written…
2,062-word summary · 9 min read
Two years after her novelist husband dies, Lisey Landon follows a trail of clues into his childhood and the other world that made him a writer.
1,998-word summary · 9 min read
Mandela's account of a Thembu childhood, a law practice, a banned movement, twenty-seven years in prison, and the negotiation that ended apartheid.
2,454-word summary · 11 min read
A fifteen-year-old writes letters to dead artists because they cannot ask questions, and slowly tells the one story she has been hiding about her sister's…
2,520-word summary · 11 min read
A pair of mallards raise eight ducklings on the Charles River and lead them across Boston to the Public Garden, with a little help from a friendly policeman.
2,044-word summary · 9 min read
Thaler and Sunstein show how defaults, framing, and social cues steer choices, and argue for choice architecture with an opt-out.
3,146-word summary · 14 min read
A Connecticut couple who believe they are too good for the suburbs plan to move to Paris, and the plan slowly exposes everything they cannot say to each other.
2,085-word summary · 9 min read
A sentient ship wakes when her captain dies, and the family that owns her starts to come apart over who gets to sail her.
2,026-word summary · 9 min read
