The Pearl
68g
Weighs the same as Clif Bar
A pearl diver's discovery promises a better life for his family and draws the attention of everyone who wants a share.
The shelf
37 books · 68g – 313g · lightest first
Weighs the same as Headlamp
In a letter to his nephew and a longer essay, Baldwin confronts the distance between America's promises and Black Americans' lives.
Bonsai
110g
Weighs the same as Tuna Packet + Hand Sanitizer
Two young literature lovers in Santiago stumble into a romance whose ending is announced before it begins.
Eastbound
113g
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Sunscreen
A French passenger shelters a Russian conscript on the Trans-Siberian railway who wants to desert but cannot speak her language.
Heart of a Dog
113g
Weighs the same as Top Ramen + Bandana
A surgeon gives a Moscow stray a human body, then finds his experiment has become an enthusiastic Soviet functionary.
Weighs the same as Balaclava + Bandana
A man tries to hold on to a lifelong friendship as the woman he loves becomes increasingly difficult to reach.
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Bandana
A Scottish novelist walks the same mountains for decades and discovers that familiarity can make a landscape stranger, not smaller.
Weighs the same as Tuna Packet + Flour Tortilla
From Nebraska fossil beds to the age of the universe, an anthropologist considers what deep time means for the living.
Weighs the same as Tuna Packet + Inflatable Pillow
While settling an ex-lover's estate, Oedipa Maas encounters clues to a secret postal network that may or may not exist.
Weighs the same as Top Ramen + Flour Tortilla
An eighteen-year-old's scandalous debut about a teenage girl whose sun-drenched summer on the French Riviera turns cruel.
The Dry Heart
136g
Weighs the same as 2× Clif Bar
After shooting her husband, a woman calmly retraces the marriage that brought her to his death.
Siddhartha
136g
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Flour Tortilla
A young man's lifelong spiritual search leads him from asceticism and worldly pleasures to the wisdom of a river.
All Systems Red
137g
Weighs the same as Headlamp + Hand Sanitizer + Mini Bic Lighter
A self-aware security android hacks its operating system to freedom, only to discover that protecting humans was easier than having relationships with them.
The Lover
145g
Weighs the same as Tuna Packet + Hiking Socks
A French teenager's affair with a wealthy Chinese man unfolds through Duras's fractured recollections of colonial Indochina.
Weighs the same as Top Ramen + Tuna Packet
On a beach holiday, a middle-aged professor steals a child's doll and confronts memories of the years she left her daughters.
Weighs the same as Headlamp + Hiking Socks
A pocket-sized anthology of essays, poems, and fragments celebrating the art of getting lost and finding your way differently.
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Tuna Packet
Human colonists are destroying an alien forest, forcing its peaceful inhabitants to learn the terrible art of resistance.
Hunger
168g
Weighs the same as 2× Top Ramen
A penniless writer wanders Kristiania, growing hungrier and less able to trust his own choices.
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals
A traumatized veteran restores a medieval church mural during an English summer that will quietly reshape the rest of his life.
Weighs the same as Phone
A runaway reinvented as Holly Golightly enchants a Manhattan neighbor who can never quite discover what she's fleeing.
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Balaclava
In a monastery near Kyoto, a descendant of Prince Genji searches for a garden that may exist only in imagination.
Why carry it: A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East →
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Top Ramen
A man discovers that hell is an infinite library and that finding his own life story is his only way out.
Jesus' Son
173g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Lip Balm
A drifting addict narrates eleven linked stories in which car crashes, hospital shifts, and chance encounters acquire the force of visions.
Annihilation
174g
Weighs the same as Headlamp + Top Ramen
Sent to survey a quarantined coastline, a biologist encounters an ecosystem that resists everything her expedition thinks it knows.
Dandelion Wine
181g
Weighs the same as Banana
In a small Illinois town, a twelve-year-old discovers he's alive—and begins to understand that the summer won't last forever.
Piranesi
181g
Weighs the same as Battery Pack
A solitary man explores an endless House of marble halls, statues, and tidal seas, unaware of the mystery surrounding his existence.
Franny and Zooey
186g
Weighs the same as Phone + Lexan Spoon
Franny's spiritual crisis brings her home to a long conversation with Zooey, the brother who knows exactly how to get under her skin.
Weighs the same as Banana + Compass
After arsenic killed most of their family, two sisters barricade themselves against the village that despises them.
Weighs the same as Banana + Lexan Spoon
An antiquarian bookseller becomes trapped in November 18, experiencing the same ordinary day over and over while everyone else forgets.
Pedro Páramo
194g
Weighs the same as Banana + Mini Bic Lighter
A man searching for his father enters a deserted Mexican town where the dead speak and the past refuses to stay buried.
Arboreality
195g
Weighs the same as Battery Pack + Toothbrush
Across a changing Vancouver Island, connected stories follow people finding ways to care for the forests and one another.
The Friend
200g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Sunscreen
A grieving writer takes in her dead mentor's Great Dane and finds an unlikely housemate for the life she must now rebuild.
The Summer Book
226g
Weighs the same as Phone + Flour Tortilla
A little girl and her grandmother spend a summer on a Finnish island, discovering the pleasures and sorrows of simply being together.
The Snow Leopard
263g
Weighs the same as Battery Pack + Balaclava
Peter Matthiessen journeys into the Himalayas with a wildlife biologist, searching for an elusive leopard and a way through his grief.
Weighs the same as Banana + Top Ramen + Mini Bic Lighter
In ten stories about people under pressure, Saunders finds moments when even the worst circumstances leave room for decency.
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Headlamp + Sunscreen
On an unnamed island, objects and the memories of them mysteriously disappear while a novelist secretly shelters someone who can still remember.
Stoner
313g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Top Ramen + Inflatable Pillow
A rediscovered campus novel about a man devoted to literature, whose apparent failures depend entirely on how you measure a life.