I picked up this book because of its canary-yellow jacket and interesting typography; I didn't realize until I started the first chapter, that About a Mountain is, actually, about a mountain - Yucca Mountain, specifically, 90 miles outside Las Vegas, and the proposed site of a plan that would entomb America's 77,000 tons of nuclear waste for 10,000 years. It would have been easy to merely rant about what an absurdly bad idea it is to store nuclear waste inside a mountain, but essayist D'Agata is much too sophisticated for that. Instead, he teases out the realities of the astonishing plan via linguists, geologists, cultural anthropologists, transportation experts and the like and, in the process, opens up a discussion about "the fragility of our capacity to know," definitively, anything about anything in the grand scheme of things. It's an impressive feat and stylishly done. -- Kim Okamura

Even if you don’t have professional design aspirations, knowing good typographic basics can set you apart from the desktop-publishing masses. Lupton’s excellent handbook goes over things like kerning, tracking and classification, but also delves into style issues of hierarchy and the division of space with a little type history thrown in for good measure. It’s like Type 101 without the homework. Also check out Lupton’s equally excellent, if slightly more rigorous, Graphic Design: The New Basics

Although I’m a great fan of Ishiguro’s writing, I’m actually including The Unconsoled on this list because I’d like people to read it and tell me what they believe it meant. I’m serious about this. The premise: a famous pianist arrives in an unnamed European city scheduled to give the most important performance of his life. The problem is, he mysteriously acquires near-total amnesia and has three days to make sense of his confounding new reality. Dream? Metaphor? You tell me.