Good morning! Saturday is a great time to relax with a book, so today I’m bringing you literary highlights from The Conversation’s global network. I’ve got a teetering To Be Read pile by my bed, but, inspired by this week’s offerings, I’m adding more titles to my wishlist.

One of the buzziest new books is Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a tell-all memoir from a former Facebook exec that is flying off the shelves. University of Canberra professor John Hawkins takes a look at Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg’s emergency legal action and how it is preventing Wynn-Williams from talking to U.S. Congress, the European Parliament and the U.K. Parliament about how Meta helped spread misinformation and hate.

Another nonfiction book that will no doubt provoke controversy is Age of Diagnosis by U.K. neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan, who, as University of Melbourne psychologist Nick Haslam notes in his review, focuses on the overdiagnosis and medicalization of everything from autism and ADHD to Lyme disease and long COVID. “The stickiness of diagnostic labels means that conditions are added but rarely subtracted,” Haslam writes.

Graphic novels, despite the “novel” part of their name, encompass any and all genres, and University of London lecturer Dominic Davies picks three nonfiction titles that document the history of the transatlantic slave trade and “help us to remember resistance against slavery.”

Now, on to fiction and a review of The Theory of Everything, a new novel from Australian writer Yumna Kassab, which University of Southern Queensland literature professor Jessica Gildersleeve calls “a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary society.” Actually, make that a post-novel, given that Kassab rejects a conventional narrative structure and employs bits of stories, poetry and even lists in what Gildersleeve calls “a treatise on intersectional feminism.”

We’re climbing into the time machine for the next four articles, and the first stop is 2015, when American author Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life, which sits, half-read, on my shelf. At the University of Liverpool, Natalie Wall looks at how this sprawling 736-page saga – which has been called trauma porn, not to mention one of the saddest books ever written – became a popular contemporary classic.

I have read the next three books, but admit their exact contents have been lost to the sands of time. I got a fresh perspective on Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre from University of Sydney English lecturer Matthew Sussman, who argues Jane’s “confident assertion of dignity, of integrity, and of moral and social equality is as relevant to our own time as it was to hers,” while University of Essex English lecturer Davina Quinlivan explains how Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s 1911 novel, The Secret Garden, was an early example of climate fiction.

It’s been at least 40 years since I cracked the cover of The Republic by Plato, but I’ve now added the 2024 movie The End to my watchlist after reading University of Nottingham philosophy professor Matthew Duncombe’s explanation of how the climate-collapse musical shares similarities with the Greek philosopher’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Maybe one day I’ll re-read The Republic; until then, I look forward to watching Tilda Swinton singing her way through the end of the world.

Kim Honey