Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It BY MARC GOODMAN

Welcome to the brave new world of criminal technology, where robbers have been replaced by hackers and victims include all of us on the Web.

Goodman, a former beat cop who founded the Future Crimes Institute, wrote his book to shed light on the latest in criminal and terrorist tradecraft and to kick off a discussion. He presents myriad cybercrime examples.

A Little Life BY Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara's novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, illuminates human suffering pushed to its limits, drawn in extraordinary, eloquent detail.

The narrative quickly concentrates on Jude, an orphan with a mysterious past. Jude's desire to maintain a veneer of control, despite being haunted by sexual and psychological abuse, creates the book's major drama.

Through her decade-by-decade examination of these people's lives, Yanagihara draws a deeply realized character study that inspires as much as devastates.

Negroland: A memoir BY MARGO JEFFERSON

Margo Jefferson was an African American girl from a good family that had money, connections and expectations of excellence.

She was (mostly) protected from the sting of racism and its pernicious hacking away at self-esteem, opportunity and hope. But her armor was thin, and over the years she has nursed her discomfort with being a child of privilege.

"Negroland" is not about raw racism or caricatured villains. It is about subtleties and nuances, presumptions and slights that chip away at one's humanity and take a mental toll.

Purity BY JONATHAN FRANZEN

The book traces the unlikely rise of a poor, fatherless child named Pip. At least partially to escape her mother's neediness, Pip accepts an internship with a rogue Web site in the jungles of Bolivia that exposes the nasty secrets of corporations and nations.

Its leader is an Internet activist whose back story in East Germany reads like a cerebral thriller.

Franzen writes with perfectly balanced fluency. From its tossed-off observations to its thoughtful reflections on nuclear weapons and the moral compromises of journalism, this novel offers a constantly provocative series of insights.

Welcome to Braggsville BY T.GERONIMO JOHNSON

D'aron Little May Davenport, a polite white teen from Braggsville, Ga., arrives at University of California at Berkeley as if he's a Southern-fried Candide.

The whole novel turns on a moment in one of his history classes . A too clever, incredibly offensive, potentially disastrous plan is born: D'aron and three friends travel back to Braggsville and stage a mock lynching, "a performative intervention."

Johnson is a master at stripping away our persistent myths and exposing the subterfuge and displacement necessary to keep pretending that a culture built on kidnapping, rape and torture was the apotheosis of gentility and honor.