BTO piling. Jets thundering above. MRTs thudding and clanking through the tunnels. The cacophony of crowds. We’re inundated by noise every day. Here are our recommendations to help you power through it all.

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Abhishek, head of content

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi (2016)

I can’t believe Paul Kalanithi was 36 when he wrote When Breath Becomes Air. But write it he did, just before dying of lung cancer—a bildungsroman and a philosophy treatise paced like a potboiler. Kalanithi considers beauty, truth, and duty in prose that’s somehow both poetic and limpid. Bonus: the Fulke Greville epigraph that gives the book its name: “You that seek what life is in death, / Now find it air that once was breath…”

“The Day the Dinosaurs Died”, Douglas Preston (2019)

I read this at least once every year. How can anyone not? Set in a place called Hell Creek, it’s a real-life mystery from prehistory that unfolds over 24 hours; spans geology, archaeology, astronomy, and biology; and is inhabited by dinosaurs (duh), asteroids, floods, and scientists with just the right amount of kooky. Even if that does nothing for you, the story throws our struggles with ambient noise into stark relief: the dinosaurs see your piddly piledrivers and raise you shrieking, deathly space boulders. Perspective, people.

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