Welcome to Gemini SZN (May 21 – June 20), my friends! This season welcomes witty banter, lots of questions, and a lil restlessness. Gemini, governed by the messenger planet of communication (Mercury), finds it effortless to adapt anywhere and socialize with anyone. There’s no better way to honor this Gemini season than exploring your special interests and bingeing a great book.
With a sign so intelligent, curious, and inquisitive, they make excellent detectives, writers, and by default—lovers of books, since books are a form of constant discovery. Because these books are recommended for an air sign that can’t sit still, we also recommend buying an audio version of these titles, so you can multitask. 😉
about Gemini
Gemini is a mutable sign ruled by the planet Mercury. Geminis are known for their naturally inquisitive, energetic, and charismatic personality. Since Mercury rules communication, Geminis are naturally gifted with the pen, storytelling, gossiping, reading, and anything else related to transmitting information. Some of the best rappers (poets) are Geminis, like Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Tupac Shakur, Snow The Product, and Kanye West (the old Kanye)-to name a few.
Book Recommendations for Gemini
Gemini’s gift of gab makes them excellent consoisseur’s of information, in other words, Gemini’s really like reading. The trick to keeping their nose in a book is keeping them engaged in a riveting tale, a heady story, or anthing else that keeps their short attention span interested.
Gemini loves learning, so reading books that add to their ever-expansive repertoire of words is like gold to them. We recommend books about the mind/psychology, true crime, mystery/thrillers, science books that expand their worldview, and satire for these witty signs.
MEMOIR. PERSONAL GROWTH.
A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining
By Rachel E. Cargle
From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do.
Written by sister-sign to Gemini, Sagittarius Rachel Cargle, “A Renaissance of Our Own” will help Gemini reimagine a life that feels right for them.
LITERARY. SATIRE. ACADEMIA.
Disorientation
By Elaine Hsien Chou
A blistering send-up of privilege and power, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage, in Disorientation Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories–and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.
So hilarious, you’ll forget that this book is actually a blistering send-up of privilege and power. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s “Disorientation” is a witty satire that’ll keep Gemini engaged from start to finish.
HILARIOUS. MEMOIR. ESSAYS.
Quietly Hostile: Essays
By Samantha Irby
A hilarious new essay collection from #1 New York Times bestselling unabashed fan-favorite Samantha Irby invites us to share in the gory particulars of her real life, all that festers behind the glitter and glam.
Written by a fellow air sign, “Quietly Hostile” will give Geminis that gut-busting laugh they so desperately love. They’ll never tire of reading about the outrageously funny adventures Samantha Irby invites us to witness.
Geminis are very intelligent and pick up knowledge quickly. They are perceptive, analytical, and often very funny. They have an unreserved, childlike curiosity, always asking new questions. (COSTAR ASTROLOGY)
SATIRE. PSYCHOLOGICAL. THRILLER.
Yellowface
By R. F. Kuang
White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American–in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.
Written by a Gemini herself, R.F. Kuang serves some hot tea in “Yellowface”, a book about a white woman who steals the work of an Asian author and then tries to pass as Asian herself. Geminis will love the important questions Kuang brings to light about who gets to publish what and why.
CIVILIZATION. HISTORY. BIOLOGY.
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene “blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner” (Oprah Daily).
Reviewed as “an encyclopedia that reads like a literary book,” Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book “The Song of the Cell” explores the beginning of biological science: the cell. Both poetic and panoramic, this book will teach Gemini a new perspective on being human.
LITERARY. THRILLER. ESPIONAGE.
The Sympathizer: A Novel
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
A double agent, espionage, and a love story. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” is every spy novel Gemini dreams of but better because he wrote a sequel…
NOIR. THRILLER. LITERARY.
The Committed
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
The sequel to The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide, The Committed tells the story of “the man of two minds” as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism.
We know Gemini needs more than one book, so pick up “The Committed” once you’re done with “The Sympathizer.”
RADICAL RESISTANCE IN A TECHO-DRIVEN WORLD.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
By Jenny Odell
Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.
It’s true, a Gemini cannot sit still. Between their social commitments, hobbies, and other interests, where does Gemini find the time to stop and exist? Jenny Odell explores the ways in which we spend our time with technology (and different ways). “How To Do Nothing” will surely give Gemini tools to win back their attention spans.
SLEUTHING. PROTECTIVE MOTHER HEN.
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
By Jesse Q. Sutanto
A lonely shopkeeper (of a certain age) takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties.
If Vera Wong isn’t a Gemini, then I don’t know who is. Solving a murder well into old age sounds like a Gemini’s dream. Jesse Q. Sutanto writes a complex and hilarious mystery that Geminis will not want to put down.
ANIMALS. (NEED I SAY MORE?)
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
By Ed Yong
Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”
There’s nothing Gemini loves more than staying curious about the world around them. Ed Yong’s “An Immense World” will keep Geminis engaged page after page with its captivating tales about the ever evolving world around us.
That, my friends, was our top recommended books for Geminis this season. If you want to recommend any books, please add them in the comment section.
Please note that I do receive a commission for each sale completed using these links. All books are from Bookshop.org, an online bookstore that gives independent bookstores a chance to earn online sales without having to create their own websites and pay for shipping.
xoxo, nikki
the bookish b* 