Hundreds of thousands of books are published in the United States each year, and this dramatic influx of titles largely runs the calendars of the publishing and media industries—usually to the detriment of any work that isn’t brand new. Even best sellers or novels by famous authors get lost in the deluge, and books that were beloved on release can fall off readers’ radar quickly. But many were popular or critically acclaimed for good reasons, and they’re worth revisiting.

Here is a list of 15 fiction titles from the past two decades that you may have forgotten about in the years since. Some are from familiar names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich; others are by authors you may not have heard of at all. These selections include plenty of drama, and there’s an undercurrent of gentle comedy, even in novels with dark themes or plots. Their characters define love in many different ways, and they seek fulfillment across geographies and time periods—contemporary London, Vichy France, Nigeria, North Korea. Ultimately, these stories are bound together by a compassion for their characters’ struggles and shortcomings—a quality that only our finest writers are able to cultivate.

More Americans are now hospitalized with COVID-19 than ever before. Their sheer numbers are overwhelming health-care workers, whose ranks have been diminished by resignations and breakthrough infections. In many parts of the country, patients with all kinds of medical emergencies now face long waits and worse care. After writing about this crisis earlier this month, I heard from a number of readers who said that the solution was obvious: Deny medical care to unvaccinated adults. Such arguments were aired last year, as the Delta variant crested, and they’re emerging again as Omicron spreads. Their rationale often goes something like this:

Every adult in the U.S. has been eligible for vaccines since April. At this point, the unvaccinated have made their choice. That choice is hurting everyone else, by perpetuating the pandemic and, now, by crushing the health-care system. Most of the people hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated. It’s unethical that health-care workers should sacrifice for people who won’t take care of themselves. And it’s especially unethical that even vaccinated people, who did everything right, might be unable to get care for heart attacks or strokes because emergency rooms are choked with unvaccinated COVID patients.

You never know exactly what you’re going to get at a Trump rally—a creative variation on the “Lock her up” chant? A brand-new conspiracy theory? But you can always rely on the former president to brag about the size of the crowd. He will remark happily upon the gridlocked traffic getting into the event. He will exclaim that he cannot even pinpoint exactly where the crowd ends. And periodically, he will demand that videographers pivot their cameras around to capture the full extent of his devoted following.

For Donald Trump and his supporters, crowd size is more than just a bragging point. It’s proof that they are part of the American majority. “A person that comes here and has crowds that go further than the eye can see … and has cars that stretch out for 25 miles, that’s not somebody that lost an election,” Trump told the crowd at his rally in Florence, Arizona, on Saturday.

Most people do not realize that Jews make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. This means simply finding them takes a lot of effort. But every year in Western countries, including America, Jews are the No. 1 target of anti-religious hate crimes. Anti-Semites are many things, but they aren’t lazy. They’re animated by one of the most durable and deadly conspiracy theories in human history.

This past Saturday in Texas, another one found his mark. According to the latest news reports, Malik Faisal Akram traversed an ocean to accomplish his task, flying from the United Kingdom to America in late December. On January 15, he took Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel hostage for more than 11 hours. When it was all over, Akram was dead and his captives were not. The hostages escaped after their rabbi engineered a distraction, drawing on security training he had received from the Anti-Defamation League and other communal organizations. Something else most people don’t realize is that many rabbis need and receive security training.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

There are a growing number of Marxists today. By which I mean followers of Groucho, not Karl. “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Marx sang in his 1932 film, Horse Feathers. “I don’t know what they have to say / It makes no difference anyway.”

What was satire then is ideology today: Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture. Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.

Last year, lumber turned into the surprise superstar of the U.S. economy when it briefly outperformed bitcoin, gold, and the S&P 500 to become “the hottest commodity on the planet.”

Now it’s happening again. Yesterday, the market closed at more than $1,200 per thousand board feet, a surge in price with only one precedent in the decades-long history of lumber trading. Last year, I wrote about the role that climate change was playing in the lumber volatility. Its effects now seem even more pronounced. “The lumber price story is really a climate-change story,” Stinson Dean, a lumber trader in Colorado, recently tweeted. He has argued that climate change has all but dictated the ongoing price rally, going so far as to call the lumber price a “climate price.”

On the eve of the January 6 insurrection, the twin special-election victories by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia gave Democrats the Senate majority they desperately wanted, and simultaneously burdened incoming President Joe Biden with something far more fickle: hope and expectations.

Tonight, the possibilities opened up by that winning night in Georgia closed shut in a pair of Senate votes that revealed, more starkly than at any point in the past year, just how limited the Democrats’ power really is. First, after a year of new voting restrictions in red states, Republicans blocked a vote on a landmark elections bill, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. Then two Democratic holdouts, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, thwarted their party’s bid to change Senate procedure to circumvent the GOP filibuster.

After Andreea’s mom died of COVID-19 in April, the harassment started. Noxious messages started coming in after she wrote a Facebook post letting friends and family know about her loss.

One person messaged her to say they couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t protected herself. Andreea has since deleted most of the other messages, but she remembers people saying things like “I can’t believe your mom was an anti-vaxxer” and “I can’t believe she didn’t understand that COVID could kill you.” “Instead of people saying that they were sorry for my loss, they would question my mom’s medical choices. It became all about her vaccine status. It was incredibly hurtful,” Andreea, a language instructor, who asked to be identified by only her first name in order to prevent further harassment, told me.

It certainly might not seem like it given the pandemic mayhem we’ve had, but the original form of SARS-CoV-2 was a bit of a slowpoke. After infiltrating our bodies, the virus would typically brew for about five or six days before symptoms kicked in. In the many months since that now-defunct version of the virus emerged, new variants have arrived to speed the timeline up. Estimates for this exposure-to-symptom gap, called the incubation period, clocked in at about five days for Alpha and four days for Delta. Now word has it that the newest kid on the pandemic block, Omicron, may have ratcheted it down to as little as three.

If that number holds, it’s probably bad news. These trimmed-down cook times are thought to play a major part in helping coronavirus variants spread: In all likelihood, the shorter the incubation period, the faster someone becomes contagious—and the quicker an outbreak spreads. A truncated incubation “makes a virus much, much, much harder to control,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me.

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In April 2020, when the coronavirus first swept across the United States, many of America’s top scientists struggled to get funding to answer basic and urgent questions about the disease it caused. Patrick Collison, the chief executive of the payment-processing company Stripe, spied an opportunity in this market failure. He co-founded a program called Fast Grants, which raised more than $50 million that was quickly distributed to hundreds of projects. In its first 20 months, the program supported research on saliva-based tests and clinical trials for drugs, such as fluvoxamine, that could be repurposed to treat COVID-19.

The success of Fast Grants raised an uncomfortable question about how the U.S. funds innovation. If a little pop-up could unlock so many good ideas so quickly, how many potential breakthroughs are being denied every year by the traditional system of funding science?