Book Recommendations
Thought Ticker:
Thought Ticker:
I love to read. I read more than a lot of people, but less than I would like. I love nonfiction especially, but there are some works of fiction here and there that I think are worth the time.
Fiction (roughly) is on the left, and nonfiction (roughly) is on the right. I append (roughly) because, well, the categories are not as cut-and-dry as us Westerner types like to pretend they are. The books are not in any particular order other than the order I put them in.
Madi is a friend of mine and a great writer. You should go check her out.
John Gardner's Grendel reads the way that having bipolar disorder feels. It's relatable, and more than that, I feel like anyone who reads it will have a better idea of me. I just really love it.
I often start to describe Grendel as "Beowulf from the monster's point of view," but that's only sort of true - Grendel doesn't last that long into Beowulf, so the retelling part is pretty short. Most of the book would be better described as a prequel, or perhaps as a context-creator, to Beowulf. The first-person narrative is a wild and maddening ride that alternates between monstrous, delusional glee in the act of transgression on the one hand, existentional despair on the other hand, and a rollercoaster spectrum of emotion and ancient Germanic folklore in between.
Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a masterpiece of the gothic genre. It's more macabre tragedy than horror, so go in expecting to feel a lot of things except scared. It's not my usual sort of book but I was really taken with it.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle follows two girls who live with their disabled Uncle in an ancient, crumbling estate on the edge of a small town. The rest of their family is dead, tragically gone in a single night, and the townspeople ostracize the survivors out of fear and malice. The truth of the situation is not clear from the start; it's a mystery, and a good one, which is compelling to read to the end even if you figure out the answers early on.
Lesbian space necromancers solve a murder mystery in a haunted house while having sword fights with mutant skeletons. It's fun, it's funny, it's heartwrenching, it's romantic (a little enemies-to-lovers, if that's your bag), it's smart, it's great.
It's also the first in a series! Harrow and Nona are wildly different vibes from Gideon, nearly different genres, but are so damn good that who cares, really? It's just Muir flexing the robustness of their authorly chops. There's supposed to be a fourth one (Alecto) coming out at some point.
Mordew is a weird book, and I mean that in the best way possible. Imagine if Harry Potter got rejected from Hogwarts and joined a gang of orphan thieves to help raise himself out of poverty. And that's just the first third of the story - after that, things go so off the rails I don't think I can adequately describe them. Phelby's way of describing things is so fresh and unique; the way he talks about magic in particular is inspiring: the ongoing metaphor of "The Itch" that our protagonist must "Scratch" for one. For two, the way magic is described as bringing things to life, like a safe that "breathes to life" so that the lock can magically open itself and then shudder to "death" as it returns to its inanimate state.
There's also a glossary, and you should not read it until the end of the story. The glossary contains spoilers, but also a wild amount of worldbuilding that never actually makes it into the story proper (mostly because Phelby seems insistent on avoiding exposition beyond what is diagetic - if it goes unexplained to the protagonist, it goes unexplained to the audience, too. And there are reasons that knowledgable individuals may not want to explain things to the protagonist).
Building SimCity purports to be a history of SimCity and the events leading up to its creation. This is true, technically, but the "events leading up" to the birth of the beloved video game franchise start decades before Will Wright was even born. This book is better described as a history of simulation, with SimCity the culmination of decades of evolution and experiment. If you're the right kind of nerd, this book is amazing; I read a copy from my local library and I've considered buying it for myself, because I might actually read it again! Although I was a little disappointed at how little SimCity actually features in the narrative, it did the second-best thing a nonfiction book can do: drop frequent references to things I had never heard of and had to look up, all of which were just as interesting as the book itself.
If I have to give the book any criticism, it is this: the text feels like someone's PhD dissertation at a university that requires minimum page counts. That's not to say the book feels like it has a lot of filler, but it is to say that it reminds me of trying to write a master's paper where I basically had to go into the full history of a relatively small topic to hit a 50-page minimum.
As far as I can find, God's Chinese Son is the most comprehensive - if not only - English language book on the Taiping Rebellion. I'm sure there's more out there than this book and the wikipedia article, but if you're gonna read anything, read this.
God's Chinese Son is the story of Hong Xiuquan, whose nervous breakdown after failing a bureacratic entrance exam led to a religious movement that then led to the bloodiest civil war in the history of China. Hong Xiuquan and his disciples start an off-shoot of Christianity that foments into an attempt to succeed from the Chinese state and start their own Christian(ish) nation. It's an absolutely fascinating story written in strong narrative style that still includes plenty of citations for the academically-inclined. Not dry in the least, and writing this makes me want to go read it again.
Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games is a must-read for anyone who wants to write essays about video games. Its biggest contribution to discourse on video games is to coin the term Procedural Rhetoric: that a game which attempts to model a real-life event, process, or situation will make rhetorical arguments about that which it is trying to simulate through the rules it uses to simulate them. So Cities: Skylines makes arguments about how cities work through the mechanics it uses to simulate cities, for example.
Modern Money Theory is an incredible explanatory text for how money actually works in contemporary nation states. I read the second edition of this back in like 2019 and still have my copy; a third edition has been published since then. This is the sort of book I had to sit with for a long time to really understand - I was never very good at economics, and needed to get past my own biases against a system I hate before I could even begin to tackle the frankly very difficult content - but it was so incredibly worth it. This book changed my view of how modern economics works and gave me a lot of insight into federal financial issues. (It did change how much I hate the system.)
And to clarify ahead of time: "Modern Money Theory" is a specific theory of economics, it is not a broadly-accepted or neutral description of contemporary economic systems. I guess I didn't read the blurb correctly before I bought it, becuase the latter is what I was hoping for. Still, so glad I bought it.
The Transhumanist Reader is a bulky collection of essays on the history and philosophy of transhumanism. There's a lot of really interesting arguments in here about the right to self-modification; while I've never totally bought into the whole "upload your mind to a computer" thing, I am on board with the underlying transhumanist principle of "using technological process to enhance human experience." There's a really good essay by a transgender transhumanist who makes some very salient points toward the idea that gender transition is a manifestation of transhumanist philosophy. There are plenty of similarly-interesting essays inside.
On the other hand, many of the essays are basically rehashing talking points of American Libertarians (actual American Libertarians, not the people who call themselves Libertarian but are actually, y'know, fascist). That means that I, personally, only agree without about half of what they say. YMMV.
If you struggle with setting and maintaining personal boundaries, Boundaries is the best resource I could possibly recommend. This book fully changed the way I see social interactions. Like, honestly, if that's a specific problem that you have, read this book.
I want to mention this because I know it can be a major turn-off for some people: the book is written by a pair of devout Christians for an audience of devout Christians, and they liberally throw around words like "biblically." I know that a lot of folks with boundary issues may also have religious trauma, so, y'know, content warning. However! I'm not Christian myself, and I got a ton out of this book - obviously, I'm recommending it - so if a lot of religious phrasing is just something that rubs you the wrong way but isn't actively triggering your PTSD, I really encourage you to give this one a read anyway.
Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor is a fantastic book, if a little misleading. This book actually has very little to do with haunted houses, and barely investigates the architectural qualities of the buildings it explores. It is actually an exploration of the ways in which architecture can unnerve us. Taylor uses a combination of real buildings (only a few of which are haunted) and cinematic settings to discuss the myriad ways a building causes fear and unease - the homes of serial killers, houses in horror movies, the Winchester Home, doll houses used for crime-scene investigation, and so on and so forth. About halfway through, the book takes on a distinctly feminist lens that brings with a lot of interesting arguments. So if feminism and the psychology of architecture are your jam, pick up this book.
I read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander back in undergrad, and I would consider it the first book to seriously open my eyes. Ironically, I read it because I wanted to be a cop; well, a detective. I was taking criminal justice courses and had a job as a campus cop... and I took a look at this book because it seemed like something important to know. Suffice to say, after reading The New Jim Crow, I ditched any thought of becoming an officer of the law. In fact, I spent a lot of the rest of undergrad writing essays about prison abolition and system reform. This is a powerful and eye-opening book that will make you feel awful about the US justice system if you have any compassion whatsoever for your fellow human.
The argument is pretty simple: America has not ended its racial caste system, just transformed it via prison. A lot of Americans know this in broad concept, I'm sure, but this book will give you the ammunition to explain the hows and whats and whys.
