Book Recommendations

Nonfiction – 2026

  • Less is more: How degrowth will save the world. By Jason Hickel. Clear description of the limitations of capitalism with concrete (and very straight-forward) proposals for creating a sustainable future that is in better harmony with nature.
  • Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of your trash. By Alexander Clapp. Gloria Steinam used to say that the truth will set your free, but first it will piss you off. This was a very well-written, interesting, and enraging description of how our trash creates pollution and unhealthy lives for many people living in the global south. Most of this waste is unnecessary — for example, the result of planned obsolescence — and only exists to keep people spending.
  • The Attention Merchants: The Epic scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. By Tim Wu. A history of advertising from printed posters and newspapers in the early 19th century to the selling of our data in the internet age.
  • The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Guilded Age. By Tim Wu. Describes the history of anti-trust law, in particular, how Louis Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt, established the first anti-trust laws as a check on corporate power, for the purpose of creating a stable society. The lack of enforcement of anti-trust has led the United States to a state in which few corporations control almost every aspect of society.
  • The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. By Tim Wu. The histories of radio, film, tv, and the rise of the internet.
  • A world appears. By Michael Pollen. Theories of consciousness.
  • Resisting AI: An anti-facist approach to artificial intelligence. By Dan McQuillan. An outline of the ways that corporate AI strengthens the interests of anti-democratic interests when it is used by institutions for controlling access to resources, surveillance, and propaganda.
  • Enshittification. By Cory Doctorow. A funny and well-argued analysis about why so much of the software we use is bad and difficult to repair.
  • The Unaccountability Machine: Why big systems make terrible decisions and how the world lost its mind. By Dan Davies. There are a lot of theories of why so many of our modern systems function poorly: lobbying, regulations, monopoly, monopsony, biased algorithms, or reductive objectives like GDP or share value. All these can be true. This book offers one more: poor decision making on the part of large, complex institutions due to an inability to accurately understand their own operations or the real world. It’s a story of how abstractions lead people astray.
  • Mother Mary Comes to Me. By Arundhati Roy. Fascinating stories of Arundhati Roy’s childhood and early adult life, her turbulent relationship with her mother, and descriptions of living in India.

Fiction – 2026

  • Anathem. By Neal Stephenson. A page-turner sci-fi book with great world building. Nominally about monks who find aliens.
  • Children of Time. by Adrian Tchaikovsky. One of my favorite books of all time: sometimes funny, great characters, and a page-turner. Nominally about spiders in space.
  • Piranesi. By Susanna Clark. Beautiful parable about seeing the true essence of all things, told as a supernatural mystery.
  • Gideon the Ninth. By Tamsyn Muir. Nominally about necromancers in space. The heads of all major house come together to resolve a mystery.