Category: Books I read

Books I’ve recently read and/or liked. I only link to a book or author if they have their own webpage and never link to Amazon or Goodreads. Buy your books directly from the author or from independent bookstores if you can.

There’s also a more complete OPML file that is both human and machine readable, that you can check out: my booklists

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Swiss author and playwright, picked the book up in Zurich in 2024. I thoroughly enjoyed Die Erfindung des Ungehorsams (2021), the invention of disobedience, and read it in one sitting. Well told, many beautiful sentences. Three women in NYC, China and England are followed as they try to understand the world. Their stories are interwoven through the emergence of AI driven automatons grasping their true autonomy. One because she sees the future in Babbage’s machinery and determines how to program them, one making sex dolls in China that get fitted with AI, one hosting Manhattan dinner parties where she tells, invents?, a story and only the others eat. All three finding a way to break their constraints, and become disobedient to their surroundings. A multilayered work, as one critic Daniela Janser wrote, a poetic homage to the oldest programming language of all, imagination. I will probably buy her more recent work Vor aller Augen, before all eyes, soon.

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Teenage boy lost connection to his world and starts blogging as a school project, or rather journal writing because he never publishes a thing. The reader spends 142 pages inside the teenagers journal and head. This being a teenager’s head there’s no narrative arc really, just teenage slang, angst and endless second-guessing of themself and others. This novella (billed as a novel) was originally published in 2017, I read the 2024 pocket version. I picked this book in German up in a Zürich book store this week from the Swiss literature section, where it was hailed as a recent ‘classic’. It was ok, mostly because it was short anyway, but not recommended. Had it been longer I probably would have left it unfinished. The reason it gained attention in Switzerland seems to be its use of teenage and informal language as an apparant novelty. I think in other languages that sort of thing is decades old, no?

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Part one of the Bridge trilogy. I bought it because I wanted to read Idoru, the 2nd part, because of a reference in a talk to ‘nodal points’ as coming from that book. Virtual light is triggering your optical nerve and brain with visuals directly without photons. The Bridge is the Golden Gate, since encrusted with people’s habitats. Gibson uses the word Thomasson to describe it. The US has splintered. In this setting a bike courier steals an object from what turns out to also be a courier, who is killed for losing it. A rentacop is brought in to find the bike courier but follows his conscience. A Japanese anthropologist who is on the bridge to observe (and hunt Thomassons), and references to a big earth quake in Tokyo which got rebuild by nanotech form the bridge to part two.

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Set in 2255 in our own solar system. A small black hole is found at the edge of our solar system. Its Hawking radiation seems to contain information, and responding to it gets a response in return in which the black hole becomes a featureless planetoid. Different factions, earth, moon, and conservationists race to be the first to leverage any potential it may provide.

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We spent this week in Switzerland, staying with friends. Tuesday the three of us went to Zürich, just strolling and exploring the city. Thoroughly enjoyed a pop-up art gallery with some graduation projects of the local art academy, at the Spiegelgasse square of Dada fame. Also spent quite some time exploring the Swiss literature section and their German language SF section in the Orell Füssli bookstore on Füsslistrasse, Switzerland’s largest bookstore so they claim. As a teenager in school I read quite a bit of Swiss author Max Frisch (1911-1991), whose 1957 Homo Faber made a deep impression on me. Later when E and I were in the alps of Wallis in 2005 we stumbled across a rich vein of original German SF in a book store in the old Brig post office (part of the Orell Füssli chain it turns out).

I ended up buying books from four Swiss authors and one German author:

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I jotted this title down to buy November 2022, came across it in a book store in October 2023, looked it up online and noticed it was a dollar at Amazon. Was curious to see what Baxter is attempting here. He’s written fascinating stuff and stuff that didn’t work for me, and he seems to have phases in topics of interest. This time it’s an interesting mix of two main story lines, and zooming out to enormous timelines. The notion of having some people move far forward in time as feedback loops to maintain humanity is interesting. Plays around with the notion of emergent mind at 10 trillion or so connected nodes, whatever type of node it is. Interesting political splits too, as well as a take on conservatism as a mistake. And now I wonder if a sun can have mind.