Photo credit: Oliver Kay
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The robots haven't taken over. They're only allowed to work under the supervision of a living, breathing human. But when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned kitchen in post-war and climate disaster San Francisco with no human boss to be found, they decide to follow their dreams and convert their ghost kitchen into the hottest new restaurant on that side of the bay anyway.
Like all good robot books, Automatic Noodle will make you think about what makes a person a person. This one will also make you think about how the bay area will weather (pun intended) increasingly extreme weather and/or that War for California Independence that folks joke/dream about. It'll also make you think a lot about hand-pulled noodles! Ultimately this is a feel good book. Not quite "cosy" scifi, but pretty close.
Let's be real, things are pretty bleak out in the world right now. Sometimes it feels like there's so much going wrong, and getting the ball rolling on improving the situation can seem overwhelming. Fortunately, Elie Mystal has provided us with a handy list of 10 laws that could be repealed tomorrow without having to worry about pesky issues like updating the US Code or overturning constitutional amendments. There's a soft spot in my heart for anyone who can get apoplectic about the deregulation of the airline industry, though I definitely wouldn't want to sit near him on a flight that has been delayed.
My reading tastes tend towards anything to do with history, especially the less explored parts. This book is at once a rewrite of American history from a Black perspective as well as a searingly funny & provocative collection of little known, but well researched historical events.
A.R. Ammons was a nature poet who lived until early 2001. He wrote about trees, flowers, spiders and their webs, birds, ponds, rivers, creeks, ridges, human encroachments and abutments, clouds, and so on. But he wasn't a nature poet, as he complains in the long poem that concludes this volume, the coyly titled "Summer Place," which could name either a North Carolina field of grass and heather in July or an Airbnb offering (of which Ammons would have had no inkling). "[A] nature poet," he advises himself, "would be the first to / tell you that any way to get by is worth exploring," but "nothing turns people off like complaining, they get / enough of it doing their own, so why not have a / complaining poem..." From there he's off and running, and he's particularly irked by wannabe poets who send him their unsolicited work for a personal tutorial, lacking consideration even to include postage-paid return envelopes. But most of the book from 1996 includes his signature brief, frequently narrow poems that compose words in ways that mimic nature or neurosis. From "Walking Song": "A little shower / and, the / sun come out, // ditch-bottom / brilliance / blinds you:" (Ammons uses colons for full stops, which are not always entirely full.) A prolific writer no longer among us, nature poet who isn't one, except now in the sense that all poets eventually turn to nature, Ammons is "worth exploring."
After Vice-President Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump in 2024, she wrote a book detailing her short campaign for the presidency after Joe Biden stepped out of the race. This book illuminates the role that the media played in the election, and the dichotomy of the standards between Trump and Harris. It also gives interesting perspective into the moments Harris wishes she had done better, and her mindset during her short, but intense, campaign.
Virtually everybody has heard of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Massage [sic], a pioneering work about how technology intercepts, molds, and transmits the information we consume. At the very least, we know him from his deliciously satisfying cameo appearance in Annie Hall. Fewer are familiar with Walter Ong, a friend and colleague of McLuhan's, who was at least as influential a scholar in the emerging field of media studies. So what does a 16th century pseudo-philosopher have to do with it? Setting aside Ong's withering criticisms of Peter Ramus's pedagogical corner-cutting and sleights of hand, Ramus serves for Ong to illustrate the early impact of the printing press on how we conceive, analyze, retain in memory, and convey the knowledge we acquire. The printing press allowed mass production of not just texts, but diagrams, and Ramus was a prodigious producer of diagrams, elaborate logic trees of concepts split into finer concepts, and so on, that would comprehend multiple disciplines at once, or so was his design. Ong is quick to point out inconsistencies and contradictions in Ramus's work, chalking it up to the philosopher's careerism, which apparently took priority over his intellectual integrity. Even Ramus's contemporaries poo-pooed his schemes and machinations. (A relatively recent book aims to defend Ramus's reputation against Ong's attack, which for reasons hard to fathom, does seem at times to be personally motivated.) So, one reason to read Ong's venerable work is to get in on the ground floor of media and technology studies. Another is to prepare for Perry Miller's monumental two-volume The New England Mind, in which Miller examines the influence of Ramist thought on the Puritans who high-tailed it to America. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is not the smoothest introduction to Ong. For that, maybe Orality & Literacy will do.
Did you ever have that friend who told the wildest stories, and even though they seemed too crazy to be true, you've spent enough time around them to think, yep, that totally could have happened. Well, Paul Scheer is one of those people. And whether it was causing an international security incident, setting fire to a dude ranch, auditioning for Saturday Night Live, or finally escaping his abusive step-father with his mother, Scheer tells them all with the humor and candor that has made him so entertaining on his podcast, "How Did This Get Made?" The audiobook includes bonus content from live recordings of that show, and the man is a born storyteller, so I highly recommend listening to it if you decide to give the book a try.
A sweet view into what a diverse and caring community can look like. Becky Chambers uses the medium of sci-fi to explore different ways a society can orient itself. I didn't want to stop reading, and I'm delighted there are three more books in this world.
Long ago Lawrence Durrell's memoir of his time on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus twenty years prior to the 1974 coup, Bitter Lemons, made me a fan of the author. He is more widely known for The Alexandria Quartet, of which I've only read the first title, Justine. I need to reread Bitter Lemons and complete the tetralogy, but recently I found my beat-up paperback copy of a 1962 collection of Durrell's poems. Preparing only to sample a few, I ended up reading it front-to-back. These are difficult poems, enigmatic and elusive; think Eliot's "The Waste Land" with its apparatus of echoes and allusions. But Durrell's mastery of meter is impressively confident, and he has endless fun with internal and partial rhymes ("Here he saw Bede who softly/ Blew out desire and went to bed..."), which makes the book nothing less than a pleasure to read.
Some time during the '80s, when I was deep into Anglo-American literary history and theory, I read Walter Jackson Bates' two Pulitzer Prize winning biographies, Samuel Johnson and John Keats. After recently finding a used copy of the former in a local bookstore, I figured it was time to reread it. We tend to think of Boswell's Life as the go-to on the topic, but that's not really apt. Boswell only knew Johnson later in life, and any fair reading of his monumental biography has to credit the figure of Boswell himself as a subject. In addition to the more-or-less objective chronological narrative of Johnson's wayward and peculiar life, Bate, a former chairman of Harvard's English Department, hopes to tease out hints of the prodigy's emotional make-up, resorting to a kind of armchair Freudianism to speculate at a distance about Johnson's desires, ambitions, commitments, and personal challenges. As a result, Bates makes numerous statements that turn on modal verbs and betray the ultimate impossibility of knowing for sure what drove Johnson. For example, of Johnson's unwilling departure from Oxford, where he abandoned the books he had acquired to support his course of study, Bate states, "At first to leave them at Oxford might have seemed a sort of talisman. But this could hardly be the case anymore. It was better to repress the thought of them..." But somehow this is okay. It's an exercise of intellectual honesty on Bate's part. Most importantly, the biography introduces us to a towering literary personality and intellect, his prejudices and foibles, sarcasm, wit, determination, and sense of humor. The account of the production of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language alone is worth the price of admission. In nine years he delivered a dictionary definitive for his time with the assistance of four local acquaintances. Compare the lexicons prepared by the Italian and French academies, which took twenty and fifty-five years, respectively, each with a national supply of scholars.
The back of the book blurb on this one says it's Indiana Jones meets Star Trek, but I would counter that it is Ocean's 11 meets Star Trek instead. I mean, it's a museum heist led by a former art thief turned anthropology grad student! In deep space! With a healthy side helping of commentary on the importance of repatriation. This book is full of found family, sarcasm, rivalry, decolonial politics, and ACTION. It's a lot of fun.
Part memoir, part family history, part Yurok Tribe history. This is an incredibly readable, story-based, human-forward book about the conflict between the Yurok Tribal Nation and the U.S. government over the last century, and the push for Indigenous rights and environmental protection in our home state. The author reads the audiobook herself. Highly recommend!
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of the lighthouse on Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman, Rowan, washes ashore. With communication with the outside world cut off and storm frequency and sea levels rising, threatening the seek bank and the island itself, both the Salts and their guest must contend with survival as well as the secrets they are hiding.
Part mystery and part story of connection and healing, this beautifully written novel had me enthralled.
Despite advances in neuroscience, we still don’t fully understand how the brain produces subjective experience, thoughts, and a sense of self. In A World Appears, Michael Pollan explores this question from multiple perspectives, including scientific, philosophical, and even psychedelic approaches.
Tracing research from the 1990s to today, Pollan examines both traditional and more radical theories of consciousness. He looks at efforts to find awareness in plants, create consciousness in AI, and capture inner experience through psychology and literature. Ultimately, the book presents consciousness as deeper and stranger than it seems, encouraging a more thoughtful engagement with our own awareness. Pollan is also a Berkeley native!