Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! Most likely when this is published my family will be sitting around the tree unwrapping some gifts, but if you’re here then you can enjoy I’ve read recently—two novels and two non-fiction books—wrapping up the last of my reading resolutions for the year!
The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon
I initially started reading The Archive Undying way back in September, paused for a little bit to do some Halloween reading in October, but even after resuming it took until the end of November to finish. For a number of reasons, it’s the sort of book that made me slow down and nibble at it in smaller chunks, with more time to digest. We’ll get to that.
The story involves a world in which AIs arose and took over entire cities, shaping them both physically and metaphorically … but then at some point (long before this story takes place), they were corrupted. With the corruption came vast destruction and death, and in the present the remnants of the AI are still visible in most cities. There are weird constructs that still roam in the wilds as well, “fragtechs” whose behaviors are on a loop but can be deadly if they encounter people. And then there’s Sunai, our main character, who is a relic, inextricably linked to his former AI and now basically immortal.
The plot is complex and has a lot of different threads, with various people from Sunai’s past (more than one of which turns out to be a former lover), and features giant robots and mysterious temples and a whole lot of back-stabbing. At times, the story switches from a third-person narrative to second-person, with the narrator addressing “you”—and these are the sections that took me longer to digest. Who’s speaking? And who are they speaking to? It only gets trickier later in the book, when some of the characters have their minds merged and linked. The book explores the nature of identity, and there’s also a lot of politics and power involved, plus a main character who has a tendency to dive headfirst into whatever is most likely to cause him harm.
All in all, I found the book to be really fascinating but also a lot of work to decipher, and even now there are parts that I didn’t fully comprehend. It’s a book that avoids using infodumps to explain the world, instead letting you gradually pick up on things as you go.
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
This is one of the books I had on my list from my reading resolutions at the beginning of the year, but then it got buried, so I didn’t get to it until this past month … but I’m so glad I did. It may be one of my favorite novels I read this year. It’s a first-contact story, with aliens arriving on Earth—near the Chesapeake Bay—in the year 2083. The story is narrated by Judy Wallach-Stevens as she navigates interstellar politics and diplomacy, largely because she is the first to encounter the aliens (along with her wife and baby).
What is particularly striking about the book isn’t just the story of the aliens themselves—a symbiotic pairing of two species who have come to rescue us from the imminent collapse of our planet—but also the state of our planet. Ruthanna Emrys envisions a world that has been ravaged by climate change but has also been slowly making progress toward repairing that damage. Traditional governments are still around but have been replaced in many places by watershed networks, local communities that make decisions through a consensus-based algorithm. Corporations have also lost their standing, with most of them constrained to artificial islands near Australia, where they are mostly free to do their own thing within strict boundaries. But the arrival of the aliens brings back all the old powers—everyone has different reactions to the idea of leaving planet Earth behind, and the competition leads to some shady tactics.
A Half-Built Garden reminds me a bit of some of Becky Chambers’ work: for the most part, it predicts a more progressive society, one with more flexible gender roles and family structures, and new ways of forming communities and distributing resources and responsibilities. Sure, there are still dysfunctions and not everyone gets along (even in the watershed communities), but the book shows how they figure out their differences. The interactions with the aliens are also important—on the one hand, they’re offering access to advanced technologies that are sorely needed; on the other, it has been millennia since they left their own planets and they don’t see the value of staying on Earth and trying to restore it. The book is sci-fi at its best: an engaging story that shows us who we are and who we might become.
What Board Games Mean to Me edited by Donna Gregory
This book collects several essays on the topic stated in the title, written by people from various aspects of the hobby, from game designers and publishers to content creators and some people who just love games. Many of the writers work in the industry in some capacity, so their essays often show how that came to be—how Sen-Foong Lim and Jay Cormier bonded over games and ended up creating games together; how Calvin Wong Tze Loon went from posting about board games on social media to covering Essen Spiel (the world’s largest tabletop convention) for several years, how KC Ogbuagu is helping to establish a new generation of tabletop gamers in Nigeria. There are also a lot of stories about personal connections with family or friends, about the memories made through playing together. Although the book felt a little uneven in spots—some people are better at making games than writing essays—as a whole it was a delightful read, and I would recommend it to anyone who loves board games (and reading about them). As a bonus, you can look for a mention of yours truly, in a story about a time when I taught a game to one of the book’s contributors!
Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better by Woo-Kyoung Ahn
This was the last book to check off my list from my reading resolutions post, and it was another excellent read. Professor Ahn teaches a cognitive psychology course at Yale on “Thinking” that became extremely popular, and now a lot of those lessons have been compiled into this book. It dives into a lot of the biases we have, exploring the reason for those biases, why they are so hard to overcome, and how we can account for them or mitigate their effects when they lead us astray. The book is very easy to read, with a combination of data driven studies as well as illustrative anecdotes (because, ironically, one of our biases is that we tend to put more weight on anecdotes than on hard data).
Some of the topics are ones you’ve probably heard of: confirmation bias, where we look for things that support our pre-existing beliefs; causal attribution (correlation does not imply causation, but we do it anyway); negativity bias, the way that negative information has a greater effect than positive information. There were also some that were new to me—or at least presented in a way that I hadn’t considered before—like the fluency effect, where we think we can do something well because we know a lot about it, or that delayed gratification is tied to “delay discounting,” the way we tend to underestimate the impact of both future rewards and future penalties.
Really, I could do an entire post just about Thinking 101 (which makes sense, since it’s an entire class!) because of all the various ways it was applicable, from sorting out unwanted kids’ toys to tweaking the rules to a tabletop game to reduce analysis paralysis. This is definitely a book I’m going to keep around because it bears re-reading to help me more firmly establish the concepts in my brain, and I hope it helps me make better decisions in the future.
My Current Reads
I’ve been catching up on some more comic books recently, including a couple of the World Citizen series from First Second, touching on topics like misinformation and democracy, and it’s given me a lot to ponder particularly in light of next year’s elections and the fact that we are still in the middle of lots of investigations and high-profile lawsuits. I’ll have more to share about those soon.
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books covered in today’s column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
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