3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
There is no better gift than a good book. Books contain the distilled wisdom of humanity's greatest thinkers. Books challenge us to expand our horizons and reevaluate our most deeply held assumptions. Books invite us to explore distant galaxies, face our fears, find meaning in our lives, unlock our imaginations, and slip inside someone else's skin. When you give someone a book, you're offering them an entire world. If you're looking to surprise someone over the holidays with something that might make a real impact on their life, it's hard to do better than the right book.
Finding the right book for that person is the hard part. My own novels make great gifts, particularly for anyone with a keen sense of adventure or an abiding curiosity in how technology shapes our lives. The recommendations below are excellent choices as well, each made a significant and lasting impact on me. Happy reading!
And now, books I love that you might too:
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges contains every short story ever written by the Argentinian master. Reading this collection was humbling, challenging, and inspiring all at once. Each tale contains enough story to be a novel, but distills it to just a few pages. Countless grand and subtle ideas are woven seamlessly into imaginative adventures filled with knife fights, mysterious labyrinths, deadly secrets, uncanny dreams, and mind-bending philosophy. Some of the metaphors that Borges employs contain more raw insight into how the internet is changing our lives than anything I've ever read, and he wrote them in the 1930s. I don't often re-read books, but this one will be a shining exception.
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid is a funny, incisive, and moving novel that tells a coming-of-age story even as it parodies a self-help book. Revealing difficult truths about social upheaval even as it illuminates the inner turmoil of its protagonist, this is writing of the highest caliber. Mohsin weaves a thrilling tale that sucked me in on page one and left me short of breath and pondering life's inherent contradictions.
The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan is compelling and comprehensive history of the internet in Russia. Soldatov and Borogan are veteran investigative journalists who map out the ongoing struggle between oligarchs, dissidents, entrepreneurs, hackers, and spooks for Russian digital domination. This book unveils the complex interplay of technology and geopolitics, raising critical questions about civil rights, governance, and surveillance in a networked world.
Bonus recommendation: This essay is the most insightful piece about AI that I've come across in ages. Hugh Howey maps out what self-consciousness really means, how to help computers achieve it, and why it would be useless and silly to do so. Even as it outlines the goals and trends underlying advances in AI, the essay reveals important truths about the human condition.
In other news, I just submitted the final edits to my next novel, Bandwidth (coming May 2018). I'm currently at 42k words into the rough draft of the sequel and will get back to writing a new chapter as soon as this email hits your inbox. My second novel, Uncommon Stock: Power Play, came out three years ago this December and I'm really happy with how the entire trilogy holds up: software is remaking finance, and there's more than enough intrigue to go around. If you're a fan of Mara and James, I'd love to hear what's stuck with you since reading their story. Finally, I teamed up with a number of other donors to help raise nearly $300,000 from over 2,000 individuals to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts to protect our civil rights online. My contribution is a chunk of proceeds from Cumulus, so every single reader is helping build a better future. Thank you for turning science fiction into social impact!
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, forward this email to a friend. I love sharing amazing stories that explore the intersection of technology and culture. The goal of this newsletter is to recommend books, both fiction and nonfiction, that crackle and fizz with big ideas, keep us turning pages deep into the night, challenge our assumptions, help us find meaning in a changing world, and make us think, feel, and ask hard questions. In an age of digital abundance, quality is the new scarcity. The right book at the right time can change your life.
I also pull back the curtain on my creative process. When I'm not reading books, I'm writing them. If you're interested, you can find my books right here. They've been praised by Businessweek, Popular Science, TechCrunch, io9, and Ars Technica. I'd love to hear what you think if you give them a read.
Cheers, Eliot
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