3 book recommendations from Eliot Peper
Ten years ago, I had a quirky neighbor named Dell. He taught me to make yogurt and the results were so delicious that I've made it weekly ever since and taught friends to do the same. I just found out that Dell passed away two years ago. It's funny the echoes we leave in each other's lives. Who knows? Maybe one of these books will leave an echo in yours.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut is a madcap speculative adventure about an apocalyptic scenario playing out in 1986 where the lone survivors crash-land a cruise ship in the Galápagos Islands—all narrated by a million year old ghost composing an anthropological history of the event that contains countless gems of satirical insight. If that sounds wild, just wait til you start reading. This is the only book I've read that is absurd enough to compete with reality.
Caffeine by Michael Pollan is a thought-provoking Audible Original narrated by the author that explores the natural and social history of the world's most popular drug. The impact of tea and coffee on human affairs is hard to overstate, but easy to overlook because of their ubiquity. Pollan weaves together politics, biology, neurochemistry, and memoir into a fascinating two-hour listen.
Atomic Habits by James Clear makes a compelling case for the compounding impact of what appear to be tiny changes in behavior. Like many of the best self-help books that purport to offer advice, Atomic Habits actually provides something far more valuable: motivation to do what you already know is right.
Bonus recommendation: My wife, Andrea Castillo, has been obsessed with food since she was a cheese-loving toddler. Her enthusiasm is contagious, and I've been the lucky beneficiary of all of her research and edible experimentation for twelve years. That's why I am so excited that she's finally decided to share it with the world in Seasonal—a newsletter that nerds out about the San Francisco Bay Area food system, one fruit and vegetable at a time. Even if you don't live in the Bay, Seasonal will whet your appetite and reframe your farmer's market experience. Sign up here.
In other news:
In this new essay for Techdirt, I share an "attention experiment" I conducted during the 2016 election that was life-changing—and ultimately inspired the Analog Series. The lessons I learned from it feel uncomfortably relevant today: "We are what we pay attention to. The stories we read don't just inform, entertain, or inspire, they shape our identities, become a part of us."
This blog post containing all my advice for authors has 10x more traffic than any other over the last month.
Seth Godin's new workshop for creatives: "Realizing that the rollercoaster is a choice is crucial. It means I'm signing up to do the work. It means that when things get tough, I recognize that the struggle is the work. It means that when fear rears its ugly head, I face it—clear-eyed and even-keeled."
One thing I noticed walking the Camino is that Spain is full of happy old men—and that meeting an old man brimming with joie de vivre in America is tragically rare.
Susan Lahey wrote up a wonderful feature on a SXSW panel I participated in last year alongside Malka Older, Kevin Bankston, and Tim Fernholz about how CEOs are using sci-fi to imagine the future: "'Borges was one of the most influential writers for both science fiction writers and computer scientists,' [Peper] said. 'Even though his stories were written in the 1930s and 40s, they prefigure many of the weird contradictions that the internet has presented to us both psychologically and sociologically.' Borges’ stories, Peper said, 'are so mind-bending they’re like yoga for your brain. I get super weirded out reading his stories. They read like a puzzle, which makes them super useful for people working on really difficult problems.'"
From my conversation with Barry Eisler about writing Livia Lone: "I doubt George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been nearly as widely read or have had nearly the cultural or lexical impact if he’d written it as an essay rather than as a novel."
Line from my work-in-progress: "Clouds whipped past, turning the windows into blank panes displaying nothing but the fact that they were in a machine flown by a machine, two humans huddled in the center of a matryoshka of generations of technology lacquered onto itself."
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, tell your friends. 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 earned praise from the New York Times Book Review, Businessweek, Popular Science, Boing Boing, 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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Eliot Peper is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. Subscribe to his blog here.
“The technothriller novel that we need right now."
-Ars Technica on Bandwidth
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