3 book recommendations for April, 2021
Maybe it’s because of Earth Day, but I’ve been hearing from a lot of readers about Veil.
Over in Transfer Orbit, Andrew Liptak featured it in a thoughtful and thought-provoking review of three novels that imagine different climate futures. Francesca Rheannon asked deep, insightful questions about it on Writer’s Voice, and the interview is airing on public radio stations across the country (you can stream it here). Next month I’ll be Zooming in to a few company book clubs who are currently reading it.
If your book club or organization wants to host a virtual author Q&A, reply to this email and we can get something on the calendar—in lieu of honoraria, I ask that you make a donation to Chapter 510, a literacy nonprofit that empowers underprivileged youth in Oakland.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Summer Frost by Blake Crouch is a technothriller in miniature. Only 74 pages long, it conjures a complete, compelling narrative arc through a near-future where a non-player character in a computer game evolves into an autonomous AI.
Working by Robert A. Caro invites you inside the creative process of this generation’s most celebrated biographer. Caro’s exquisite attention to detail and dedication to getting the important things right will inspire you to invest even more care into your own creative work.
If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino is a novel structured like a Matryoshka doll, stories nested one inside the other in a masterpiece of recursive narrative that you won’t be able to tear yourself away from or soon forget. When the dots finally connect, the payoff cascades through every successive layer of abstraction.
Bonus recommendation: In “Reimagining the PhD,” Nadia Eghbal reflects on the five years of independent research and writing about open source software that ultimately led to her book, Working in Public.
In other news:
Imagining a better future is the first step toward building one. Share on Twitter.
Ideas aren’t unique, execution is: “Wallace independently came up with the same theory of evolution around the same time as Darwin. Twenty-three people ‘invented’ the lightbulb before Edison. Multiple independent discovery is the rule, not the exception. We remember those who realize ideas in a singular way and make them stick in the culture.”
Fun interview from a few years back in which Kevin Bankston asked me, Malka Older, and Ada Palmer about writing science fiction that imagines the future of government and governance in the digital age.
Seeing this pop up on Reddit made my day.
Literary leverage: “Knowing that you will never reach everyone frees you to write for a particular someone.”
It's easy to delay important decisions indefinitely because you want more data when what's really standing in your way isn't incomplete information (it will always be incomplete), but fear. As Carl Richards wrote, “Risk is what’s left when you think you’ve thought of everything.” Share on Twitter.
Excited to read Neal Stephenson's take on a near future shaped by geoengineering when his new novel Termination Shock drops in November. Fun fact: "Termination Shock" was a working title for the manuscript that ultimately became Veil.
Alix E. Harrow on writing The Ten Thousand Doors of January: “What makes adventure great is more about what isn’t on the page than what is—it’s ships sailing toward unknown horizons, horses galloping into sunsets, the promise of something even grander and stranger off the margins of the map, unwritten.”
When you learn something new, it becomes your new baseline, and it’s easy to miss how much others could benefit from the hard-earned understanding you now take for granted. Remember: What feels obvious to you is often original to others. Share on Twitter.
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, become a paid subscriber and tell your friends. Every month, I 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 grow. In an age of digital abundance, quality is the new scarcity. The right book at the right time can change your life.
When I'm not reading books, I'm writing them. If you savor the promise and peril of new worlds opening up, if you prefer hard questions to easy answers, if you seek adventures that will transport you and leave you changed, then you're the kind of person I write for. You can find my novels right here. Bon voyage, fellow traveler.
Cheers, Eliot
Eliot Peper is the author of Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He publishes a blog, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.
"Peper delivers his best novel yet. Veil is filled with diverse characters, complicated relationships, and ethical dilemmas that are sure to spark late night debates. A Michael Crichton-style tech thriller."
-The Geekiverse on Veil
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