3 book recommendations for July, 2020
Over the past two months, I’ve been Zooming into book clubs to discuss Veil and it's been enormous fun to talk through creative process, storytelling, and the big questions the characters grapple with. The conversations have been far more fruitful and rewarding than I dared to imagine—with the novel as a jumping off point, we're able to dive straight in, ideas rippling out around us.
If your book club, class, or team wants to host a discussion, just reply to this email and we’ll get it on the calendar.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Life in Code by Ellen Ullman is a vivid, thoughtful memoir of the legendary programmer's journey into and through the world of computers as their successive revolutions rippled out through the culture. Ullman's prose has the beautiful precision of the code she loves to craft—distilling the human experience of grappling with machines into insights dense and clear as diamond.
Essays in Idleness and Hojoki by Yoshida Kenkō and Kamo no Chōmei (translated by Meredith McKinney) collects the works of two Buddhist monks who lived in 12th and 13th century Japan. Sometimes sprawling and goofy, sometimes pithy and insightful, their stories and the timeless life lessons they draw from them are a shining example of how neither oceans nor centuries can truly separate us from each other, for better and for worse.
The Spark by Lyn Heward and John U. Bacon is a lovely parable of rediscovering the creative spark that burns inside all of us, revealed through one man's journey behind the scenes of Cirque du Soleil. Populated by a diverse cast of artists, acrobats, clowns, riggers, and choreographers—each with something universal to offer—this story will give you the gentle push you need to take a leap of faith into fulfilling your unrealized dreams. I found this book so useful that I'm including it as a resource in my advice for authors.
Bonus recommendation: The surprisingly interesting history of green beans connects everything from indigenous Americans' "hunger season" and European flatulophobia (fear of farting!) to revolutionary food storage technologies and a trio of 19th century entrepreneurs in Ukiah.
In other news:
One of my all-time favorite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson, just said such nice things about my new novel: “This is the best kind of science fiction, in which the overriding issue of our time, climate change, is addressed with vivid characters serving as exemplars of all the roles we need to take on in the coming decades, all gnarled into a breathtaking plot. I hope it’s the first of many such novels creating climate fiction for our time.”
Creativity is a choice: "Veil exists because I didn’t make writing it dependent on finding optimal conditions. Veil exists because I wrote it whenever and wherever I could. Creativity isn’t some chance aligning of fickle stars. Creativity is a choice."
Last week was Sci-Fi and Fantasy Week over on Goodreads and I partnered with them to annotate some of the most popular Kindle highlights in Bandwidth. It was surprisingly fun to read the various passages and explore their inspirations and implications.
Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative and former UN assistant secretary-general for climate change on Veil: "Veil is the tale we need to confront climate change. Peper deftly explores one of the most controversial ideas on the climate agenda—solar geoengineering—and its geopolitical quandaries—raising tough questions and showing why we require new forms of governance to answer them."
How to make sense of complex ideas: "In Richard Feynman's hilarious and incisive memoir, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the Nobel Laureate shares his personal method for cutting straight to the heart of seemingly complex ideas, even when speaking to experts in fields far beyond physics."
Seth Godin recommended the Analog Series—saying the story offers a thrilling glimpse into our digital future—in this podcast interview about how you can use marketing to change the world.
Inspired by The Spark, I discovered a number of bold and evocative Cirque du Soleil promotional posters that promise mystery, adventure, and new worlds aching to be explored. I’ll be including these in my reference lookbook for cover designs of future novels.
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, Ars Technica, and the BBC. I'd love to hear what you think if you give them a read.
Cheers, Eliot
---
Eliot Peper is the author of Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. Subscribe to his blog here.
"Death, despair, and plenty of hope. This sci-fi thriller has it all, plus plenty of scientific grounding to contemplate how solar geoengineering might play out on a planet struggling to bring global warming under control."
-Gernot Wagner, author of Climate Shock and Bloomberg's Risky Climate column, on Veil
If this email was forwarded to you and you'd like to sign up, just click here.