3 book recommendations for November, 2020
I love gifting books because when you give someone a book, you're offering them an entire world. Here is the complete list of my best book recommendations—i.e. my forever gift guide.
And now, books I love that you might too:
Dune by Frank Herbert is a richly imagined science-fiction epic that follows the coming-of-age of a young aristocrat whose life is torn apart by political turmoil when his family arrives on the new planet they've been assigned to govern. This is adventure on a grand scale, brimming with intrigue, philosophy, and twists of fate.
Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper is lovely tale about three children who go on a family holiday to the Cornish coast and discover that there is a secret world thick with danger and magic hidden beneath the thin veneer of normal life—sure to sate your appetite for "once upon a time..."
Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino collects a series of thought-provoking lectures about writing, literature, and craft that mine mythology and the human psyche for creative insight. Calvino has a special gift for illuminating subtle ideas in prose, and shares the most important lessons he gleaned from a lifetime of storytelling.
Bonus recommendation: The Gifts of Reading by Robert Macfarlane is a generous and wide-ranging personal essay about how books ripple through our lives and friendships.
In other news:
I just finished the first revision of a new novel. I tweaked the underlying premise, reinvented two of the five main characters, rewrote many chapters, and added 40% more material. It hasn't been easy, but I hope the results prove worth it.
From my work-in-progress: "If you thought too hard about anything, it became impossible. The only way to make progress was edgewise, never looking at the task directly, sneaking through the alleys of your subconscious to arrive at a decision you knew full well you’d already made."
Making machines human-readable: "The widening gap in basic computer literacy is dangerous. Users and policy-makers don't have to be able to read or write code, but they must understand its implications. We're making humans progressively more machine-readable, we need to make machines more human-readable."
I participated in a UC San Diego panel on ethics and AI: "As software eats the world, it leverages human agency, compounding the magnitude and complexity of the consequences of the choices we face."
A beautiful thing about text as a medium—besides its durability and information density—is how inexpensive and efficient it is to create, publish, and distribute; that featherlight quality opens the field to idiosyncratic creativity and diverse voices. Share on Twitter.
In a wonderful short essay, Jeff Bennett extends the metaphor of a kintsugi—which he stumbled upon in Breach—to imagine how the United States might reverse the trend toward political polarization: "We are, at our best, lovingly reconstructed patchworks of our shattered selves.”
David Mitchell on braiding six novellas into Cloud Atlas: “It was just the insouciance of youth. Sometimes your lack of experience can save you. Sometimes an underinformed decision is retrospectively the right decision, and had you had more wisdom, you wouldn’t have done it.”
Listening to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach’s Cello Suites, I feel like I’m falling through the music. Great fiction taps that same gravity, one moment collapsing into the next, surprising and inevitable, our hearts in free fall. Share on Twitter.
How the Analog Series imagines new institutions for the internet age: "Bandwidth grapples with how feeds shape our lives. Borderless examines the rise of tech platforms and decline of nation-states. Breach explores what might come next—how we need to reinvent our institutions to build a better future."
Collect good ideas. Weave them into your work. Don't try to be clever. If you invest sufficient care and attention, the connections you make between those good ideas will naturally be the connections only you can make. Creativity is remixing. Share on Twitter.
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, 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
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Eliot Peper is the bestselling 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 has accomplished the extraordinary, rendering our own world searingly visible through an imaginary future, and producing an entirely plausible fictional universe with its own logics, rules, and legends. Deeply plotted and bracingly narrated, Breach is a joy to read, a puzzle to consider, and a cultural mystery to solve."
-Eva Hagberg Fisher, author of How To Be Loved, on Breach
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