The Dictionary of Lost Words
Winter is here. For me, that means big waves, family time, and curling up on the couch with a good book.
A good book is a magical thing. A time machine. A portal into other worlds, other minds, other hearts. A vehicle for transcending our isolated selves to traverse the kaleidoscope of human experience and possibility. A good book can do that for you, and more.
But, beware: A good book may offer a welcome escape, but it may also, if it hits you in just the right way at just the right time, alter the course of your life.
And now, a book I love that you might too:
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams tells the story of a girl who grows up to become a major contributor to the first complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. This is a novel full of love, loss, and ingenuity that brings its characters to life by showing how they bring their impossibly ambitious project to life, a project that is deeply entangled with the events and politics of its time. I received this book as a gift, and can confirm that it’ll make a great gift, especially for language-lovers and bookworms.
Things worth sharing:
Foundry is another book that makes a great gift. AI is eating the world, and two spies vie for control of the intricate semiconductor supply chain the technology depends on. This is the kind of near-future thriller that will fascinate anyone fascinated by how technology shapes our lives. It’s the best thing I’ve written.
Incidentally, Foundry was the first novel I wrote in first person, and it was fascinating to feel how it made a different set of things feel natural in exposition. Third person lends itself to narrating physical action while first person makes it easy to cut seamlessly between events, thoughts, feelings, memories, etc., just like a blog or personal essay. You can still achieve whatever you want in either POV, it just requires more effort and technical skill to pull off that which the POV doesn’t lend itself to.
Other gifts I love to give: All Systems Red, Fat Gold olive oil, The Forest, Dandelion chocolate, Go Get ‘Em, Tiger!, Long Now Foundation memberships, and Oranges.
It was a fun surprise to see Bandwidth appear alongside Hank Green’s A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (a recent favorite of mine!) in Seth Godin’s gift guide. Speaking of, Seth has a new book out that I’m midway through and savoring.
Whoa: “a machine learning model capable of decoding and designing DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, from molecular to genome scale.”
Part of the fun of reading portal fantasy novels is that books are fantasy portals—it’s a genre where the medium is the message and the message is the medium.
Over on The Orthogonal Bet podcast, one subscriber to this humble newsletter, Sam Arbesman, interviewed another, Dave Jilk, about his new book, a sci-fi epic poem about what AI might evolve into.
Interesting to imagine a world where your primary internet interface isn't a curated directory like Yahoo or ranked links like Google or an algorithmic feed like social media or a fractured constellation of group chats, but an AI character that you've built a long-term relationship with, almost as if daemons from The Golden Compass could tap anything in the digital realm on your behalf.
The bedtime story our 18-month-old pulled off the shelf last night.
Good writing is about whatever the writer is obsessed with. Remember that high school teacher who made you fall in love with a subject you thought would be boring? Their enthusiasm was contagious. Just so, a writer’s enthusiasms define their writing. You can only write well about something you genuinely care about. You thinking something is cool is a key ingredient in readers thinking something is cool, so the best books are about what the author thinks is cool.
As a reader and writer, I’m excited to see more text-based social networks popping up like new neighborhood cafés, each with their own distinct vibe. I’ve been playing around with Threads and Bluesky—if you are too, say hi!
Year-to-date publishing revenue is up 7.8% industry wide. People continue to love books!
From an essay I wrote for Every: “The future is not our destination. It is our great constraint: we can only build what we can imagine. The future is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a shared dream to be realized through shared effort, a horizon of infinite possibilities limited only by our vision. The future consists not of atoms or bits, but imagination. It is not the endpoint of a deterministic trend, but contingent and always subject to reinvention. The future is a question to be answered by what we choose to do next.”
Thanks for reading. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. So when you fall in love with a story, tell your friends. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.
Best, Eliot
Eliot Peper is the author of Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He also consults on special projects.
“Peper has this ability to write about the future in a way that is at once completely recognizable and totally imaginary and extremely realistic and also optimistic while also being utterly compelling enough to galvanize our present—also, his books are just so f***ing fun to read.”
-Eva Hagberg, author of When Eero Met His Match and How to Be Loved, on Reap3r
Incredible that I'd just read/heard "Dictionary of Lost Words" last month, too! Loved it.