Looking for some reads during the winter vacation? We’ve colated our top picks from 2024 for you. Some are political, some just trash because sometimes that is nice too.
Books
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century is a 2017 nonfiction book by American journalist Jessica Bruder about the phenomenon of older Americans who, following the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009, adopted transient lifestyles traveling around the United States in search of seasonal work (vandwelling). The book was adapted into the 2020 film of the same name.
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman is a 2006 book written by Nora Ephron. The book collects humor essays by Ephron, many of which deal with aging: her ups and downs dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.
Kaput: The End of the German Miracle is an incisive analysis of the failures of German business and political elites from one of Europe’s leading commentators by Wolfgang Munchau. He argues that the weaknesses of Germany’s economy have been brewing for decades and that neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the industrial and political elite country, have a small group of companies and shareholders but did little for the majority: the result has been spiralling income inequality. The dominance of industrial interests has left Germany technologically behind and is too slowly adapting to the digital realities of the 21st century.
The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction ("cli-fi") novel by Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation's. While they pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential.
The Dispossessed: is a 1974 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of her seven Hainish Cycle novels. It is one of a small number of books to win all three Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism and revolutionary societies, capitalism, utopia, individualism, and collectivism.
Dark Politics: The Personality of Politicians and the Future of Democracy by Alessandro Nai and Jergen Maier is a novel exploration of the rise of aversive and antagonistic political figures worldwide. Drawing on new data from 100 recent elections, post-election surveys, and original experimental evidence, The book provides a large-scale comparative investigation into the "darker" sides of human personality politicians in--the "Dark Triad" of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
Radicalized is a collection of novellas written by Cory Doctorow. The book was initially released in 2019. Radicalized explores such issues as digital rights management, police brutality, radicalization in internet communities, and doomsday preppers. Doctorow has stated that the collection was inspired by "dealing with the stress and anxiety of being alive in the Trump era," and that the stories are not meant to be predictive, but rather allegorical.
Three Body Problem is a 2008 novel by science fiction author Liu Cixin. It is the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The series portrays a fictional past, present, and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three Sun-like stars orbiting one another, a representative example of the three-body problem in orbital mechanics.
A Court of Thorns and Roses is a fantasy romance series by Sarah J. Maas, which follows the journey of 19-year-old Feyre Archeron after she is brought into the faerie lands of Prythian. The first book of the series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, was released in 2015. The series centers on Feyre's adventures across Prythian and the faerie courts, following the epic love story and fierce struggle that ensues after she enters the fae lands.