Very specific title, I know. But some of you are rolling in that filthy holiday money/gift cards and are looking for good books to read. And the paradox of choice is real and cruel. So here are just two books — one fiction, one non-fiction — that I enjoyed reading the most this year. I think your book money/library card could be spent worse than adding these to the to be read pile that you will resolve to actually finish in the new year.
Fiction: The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo
This not a traditional noir, however, even if the noir aspects are done very well. In addition to the mystery, the book is almost a rumination on emotions and how people deal with depression, the loss of hope. The pigment police are depressives, because the belief is that they can handle the surge of emotions better than neurotypical people can, and so there is quite a bit about depression and other such conditions. but there is also a very nice rumination on how hope is held onto and how being hopeful does not negate neither the bad things in life nor your justified emotional reaction to said bad things.
Non-fiction: Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant (link to his excellent newsletter which you should all be reading)
Merchant elevates the historical consensus about the Luddites with an almost novelistic, but rigorous, retelling of not only their story, but how their story illustrated problems with the “technology above all” mindset both in their day and in ours. It is an exceptional, important book.
The Luddites were heroes. Their resistance reminds us that technology in and of itself has no value. That growth in and of itself has no value. That an economy should serve the people of a society, not the other way around. They were, if not the start, then a significant driver of the process that eventually made it possible for the benefits of new technology to be broadly shared and for things like a comfortable middle class to exist. Because the Luddites did not entirely lose. Under their pressure, the laws eventually did change. Not as much as they needed, but the start of the creation of the better world we live in began not with the invention of the machines that filled the factories and employed children to run them, but with the Luddites standing up and saying “Enough.”
There you go: the scientifically proven best books I read this year, and ones you should read as well. Because science says so.