While I’ve started writing more directly about what I read, I often read a lot that doesn’t appear in my work in a citeable way. Yet, almost everything I read influences my work—including the fiction.
So as this year begins to come to a close (and really, who let that happen?!), I decided to review my year in books and make a list of works that really stuck with me this year. If you read everything I publish, you’ll likely see some familiar titles. But for even the most fastidious What Works reader, there should be a few new-to-you titles (unless you read more social philosophy or science fiction than I do!).
What I noticed compiling this list is that much of my reading this year was about how we organize and govern ourselves—even (maybe especially) the science fiction. There were plenty of questions of individual concern, but they were all firmly situated within broader social and political contexts. Maybe that’s true of what I read every year, though it seemed a timely theme for 2024.
I’ve included links to the books on their publishers’ websites. You can often buy straight from that, or the page will direct you to a bunch of different retailers. Or, borrow them from the library! If your library doesn’t have it, request it!
Soon, I’ll share a list of 10 (probably more…) podcast episodes that have stayed with me this year, too.
Happy reading!
Non-fiction
Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias
…the puzzle is less about how things become awkward than about how things are ever not awkward. Our reliance on infrastructure is most evident when that infrastructure fails.
What if there are no awkward people, just awkward situations? That’s the thesis of Alex Plakias’s Awkwardness: A Theory. I found this book via the Overthink podcast and downloaded it before I even finished listening to the interview.
Plakias attributes our experience of awkwardness, separate from emotions like embarrassment or anxiety, to a lack or misalignment of social scripts. Her framing offered me, as an autistic person, a critical way to rethink an experience I’m extremely familiar with.
I’ll definitely be writing more about Plakias’s ideas in the future.
Get it from Oxford University Press.
Autism Is Not A Disease: The Politics of Neurodivergence by Jodie Hare
The campaign asks us to unpack our society’s desire to define a ‘normal’ brain against one that functions differently. It demands that, instead of pathologising those who exist outside these predetermined norms, we recognise their existence as part of natural biological variation, as well as recognising our failure to support them, and begin to build a world in which they too can thrive.
As its subtitle suggests, this book isn’t about the experience of autism. It’s a call to view autism specifically and neurodivergence generally as a political movement. Hare argues that, in addition to recognizing neurodivergence as a condition of individual concern, we should understand neurodivergence as a movement struggling for inclusion in society on our own terms.
I wrote more about this book here.
Get it from Verso.
The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han
In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers. Fewer theories are therefore formulated no one wants to take the risk of putting forward a theory.
Apparently, Byung-Chul Han has become something of a celebrity philosopher. He’s been on a publishing spree for at least the last decade, releasing essay-length books primarily interrogating the role of technology and digital culture in society.
In The Crisis of Narration, Han tackles how the overabundance (excess, maybe?) of communication today fails to pass on meaningful value or make sense of context. Our digital culture tends to reward sameness rather than risk-taking. Media that reinforces the status quo is favored over media that offers poignant criticism or explanation.
I think Han sometimes creeps into ‘old man talks about the internet’ territory. But even then, how he frames the phenomenon he’s criticizing is fascinating and gives me new ways to think about the technology and culture I am probably more embedded in than Han.
Get it from Polity @ Wiley.
Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler
…putting values centre stage is not empty idealism, but an essential part of any serious political strategy, since they provide the glue that can bind disparate groups together.
I suppose this was a year of political and social philosophy for me. I heard economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler on Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayers and immediately grabbed his book.
Free and Equal is presented in two parts. The first explores the work of political philosopher John Rawls, a highly influential 20th-century thinker largely unknown outside the academy. The second part uses Rawls’s work as a springboard to argue for practical policies that would make us all more, well, free and equal.
Get it from Penguin Random House.
While I haven’t finished Timothy Snyder’s new book, On Freedom, what I’ve read so far suggests that these two would be a perfect pair. Both invite the reader to think about the conditions needed for positive freedom—that is freedom to rather than freedom from. You can get a taste of Snyder’s argument on Slate‘s Amicus podcast with Dahlia Lithwick.
Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew
Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment.
This book has a lot in common with Hare’s Autism Is Not A Disease. It’s political, practical, and a solid reminder that recognizing and accommodating difference isn’t too big an ask.
Shew argues against the brand of ableism that assumes every disabled person would like to be ‘fixed’ by technology or a medical breakthrough. She doesn’t suggest that technology and medicine are wrong or that disabled people shouldn’t use the tools or aid they provide. Instead, she presents the case for fixing physical and social spaces so that disabled people can live full lives regardless of the technology they use.
Her chapter on autism was one of the best things I’ve read about the subject from a non-autistic thinker. It includes mention of roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons as “cultural technologies” that accommodate the social needs and proclivities of neurodivergent people. I’m not a LARPer myself, but I’ve certainly been grateful for other cultural technologies for the same purpose!
Get it from W.W. Norton.
Fiction
Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
Yes, she had needed that. She had needed it all her life, without knowing that was what she needed. The joy of creation, of play, had been the empty place unfilled by family and social duties. She would have loved her children better, she thought now, if she had realized how much she herself needed to play, to follow her own childish desire to handle beautiful things and make more beauty.
I’ve been thinking a lot about solitude this year. I have an intellectual hunch that people who love to be alone (like me) have something important to contribute to the discourse on the loneliness epidemic. Anyhow, Remnant Population is about solitude—and about so much more.
This book centers on an older woman, Ofelia, who is part of a colony on another planet. The colony has been given orders to pack up so that they can be shipped to another planet to colonize. Ofelia hides while all the other colonists (including her son and daughter-in-law) board ships for their next destination. She is left utterly alone.
Until she’s not.
Okay, so this story is about the promise of solitude. But it’s also about a woman who finally gets to make her own choices late in life—and how that shapes her perspective of colonization, companionship, and communication.
This isn’t a new book (originally published in 1996), but its themes are extremely timely. I loved this novel.
Get it from Penguin Random House.
Machine by Elizabeth Bear
We cannot isolate ourselves from systems, have no impact, change nothing as we pass. We alter the world by observing it. The best we can do is not pretend that we don’t belong to a system; it’s to accept that we do, and try to be fair about using it. To keep it from exploiting the weakest.
This is a book about fighting to make things better, even when they’re already very good. It’s also a book about extreme utilitarianism and idealistic ignorance.
I wrote about this book and its series-mate, Ancestral Night, in my post on utopia being a work in progress in early November.
Get it from Simon & Schuster.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
If we were blind to anything representing a new category, then our individual histories might have amounted to a series of glancing encounters with unspeakable wonders—as a general summation, it felt about right. Life as a repeated failure to apprehend something.
This is the only book on my fiction list set (mostly) on Earth. Honestly, it’s really hard to describe. It’s science fiction with the pace of literary fiction (it was long-listed for the Book Prize). It’s character-driven but also has a few moments that would fit into a summer blockbuster. It’s about pushing contemporary science and technology as far as we can imagine. At the same time, it’s about shadowy corporate conspiracy.
Oh, and family. It’s about family, too.
I didn’t know what I was getting into with this one, and I think that was for the best.
Get it from Grove Atlantic.
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
The problem was that the unspoken orders were not always the same. Every room, every gathering, every scene came with its own specific demands, and even when he had learned the basic orders of a place there might be changes that stemmed from causes imperceptible to him.
This mystical novella is right at home on a list that also includes Free and Equal. It takes place in space, but that place only gives structure to the more psychological setting: a rigid caste system.
The story explores how oppression and violence are perpetuated even when one has been granted “freedom” and “equality” in theory.
Get it from MacMillan.
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Equality is not a fact, like the length of days… Equality is an idea, a belief, like beauty.
This is a novel that dares to ask the question: What if a plant was one of the main characters?
Semiosis traces the early history of a human colony on an exoplanet, from its founding to its first major power struggle to the establishment of a thriving city to the discovery of the indigenous plant sentience and a whole other alien group. At each inflection point, the story asks us to think about who “counts” as a person, a citizen, or an intelligence capable of contribution and collaboration.
Get it from Tor.
