Wednesday Reading Recommendations

January 24, 2024

Since last Sunday’s newsletter exploring what it means that publications like Pitchfork cannot seem to make a go of it as business entities, it was announced that more than 100 staffers were being laid off from the Los Angeles Times newspaper. These layoffs include the book section, most notably the editor, Boris Kachka, who had built a great section even against current cultural and business headwinds.

Another casualty was

Brian Merchant

the paper’s technology columnist and an almost singular voice of tech criticism coming from a mainstream media outlet. Brian is also the author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, a kind of corrective history of the Luddite movement that applies the lessons of the past to the challenges of today.

Brian also has a newsletter here that you can find by clicking on his name in the paragraph above. I highly recommend subscribing.

In my dream, someone with enough seed capital hires Boris Kachka to create a sustainable books publication along the lines of what happened when Deadspin was ruined by the financialists, and all the talent got up and started Defector.

Is it too much to ask for a world where interesting writers write about interesting books interestingly?

Here’s some reading recommendations for folks who sent me the last five books they read, along with their hometown.¹

Recommendations

1. Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal
2. Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley
3. The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
4. Love and Loss by Kathryn Schulz
5. The Magical Language of Others by E. J. Koh

Terry R. - Seattle, WA

Terry is drawn towards the personal memoir that deeply explores the specifics of one’s experience. For me that brings to mind The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found

1. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
2. Damaged, Not Destroyed: From Trauma to Triumph by Mike Todd
3. What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
4. Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever by Matt Singer
5. Three Holidays and a Wedding by Uzma Jalaluddin & Marissa Stapley

Natasha S. - Tulsa, OK

Mix of fiction and nonfiction with no seriously discernible trend. I have to go with a book that I think is just intrinsically interesting. On that front, it’s hard to beat Paul Collins, The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars.

1. Lone Women by Victor LaValle
2. Wellness by Nathan Hill
3. The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo
4. Horse by Geraldine Brooks
5. Infinity Gate by M. R. Carey

Karla H. - Grinnell, IA

Alright, here I just gotta come up with some top-shelf fiction. Shouldn’t be a problem for someone like me: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.

1. Body by the Sea by Jean-Luc Bannalec
2. Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash
3. Five Years of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks
4. The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell
5. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Dan

Another call for well-written, highly involving fiction: The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell.

1. Real Artists Don't Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age  by Jeff Goins
2. Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition and Accelerate Your Career by Scott H. Young
3. Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food by Chris van Tulleken
4. The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life by Robin Sharma
5. This Is How You Lose the Time War  by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

Andrés T. - Madison, WI.

A trend on how to maximize one’s performance among three of the books here, something I sort of bristle at naturally, but I can’t help but acknowledge that if one is going to succeed as a writer or artist in today’s world, you can’t just plug away at the art and expect things to take care of themselves. If that ever worked it certainly doesn’t anymore. Still, I want to recommend a book that gets at the “why” of creativity, one I’ve talked about here before, The Gift: How the Creative Spirt Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde.

If you’d like to request a recommendation of your own, the guidelines are at the link just below this sentence.

The best way to encourage me to keep doing these additional Wednesday posts is to subscribe to the newsletters. Paid subscriptions are even more encouraging.

All for now. See you this Sunday.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. All books linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income reset to zero for the year, but there’s a bunch of referral income “pending,” so it’s just a matter of time before that ticks up.