Staff Picks

Thought provoking and at times eerily relatable, this piece of satire walks a fine line between utopian and dystopian fiction. Young adults readers will be encouraged to ask themselves difficult questions as they read. A great choice for those who are hoping to reevaluate our connection to technology and consider what it is that makes us human.

 

Publisher's description:

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon -- a chance to party during spring break. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its ever-present ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. M. T. Anderson’s not-so-brave new world is a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.

 

This book was a breeze to read thanks to an approachable invitation into the culinary world, some quirky, magical realism, and a woman who challenges herself to believe there is more to life. There is no way you will guess the ending of this bizarre and truly gripping tale of bread, robots, and joy.

 

Publisher’s description

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her―feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?"

 

The first book in the MaddAddam trilogy can easily be read as a stand alone. Oryx and Crake is a dark speculative fiction narrative that shifts between a strangely wild present and a technologically marvelous past (a past that is uncomfortably close to our own contemporary America, just a bit more slanted.) Thoroughly engaging; one doesn't want the book to end. Fortunately, there are two more books exploring the rich characters and inhabiting the strange territory of Oryx and Crake.

 

Publisher's description:

Jimmy, perhaps the last living human unaltered by science, struggles for survival in a post-apocalyptic world as he tries to make sense of how everything went wrong, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx, a girl he met through a kiddie porn website.

 

This is a novel about many things, but its main theme is families: the ones we're born into, the ones we create, the ones that are about friends more than blood ties, the ones we fantasize about being a part of (rightly or wrongly), and, in the end, the ones that, if we are lucky and see a good thing for what it is, can sustain us through tough times both personally and globally. It helps that this book also features clever characters, snappy dialogue, humor and compassion, and sharp commentary on current affairs starting with the 1980s and leaping to the present.

 

Publisher's description:

Two generations of an American family come of age on either side of the September 11 attacks, transforming their ambitions against a backdrop of dramatic political and environmental changes.

 

The author left her job in publishing, where she was underpaid and lacked a clear path ahead, to work first with an e-book start-up and then relocated to San Francisco to work in start-ups for data analytics and an open source community. As a non-technical woman working in customer support, the author provides a fast paced, engaging perspective of an outsider working inside the world of start-ups. She observes the differences from her prior work experiences, including among other things, the tech-bro culture and the emphasis on snacks and company hoodies, and ultimately questions whether having financial security is enough to keep her in the start-up world when she doubts the value of her work.

 

Publisher's description:

In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener—stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial—left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress. Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building. This memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power.

 

Find Uncanny Valley in our online catalog.

Emoji have become a polarizing cultural influence. Do they help us communicate? Are they useful? Linguistics, being the study of language, is an ever changing landscape. This book makes a compelling case for bringing emoji into that conversation.

 

Publisher description: 

Vyvyan Evans' Emoji Code charts the evolutionary origins of language, the social and cultural factors that govern its use, change, and development; as well as what it reveals about the human mind. In most communication, nonverbal cues are our emotional expression, signal our personality, and are our attitude toward our addressee. They provide the essential means of nuance and are essential to getting our ideas across. But in digital communication, these cues are missing, which can lead to miscommunication. The explosion of emoji, in less than four years, has arisen precisely because it fulfills exactly these functions which are essential for communication but are otherwise absent in texts and emails. Evans persuasively argues that emoji add tone and an emotional voice and nuance, making us more effective communicators in the digital age.

 

This book is hilarious, moving, thrilling, and impossible to explain. You might think you know what it's about--Hazel has left her tech entrepreneur husband after he threatens to put a melding chip in her brain, and now must find her way in the world again--but I guarantee you won't see half of what's coming. A fantastic read best experienced in one gulp!

 

Publisher description:

Moving to a senior citizen trailer park with her father, Hazel, the estranged wife of a corporate CEO who demanded she install a brain chip so that they could be constantly connected, tries to carve out a new life while her ex uses sophisticated technology to stalk her.

 

When a multimedia, digital artist and educator writes a book about distancing one's self from the internet, you know that you're in for some untread territory. Odell makes the case for tuning into the place(s) one finds oneself in, for opening one's awareness to birds, plants, air, and water, and suggests myriad reasons why these practices are infinitely more rewarding than another scroll through Instagram. Highlights for me were: ancient Greek culture, a history of back-to-nature communes in 1960s America, bioregionalism, the Oakland rose garden, and a deep dive into new artists, specifically Mierle Laderman Ukeles. But, because you are a different creature, and because this book is filled with so many gems, your list will be invariably be very different from mine. So read it, and let's compare notes.

 

Publisher description:

Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity. doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it) may be our most important form of resistance, according to critic Jenny Odell. Odell sees our attention as the most precious--and overdrawn--resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, this is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Timely and persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent.

Find How to do Nothing in our online catalog.

This is a powerful and well-reasoned book, and even if you disagree, it will make you think. After finishing it, I deleted my Twitter account and haven't looked back. I've never had accounts on Instagram or SnapChat and don't intend to get one one, either. Any future platform better be able to make its case with regard to the points Lanier makes. His ten arguments, to sum them up, have to do with the much-discussed privacy, use of personal data, and news-manipulation issues created by social media. But he also deals with more-individual negative consequences. Worth the read!

 

Publisher description:

You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we're better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms. Lanier's reasons for freeing ourselves from social media's poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more connected than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.