WIRED’s Picks for the 15 Books You Need to Read This Fall
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Dear reader, we write this to you from the rapidly chilling environs of Brooklyn, where the leaves are turning to gold and our eyes are turning to all the books we are stockpiling to get us through the winter months. (Yes, we briefly thought of saying “turning our eyes to page-turners,” but that felt like a bit much.) Some of these titles touch on the influence of sci-fi on NASA, others illustrate life in Canada’s oil sands. All of them go down smooth with a pumpkin spice latte—if you’re into that sort of thing. Also, don’t worry: If you’re in the southern hemisphere and your spring is just getting started, these books are just as fun in the warmer months. Enjoy!
By Samantha Cole
From the browser cookie to the dynamic webpage to the shopping cart, Motherboard staff writer Samantha Cole points out that nearly every fixture of the internet as we know it was built, at least in part, by a demand for sex. As such, her new book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex is, at its heart, a history of the early internet in all of its weirdness and wonder. Once, she reminds readers, the internet was a place where nuns proffered medical resources for people with AIDS, lifecasters broadcast the minutiae of their days via cameras strapped to their heads, and people could explore their sexuality and create community unfettered by the limits of meatspace. To be fair, many of society’s most pernicious prejudices and puritanical mores are intrinsic to a history of sex and the internet, and Cole gives these subjects their due, too. But ultimately her history affirms that the virtual and physical worlds are inextricable and rife with possibility if the humans tangled up in them play their cards right. —Eve Sneider
By Anne K. Yoder
Hannah is an ordinary teenage girl in many ways. She gossips about crushes with her friends Azzie and Celia. She worries about doing well in school. Sshe experiments with drugs. In Anne K. Yoder’s debut novel The Enhancers, most of the drugs Hannah takes are administered by her parents, with the explicit permission of her school, and the whole community. She lives in a factory town, where just about everyone is an employee or a customer (or both) of a pharmaceutical company pioneering brain-enhancing concoctions with names like VALEDICTORIAN and VIGILante. Are there side effects? Oh, yeah. Yoder includes snippets of the label warnings in between chapters, so we get to learn about ominous-sounding “fact abscesses” for instance, as well as “an inability to feel.” While their parents and teachers encourage the younger generation to gulp down pills, Hannah and her friends start to resist becoming “enhanced.” This tragicomic thriller about sinister corporations is highly recommended for fans of Apple TV’s Severance or Ling Ma’s Severance. —Kate Knibbs
By Percival Everett
Percival Everett approaches genre like a veteran card shark does poker: methodically patient, rarely playing the same hand twice. His books—30 and counting—are full of ambition and mystery, each one of them sustained by a sense of existential wonder. His latest, Dr. No, doesn’t rely on the themes and tricks that outline any of his previous books but remains needle sharp in thought and originality. The contorting plot is Everett to the core: a Brown mathematics professor, who specializes in the study of nothing, is recruited by a billionaire-slash-wannabe-Bond-villain that plans to break into Fort Knox to steal—that’s right—nothing. It’s a satisfying, if sometimes demanding, puzzle to the very end. —Jason Parham
By Ling Ma
Ling Ma’s collection of eight spare, unsettling stories follows in the same near-speculative style as her 2018 debut novel Severance. Ma’s Chinese-American protagonists share an emotional remove, as if they are watching their own lives from outside a window—a feeling of alienation, Ma seems to say, that is common to the children of immigrants. The effect is intriguing but incomplete, with the particular desires of her characters left undefined. But there is plenty of strange, subversive pleasure still to be found in these stories, including consumerist satire, an invisibility drug binge, and a guide to yeti sex—yes, you read that right. —Camille Bromley
By Margaret Weitekamp
The first Americans to go to space and the first to travel to the moon were surely heroes, but let’s be honest, they pretty much looked the same: white men who were also Christian, married, military-trained jet pilots. Early space photographers had to ask them to stand alphabetically so they wouldn’t be mixed up in the captions. But Margaret Weitekamp argues that not only has that been changing, it’s partially the result of the evolution of space science fiction. The space historian makes a solid case that NASA—and the American public—have moved beyond the Buck Rogers archetype for astronauts, with many people, though not all, aspiring to the more inclusive ideals of Star Trek. It’s a smart look at the future of NASA, while digging into its past. —Ramin Skibba
Courtesy of FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUXBy Rachel Aviv
At six years old, star New Yorker reporter Rachel Aviv was hospitalized with anorexia. Her doctors had never seen someone so young develop the condition and couldn’t figure out its cause. Aviv made a full recovery but the episode remained a mystery. It also led to her lifelong interest in mental health. Her new book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, is split into four chapters, each one focuses on a different person with unusual mental health issues. Their circumstances have little in common except extremity and uncertainty about what is really happening to them, but they all reflect Aviv’s main thesis: that there can be no grand unifying theory of the mind. Strangers to Ourselves is occasionally maddening but always thoughtful, and anyone with even a passing interest in mental health, identity politics, the healthcare system, or philosophy of the mind will be riveted. —Kate Knibbs
By Luke Dani Blue
The 10 stories in Luke Dani Blue’s debut collection illustrate men and women in startling metamorphosis, as they struggle to claim genders, relationships, and more. In “Other People’s Points of View,” a trans psychic who frequents a witch subreddit is gifted with extrasensory perception. She can read minds—but only those mired by indecision: “The choices can be life-altering but mostly are dumb, like whether to text someone back or which route home will avoid the traffic jam. The more banal the decision, the shoutier.” Another story, about a mysterious and mesmerizing black hole used for garbage, is concerned with familial thorns and what we choose—or don’t choose—to hold on to. It’s a wonderfully unruly thing, this book, and like the body itself, all the more striking because its form is all its own: squishy here and muscled there, imperfect and terrifically queer. —Jason Parham
By Negar Mottahedeh
In 1979, just after the Islamic revolution in Iran, Kate Millett, the American writer known for launching second-wave feminism, went to Tehran for a celebration of International Women’s Day. The city quickly became the site of demonstrations for women’s rights and against mandatory veiling. Millett attended the protests, documenting her observations on a tape recorder. But she didn’t speak Farsi or know much about Iranian culture, so she wasn’t able to understand everything that was happening around her. In Whisper Tapes, Negar Mottahedeh, a professor at Duke, revisits those recordings, and recreates the early days of the women’s movement, quoting speeches, slogans, and debates picked up in the background of Millet’s audio. As women in Iran today again take to the streets in protest, the book is a reminder that the Iranian women’s movement has been there since the start of the Islamic Republic. —Jennifer Conrad
By Baek Sehee
“I wasn’t deathly depressed, but I wasn’t happy either, floating instead in some feeling between the two,” Baek Sehee writes of her decision to start seeing a psychiatrist. At the time she was, by all outward appearances, doing well, a successful woman in her twenties managing social media at a Korean publishing house. But her persistent depression was getting to be a little much to bear; it was time to talk to someone. In an effort to help herself remember the content of her sessions, Sehee asked her therapist if she could record them. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, which was a hit when it was first published in South Korea in 2018, comprises edited transcripts of these conversations interspersed with short essays where Sehee muses on her takeaways from the process. But don’t let the structure fool you. Rather than draw neat conclusions about her psyche, Sehee’s writing mirrors the confusion, frustration, and moments of fleeting revelation that are all part of the therapeutic process. One of Sehee’s preoccupations is empathy: for herself, for others. “I had wanted to be a cool, rational person, but once I had cooled down, my world froze,” she writes. For readers feeling a little icy around the edges, her memoir promises to defrost. —Eve Sneider
By Les Johnson
While very few of Earthlings’ space expeditions have ever gone beyond low Earth orbit, Les Johnson dreams of traveling much farther from home. The NASA scientist and author leads the NEA Scout’s solar sail project, a propulsion system that will transport a small satellite to an asteroid without the need for pesky (and heavy) fuel on board. He envisions more futuristic stuff, too, all of which sounds like something straight out of Star Trek—and in fact, some are. Perhaps in a century, scientists will be able to power spacecraft to the outer reaches over our solar system and even to other stars using continuous fusion, like in our sun’s core, or streams antimatter, or even a series of nuclear bombs. In Johnson’s vision, the possibilities are great. —Ramin Skibba
By Kate Beaton
For most of the 2010s, Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton’s webcomic Hark a Vagrant was a must-read for anyone who loved their historical and literary references with a side of wickedly insightful humor (also a must-read for those who like their wickedly insightful humor with a side of historical and literary references). Her new graphic novel, though, has none of that. Drawn from Beaton’s real-life experiences in the Athabasca oil sands of Alberta, it’s a harrowing meditation on class, creativity, and what people find themselves doing to survive—and the marks those actions leave on them in return. The cartoonist spent more than five years on the book, partially because—as she told WIRED—her “intense connection and deep concern [for the subject matter made] it a hard and impossible story to tell.” In the end, it’s definitely a difficult story to hear, but Beaton tells it masterfully well. —Angela Watercutter
By Ned Beauman
British novelist Ned Beauman invites readers into dystopian Europe, where global warming has turned food into tasteless mulch and environmental activists are launching lab-made tumors at their enemies. Amid this chaos, middle-aged mining executive Mark Halyard is trying to not take life too seriously. But thanks to his love of sushi, now a preserve of the super rich, he’s on the verge of bankruptcy and his plan to get out of debt by gaming the “extinction credit” market has gone horribly wrong. To save his own skin, he’s forced to team up with his ideological opposite, a biologist named Karin Resaint. Together, this unlikely duo embark on an international mission, taking the reader on a tour of this unhinged new world—traveling from a Finnish labor camp, to the new “hermit kingdom” and onto a libertarian island, which has a serious problem with bugs. Beaumann’s dark comedic writing tears apart the carbon offset industry, while using sharp storytelling to make big climate ideas easy to digest. —Morgan Meaker
By Vauhini Vara
In its first chapter, The Immortal King Rao seems to be a story about immigration and family, tracking the improbable career of King Rao from his Dalit family’s coconut farm in southern India to founding the most powerful tech company in the world, one that marries the pervasiveness of Amazon with the sleekly addictive hardware of Apple. The second chapter throws the reader into a climate-wrecked near future when Rao’s company, Coconut, has taken over governing the United States, and a rebel group called the Exes plots the collapse of the new Shareholder Government. The novel, by WIRED contributor Vauhini Vara, at times feels like a multigenerational family saga, a dystopian thriller, or a satirical tale of what happens when Big Tech pervades every aspect of our lives—and our bodies. It’s all of those things, packed into less than 400 pages. —Jennifer Conrad
By Tom Mustill
In 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling a kayak in Monterey Bay when out of the flat, calm sea erupted a five-story building. Well—a breaching humpback whale, every bit as solid as a concrete tower, and just as dangerous to find suddenly falling on you. The kayak crumpled but Mustill survived, and video of the breach went viral. Soon after, Mustill, a wildlife documentarian, heard from a whale specialist friend of his who had analyzed the video. Her theory: His life had been saved because the whale had twisted away in midair, trying not to hit him. So began Mustill’s investigation into the inner minds of whales. He learns that whales do more than sing—they rhyme, invent compound words, and share sonic cultures across the vast oceans. With the help of machine learning tools, scientists will soon know far more about what cetaceans are capable of. Whatever the findings, they’re bound to surprise us. —Camille Bromley
By Matthew Viragh
During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic—and often even now—one of the things cinephiles missed most was theater-going. As a cinephile, I missed it too. Specifically, I missed Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg. Similar to Alamo Drafthouse locations, Nitehawk serves up amazing food and drinks alongside indie films, blockbusters, and cinema classics. Thankfully, in 2021, Matthew Viragh, Nitehawk’s executive director and founder, released this cookbook of the Brooklyn theater’s best offerings. It’s perfect for when you want a to sip a Tears in the Rain during your Blade Runner screening or munch on a Violet Blue Dragon Mandoo while watching Oldboy. —Angela Watercutter
