Books and Books

Last week I smashed through a really dumb crime thriller. It didn't look promising from the moment I spotted it, but it was just sitting there on a stack of books, looking at me with its generic cover art, and without really understanding why I picked it up. I am a sucker for trashy page-turning novels. This one was bad, not in a fun way, and it had this non sequitur of an epilogue that was so confusing I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a twist, cliffhanger, or if in my haste to get through the novel I'd missed something and was supposed to recognise the random new character suddenly being introduced.

I don't know why I cared, I think I just found it fascinatingly badly written, so ended up searching for '[name of book] plot summary' to figure it out. In the results I found a forum full of comments from people also confused about this epilogue. Also in the top results was a website giving a plot summary. I clicked through and there was a summary of the novel I just read. Except it wasn't the story I had just read. It had the same cover, same author, but this summary was clearly AI-generated, seemingly by feeding the book's blurb to ChatGPT or similar and asking it to fill in the blanks. It featured entirely different characters going through the motions of an entirely different (although equally tired and generic) plot. Nothing anywhere signified that this was AI-generated, or that it was in no way accurate in relation to the book it was apparently summarising.

I've read so many examples of this kind of thing happening this year, and junk websites filled with SEO that only exist to serve ads are not new, but it was still weird to stumble into this kind of AI-generated uncanny valley of a website. (And I'm not naming the book, because as bad as it was, at least it was written by an actual human.)

Anyway, it felt like a portent of things to come. I'm so desperate for this AI bubble to burst but I'm not sure it's going to any time soon. And it makes me wonder about the best strategy for engaging with what the internet is going to become in the near future. Try to join a neo-luddite uprising and build a resistance to the coming tsunami of AI-slop, or give it up and mount an exodus? Maybe both? Dig in and try to construct barricades against the rot while at the same time drafting an exit strategy?

I dunno. I've only had one coffee and this was only supposed to be a short paragraph introducing a list of books I enjoyed this year.

Regardless! To whatever the degree the internet as a tool of communication and solidarity is still saveable or salvageable, I think little websites/newsletters/RSS feeds made by real humans about things they are trying to work out or things they are passionate about count as tiny acts of resistance. And it is in this spirit I bring to you a post about some books I enjoyed this year.

GOOD BOOKS

I got through less books this year than in 2023. I blame the many hours sunk into Baldur's Gate 3 and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for that. And while I often enjoy deliberately reading 'good-bad books', this year I made a few too many unlucky guesses when picking up the next thing and ended up trudging through a few too many bad-bad books (as seen above).

Nevertheless, plenty of books were still enjoyed. Here is a selection of ten of them that I liked enough to share here, in the order I happened to read them:

Bellies - Nicola Dinan

Young people getting to grips with their gender and relationships. Warm, sad and vulnerable. Beautifully captures the mood of being in your early twenties, figuring everything out, endless night time adventures, tight friendship groups, desperate-everything.

Utopia - Jon Greenaway

Excellent intro to philosopher Ernst Bloch and his ideas on utopia. I wrote about this earlier in the year.

Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros

Kind of weird politics. Dragons. Very horny. Is there something interesting to be said about how even books as politically small-c conservative as this still have revolutionaries as the good guys? Maybe. My first dip into what the kids call romantasy. No regrets! The sequel Iron Wing was longer, clumsier, more confusing and still very horny. Searching elsewhere in this genre (my interest presumably piqued thanks to Baldur's Gate 3), I also read A Court of Thorns and Roses and found it deeply boring, though my romantasy consultant insists that its author is worth exploring further.

In Ascension - Martine MacInnes

Probably (?) the best sci-fi I read this year. I enjoy ‘philosophical sci-fi’ and in the beginning found this a little like reading Cixin Liu, but with some actual three dimensional characters instead of just ideas. Still not sure if I was persuaded by its drift away from a clear plot into more metaphysical musings as it went along. Very stylish though, and not scared of its own intellect. Would have enjoyed a little more melodrama.

Evenings & Weekends - Oisin McKenna

Excellent. Probably my overall favourite of the year. At its best when describing the alienated sadness of humans who love each other, trying to communicate despite being trapped in the pits of themselves. A particular kind of melancholy made more affecting despite or perhaps because of its lightness.

It’s On Me - Sara Kuburic

Title sounds like an airport self-help book. It kind of might be one? But at its core has a weighty existential philosophy made accessible via direct and easy-to-read language. I thought it managed to walk the tightrope of embracing 'therapy speak' and a sort of 'you are your own main character' kind of perspective, whilst avoiding the trap of promoting individualistic, alienating or selfish outlooks. Or put more simply: some good ideas about how to live life the way you want to.

King Kong Theory - Virginie Despentes

Like reading a bolt of lightning riding a laser. Immensely satisfying read. Describes and demands an inclusive and revolutionary feminism with precision and hope. Cuts through 'girl boss' neoliberal feminism like a shark through a careless limb.

The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler

The best book I read this year about highly intelligent octupuses. (This sounds like a joke but I did actually read two.) A slow burner, but it hooked me by the end. It’s got a good mood. Adjacent in some respects to In Ascension, although whereas that book was all deep, cold blues and distant, dry violence, this one is ripe, sticky and lively. Echoes of Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers, another favourite of recent years. A warm kind of storytelling that did not lapse into coziness. And in places, gently brutal.

The Wilding - Ian McDonald

Spotted on Cory Doctorow's blog. Fun, disposable, high-octane horror. Good at finding ways to describe an unknowable, Lovecraftian dread that is too other, too primal to comprehend in anything other than flashes of terror. I smashed through it in a day. Tightly told. Don’t stop to think too hard about it.

A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto - China Mieville

Great and accessible analysis of The Communist Manifesto that does not dumb anything down. Demanded concentration but rewarded me for it. Understandable, direct as possible, full of burning urgency. Mieville is particularly good at teasing out the dialectical balancing acts necessary to hold a bunch of complexities together and navigate his way to careful and nuanced understanding, all while bringing me along and making sure I didn’t get lost. A reassurance (for me anyway) that as impossible as it seems, another world is still possible, and the heart of it beats in the pages of this text.

That'll do. Here's a handful of honourable mentions that I probably enjoyed just as much as the above, but I didn't wanna make this post even longer : The Lodgers / The Underground Village / Mrs. S / Unlearning Shame / On Vicious Worlds (good but even better is the first in this series, These Burning Stars — probably my favourite sci-fi of last year!) / Pirate Enlightenment / Acts of Desperation / I'm a Fan / Radical Intimacy.

Ok, that's books! Any recommendations on things to add to my already-too-long reading list for 2025 more than welcome. As the opening anecdote shows, the dumber the book looks, the more likely it is to jump the queue.

I might lean into this end-of-year-ness and make the next post a look back at The K.N.R.U.'s output in 2024 and figure out where it might go next. Hope you're all having/had as relaxing and non-stressful a holiday season as possible.

Bye for now.