I'm not unashamed to say that I discovered J.D. Salinger through the show Bojack Horseman, and had never read Holden Caulfield's journey. It resonates even more when having a teenage kid around. It's one of those books—like Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces—that proves great literature doesn’t always need to be ultra-serious.
Outer Dark was the last McCarthy novel on my list, for no particular reason. This grotesque tale follows siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme on separate, dark journeys “a-huntin this here tinker” who took their days-old baby, abandoned by Culla in the woods. McCarthy wrote it during a transformative period, around the same time as The Orchard Keeper, while working from North Carolina, New Orleans, Tennessee, and even Ibiza. Among his early works, it stands out as one of the more accessible reads.
By Cormac McCarthy, the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; the brother leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
Cryptocurrency has revolutionized and democratized the art of financial scams, making it easier than ever to defraud investors while sidestepping regulations under the guise of “innovation” and virtue like “financial freedom.” Zeke Faux exposes this chaotic circus brilliantly, delivering a read that’s both refreshing and depressing.
The “rollicking” (The Economist), “masterfully written” (The Washington Post) account of the crypto delusion, and how Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers turned useless virtual coins into trillions of dollars—hailed by Ezra Klein in The New York Times as one of the “Books That Explain Where We Are”
FINALIST: the Edgar Award (Fact Crime), the Porchlight Business Book Award • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times DealBook, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, Irish Examiner, Morningstar, The Verge, Wired
In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment…
This practical guide to modern encryption breaks down the fundamental mathematical concepts at the heart of cryptography without shying away from meaty discussions of how they work. You’ll learn about authenticated encryption, secure randomness, public-key techniques such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography, as well as advanced topics like post-quantum cryptography and multi-party computation.
