So many amazing books find their ways out into the world in nontraditional ways. One of these is my top pick for 2025: The Blues and Billie Armstrong by Roy Dufrain.
This coming-of-age tale about a boy uncovering family secrets in small-town Northern California, and later, that boy become a man at last forced to confront the mysteries of his own past, hit my sweet spot in so many ways. Roy’s language grips you by the throat and won’t let go. His colorful and true-to-life characters leap off the page and into your heart, thrilling and disappointing you at every turn. Stepsister Billie emerges as a catalyst, a powerful force of nature. But our protagonist reveals himself only slowly, leaving the reader to decide between “right” and “wrong.”
If you love a gritty mystery as much as I do, you’ll find plenty of layers to explore in this hard-hitting page-turner!
Archer King is thirteen years old in the midst of the historic upheavals of 1970 America. After his mother’s mysterious death, his father remarries and he gains a stepsister—the barefoot, braless, hand-on-hip seventeen-year-old, Billie Armstrong, whose larger-than-life personality and radical politics open Archer’s eyes to new ideas (and feelings) but cause friction, especially with Archer’s hero, local baseball legend Hank Timmons, home on leave before shipping out to Vietnam.When they discover a cache of old blues records and love letters, Archer and Billie team up in a quest to learn the truth about his mother’s secret affair and its connection…
Those of us who live in California’s Silicon Valley often find ourselves drowning in a soup cooked up by self-important tech bros and their self-fulfilling prophecies. So many of our close relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances draw sustenance from the burgeoning business of AI. But even we only get an occasional glimpse behind the hype.
In Empire of AI, seasoned tech reporter Karen Hao reveals the seedy underbelly of the race toward a deeply flawed but most likely life-altering Artificial General Intelligence, through the lens of one of its leading proponents, OpenAI. Encompassing the story of how we got here since the 1950’s, where we are now, and the places AI might yet take us for better or for worse, Hao leaves no stone unturned. As we play with toys like ChatGPT and Sora 2, she tells us, the AI tech industry has grown into a powerfully extractivist colonial power.
But for all the doom and gloom, we needn’t accept the rape of our earthly resources to feed this giant. We needn’t conscience the collateral damage and outright data theft that technocrats like Sam Altman would visit upon us to reach his goals. We needn’t even accept those goals as good, or somehow inevitable. There is a way to avoid the downside, and still reap the very real benefits of artificial intelligence.
To do so, we all need to become more conversant with the field while we still have the chance to alter its trajectory for the good of humanity. Karen Hao is here to show us the way. This book is a call to arms – and a MUST READ!
Here’s a delectable little morsel I devoured when the publisher offered me a galley to read!
Ursula K. Le Guin meets H.P. Lovecraft in this daring little novel, and we, the readers, get to savor that battle. With simple language and seamless worldbuilding, Kenneth Hunter Gordon weaves a daunting tale of human survival. And through the logical, childish eyes of his protagonist Anny, we learn what it means to be human, nonhuman, and everything in between.
It was difficult for me to put this one in a box - the hallmark of an original work. I’ll be thinking about it for a long while!
In a distant future, a little girl named Anny makes toy mice out of scraps and dust. Anny has never seen a real mouse, just as she's never seen the planet her family came from many generations ago. All she knows is her home, Tsedt: an isolated village of human colonists' descendants and their friendly helper robots.
But then one day the Amau arrive in Tsedt: plastic people with luminous eyes, intent on taking young humans to the distant city of Harbor to be educated. It's not long before Anny is flown away to a place unlike any she's seen…
In the year 2054, a boy named Kai is born in America’s desert Southwest. His only companion is his Mother—a super-soldier robot. Rho-Z is Kai’s home, protector, provider, and teacher. But she has the potential to be so much more.
The Mother Code tells the harrowing story of how Kai and his Mother came to be. It is the story of how they grow to better understand both themselves and the world that made them. But when survivors from that former world decide that the Mothers must be destroyed, Kai faces a choice:
Will he break the bond he shares with Rho-Z, or fight to save the only parent he has ever known?
