Books like Deeper

While short book aimed at younger readers, there’s so much to learn for anyone regardless of age that wishes to exercise their terror-inducing writing muscles. I read this book so long ago that I would guess it was back in 2005. While the time frame is hazy, the details and lessons in the book are anything but. The way Zindel handles the horror parts is what gets this book on this list. The antagonist monster is horrendous of course, but it’s the mystery behind it that is what’s more chilling because it is vaguely hinted at but never outright explained.

Even on the final page, when you learn that this creature isn’t anything new nor anything going away, there are still so many mysteries that will not (and maybe should not) be solved. That is why this book is recommended. When things are over-explained, they tend to lose their magic.… show more.

My second love in literature is unreliable narrators, and from word one, it’s clear the protagonist in John Dies at the End is the worst offender.

There are few likable characters to be found in this book, and none of them are the protagonist. I fell in love with the main character’s sarcastic and often salacious take on monsters, zombies, and everything in between. Every scene feels like a joke to the narrator despite the death and carnage that seems to follow in his wake.

More than any of that, this book felt completely unique. I’ve never read anything quite like it. The words crack like a whip, there’s no slowing down, and even as I re-read lines, I felt like I was starting to lose my mind along with the protagonist. That’s a powerful tale.

McCarthy’s second novel is an underappreciated masterpiece, one that combines the author’s distinct style and notoriously difficult subject matter with a genuinely sublime vision of the world. Simultaneously a horror novel, a historical fiction, a Gnostic heresy, a cosmic joke, and act of spiritual seeking, I cannot recommend it enough.  

This is another book that really hit me right between the eyes as a kid, and revisiting it with my kids as an adult, it’s nothing short of just creepy weirdness.

Guillermo Del Toro once said that kids' stories should be frightening, and this definitely fits the bill. The best part about it is how short the stories are, too, so I was able to break it up with my kid into a number of sittings.

Perhaps my favorite author of all time is Edgar Allan Poe, but HP Lovecraft is certainly within the running of my top five, perhaps three. His fiction is predicated upon the idea that we understand very little about the nature of reality and are ourselves rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

This notion in and of itself is rather humbling and petrifying. Not to mention the fact that Lovecraft’s work is downright cool, rife with slime, tentacles, and other unknown and indescribable horrors from beyond the cosmic veil of outer space…and beneath the ocean, which is without a doubt the scariest place on earth.

I am one of those people who were really into Lovecraft until they discovered he was a huge racist and homophobe, among other things; the contemporary reclamation of Lovecraft’s iconic mythology is delicious, and this book is a wonderfully eerie, weird entry into the new canon.

This book checks a lot of my personal boxes, like secretive government experiments, shady, half-revealed lore, and lyrical writing. I’m a huge fan of stories where you know just enough about what’s going on to keep up, and the characters are so sympathetic that you’ll follow the mystery for their sake alone. 

In the ongoing debates over artificial general intelligence (AGI), Judea Pearl is taking a firm stand: He argues that an intelligent robot should be able to reason about causality and that the currently fashionable approaches to AI miss this aspect.

A celebrated AI researcher and a Turing Prize laureate, Pearl has developed an amazingly original approach to this problem. This book is a high-end popular exposition of his approach.

But it’s so much more than that. It’s a history of statistics and its conflicted attitude to causality. It’s a story of heroes (or villains?) in this history. And it’s a scientific autobiography that describes Pearl’s journey. Pearl likes picking fights with the AI community, statisticians, or economists. He’s boastful, provocative, extremely intelligent, and knows how to tell a story.

As it did to other parents all around the world, the murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 chilled me to the bone. What kind of monster could kill an innocent child and leave her violated dead body in the basement of her home? And if it was possible to make it even worse, to do it on Christmas night. Police investigators seem to have made the child’s mother Patsy their number one suspect and completely ruled out JonBenet’s father John. The author rules him straight back in—hence the title of the book. I have read most of the books written about this sad case and in my opinion this one is the best. Doc G backs up everything he says with evidence and facts and you end up finding it difficult to disagree with him.

What is creativity, and what makes it possible? If a new idea came from nothing, would it be magic? If a new idea were generated by recombining old ones, would it really be “creative”? In this book, Margaret Boden, a distinguished philosopher of science, thinks through what creativity really is, whether it takes the form of a world-altering advance in science or a novel jazz improvisation. To help understand human creativity, the book compares it to the workings of computer programs—ones capable of generating art or music that at least appears creative. Readers who have followed more recent developments in artificial intelligence will be able to consider for themselves whether machine creativity is, or could be, a reality. The book helped me think about what it means to create an “authentic” poem.

As I write these lines, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention.

This is largely due to ChatGpt recently bursting onto the scene. But even before ChatGpt began making its mark, AI was often in the news. Some have expressed worry that it will take our jobs, others that it will reinforce systemic oppression by making racially or otherwise discriminatory decisions, and some have even voiced concerns that one day a superintelligent AI might pose an existential threat to humanity.

In the midst of all this, what might get lost is what AI is, what it's capable of doing, and what its limitations are. Wenger's book is intended to address all of these questions. It manages to do so in a way which goes into some of the mathematics of AI systems and yet remain accessible to a lay audience.

After laying out the technical aspects of AI,… show more.