Books like Lambda — picked by fans

I read this while on vacation, and though it was a wonderful trip, I kept thinking how much I was looking forward to getting back to the hotel room to continue reading.

The protagonist’s all-consuming job working for a tech company made me realize how much I wished I had used social media less. I loved how the book made us see how Mae’s job, at first exciting, took her to places she didn’t want to go.

In today’s online world, the completely interconnected one of this book is a cautionary tale.

For my final choice, I recommend a work of fiction that made me think deeply about the future of money, markets, institutions, and society. I started reading Ari Juels’ book out of polite interest since I met him, and I can personally testify to his smartness and niceness.

Once I started reading it, however, I couldn’t put it down! It’s a very well-crafted story that draws the reader into the world of blockchains and digital assets with, I thought, very human and believable characters. I can tell you firsthand that trying to write a novel about the future of money is incredibly difficult—I’ve tried! I take my hat off to him for this excellent work, which I hope will cause more people to take the future of money and all it implies more seriously. 

Is tech a science? Close enough.

I was on my way home from the grocery store, and I heard Naomi Alderman in an interview about this, her latest book, on NPR’s All Things Considered. It's a good thing I didn’t buy ice cream that day because I sat in the car in the driveway, listening until the end. Hearing her, I knew I had to read the book. And when I did, I couldn’t put it down (the reading equivalent of sitting in the driveway listening to the radio?).

Populated with extraordinary characters, from genuinely good to incredibly greedy, this book both frightened me and gave me hope, but it never let me go until, well, after the last page (yeah, there’s a little bit of a trick at the end).

Future Politics takes the conversation to the societal level, looking at how technology will change the fabric of our communities. Susskind brings an expert eye to a sweeping body of knowledge and resists simple narratives. This book is dense, but worth the effort for those looking to understand the dynamics that will shape society as we know it, for better and for worse.

Susskind is a scholar of history and politics and brings that love of fundamental political questions to this work. I enjoy how he anchors modern questions about the implications of technology for freedom, for example, in much older debates about freedom and the State.

I had never thought much about what technology was and where it came from before reading this book. This book opened my eyes and made me understand the history of humanity and the history of technology are one and the same.

The book vividly describes the theory of technology’s origin and evolution. In doing so, the author reminds us that technology creates our world, which in turn creates our wealth, our economy, and our way of being.

Like so much else Mumford wrote, this book is a volcano of provocative ideas that I found revelatory when I first read it and still do. Published in 1970, it summarizes much of Mumford’s thinking about the largely invisible and growing power structure he calls the Megamachine that threatens humanity and life on planet Earth.

His earlier writing, including The City in History (1961) and his essay The Natural History of Urbanization (1956), was formative for my own thinking about urban parasitism and aggression. Although a lover of cities, as am I, Mumford was well aware of the consequences of their depredations. 

I loved this book first and foremost for the completeness of the research done including supplemental materials such as sketches, artwork, etc.

How he was able to gather so much information about the roamings, seemingly on a daily basis, of a man that lived 500 years ago is beyond me. I also thought the choice of Alfred Molina to narrate was brilliant as his Italian phrasing and enunciation made all the difference in the world.

In the end, I felt I knew da Vinci on a personal level, which surprised me.

But can you fight the future? Isn’t it inevitable? This is often how tech companies try to make us think, and that anyone who opposes “progress” is a Luddite. But, as Patrick Sale makes clear in this excellent and heartbreaking historical study, the original Luddites—a protest movement that swept the industrial heartland of 19th Century England—were not anti-technology; they merely thought technology should serve people, not profit. Faced with the destruction of their livelihoods and their traditional way of life, they destroyed machines and burnt factories because that was the only outlet they had for their rage and desperation. And when the “inevitable march of progress” comes to trample you too, you may see that they had a point.

An office rivalry between software developer Emma and app developer Rishi takes an interesting turn when they’re sent to Bangalore to work on a project together.

Back in his home country, Rishi’s family pressures him to get married to a woman of the right caste/religion. Emma offers to create an algorithm to help Rishi find the perfect wife who might be a lot closer than he thinks!

This book does a wonderful job of delving into the challenges of an American woman dating an Indian man as well as the dynamics and relationships within an Indian family. Brooke Burroughs brings India to vibrant life on the page, and I felt as though I was falling in love with the country (and Rishi!) along with Emma.

This book completely changed how I thought about the technology that surrounds us, the electric grid, assembly line production, the military-industrial complex, and on and on.

I grew up at the end of the time period Hughes writes about when all these huge technological systems were in place. I didn’t give them a thought. They were like the air we breathe. But they were created during this century, and it was amazing to read about this transformation of our world.

Reading this book, for me, was like learning to see the world I live in anew, to feel the air we breathe.