Here are 94 books that Suspicious Minds fans have personally recommended if you like
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In 2011, after years reporting on media and technology for Wired, I published The Art of Immersion, about how digital technology is changing the way we tell stories. Then I joined Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab, started the executive education course Strategic Storytelling, and put together the toolkit that inspired The Sea We Swim In. The ostensible subject of all this was storytelling, but the common thread, I came to realize, was the role stories play: They facilitate pattern recognition, the skill we need to make sense of our random world. The pattern that’s governed the past 15 years of my life, in other words, has been pattern recognition.
Obviously, some of us are more aware of patterns than others. Simon Baron-Cohen—a psychologist at Cambridge, and one of the world’s leading authorities on autism—has found that a facility for pattern recognition is strongly correlated not only with gender (males predominate) but with autism.
He led a survey of 600,000 Britons aimed at determining if they were primarily empathizers, adept at connecting with other people, or systemizers, more interested in detecting patterns and learning how things work. Those at the extreme end of systemizing were considerably more likely to be autistic.
Baron-Cohen’s empathizer/systemizer questionnaire is included at the back of the book. Taking the bait, I found myself on the cusp of extreme. Which may explain a lot.
A groundbreaking argument about the link between autism and ingenuity. Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy thousand years, from the first tools to the digital revolution. How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species's inventiveness. However, these abilities exact a great cost on autistic people, including social…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a scientist, educator, successful entrepreneur, and author. I believe that human civilization is threatened by the wonderful and dangerous technologies that we created in the last two centuries: fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, gene editing, AI, and social media. As a creator of technologies, I feel responsible that more hasn’t been done to properly control them. My current mission is to sound an alarm about the potential tyranny of technology through my novels, 100 Years to Extinction and the sequel, 12 Years to AI Singularity, on my website and on social media. While the recommended books on my list are nonfiction, my fictional story presents the science and technology accurately as nonfiction would.
I loved the way Nexus looks at human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world.
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. Will we lose that power to AI? I believe Harari adds an important historical perspective to complement Kurzweil’s view of the future.
I found Harari’s account about the role of Facebook’s AI in the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar to be fascinating.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.
“Striking original . . . A historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly.”—The Economist
“This deeply important book comes at a critical time as we all think through the implications of AI and automated content production. . . . Masterful and provocative.”—Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests,…
In 2011, after years reporting on media and technology for Wired, I published The Art of Immersion, about how digital technology is changing the way we tell stories. Then I joined Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab, started the executive education course Strategic Storytelling, and put together the toolkit that inspired The Sea We Swim In. The ostensible subject of all this was storytelling, but the common thread, I came to realize, was the role stories play: They facilitate pattern recognition, the skill we need to make sense of our random world. The pattern that’s governed the past 15 years of my life, in other words, has been pattern recognition.
Gladwell became famous for uncovering patterns in the social behavior of humans; I wanted to find the patterns—some would say formulas—that characterize his books. Why are these books so popular? Why are critics so disdainful?
Here he revisits his first, a huge bestseller, and finds that the model of viral contagion that seemed hopeful and bright a quarter-century ago now looks dark and foreboding.
What makes both books work is a combination of diligent reporting, narrative sleight-of-hand, and a nose for patterns. “There must be a set of rules,” he writes, “buried somewhere below the surface.” No, his rules don’t always hold. But our need for patterns that explain the chaos around us has a lot to do with his success.
Most Anticipated in: AARP | Associated Press | Time Magazine | Oprah Daily | Chicago Tribune | Literary Hub | Publishers Weekly | Publishers Lunch
Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light.
Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
In 2011, after years reporting on media and technology for Wired, I published The Art of Immersion, about how digital technology is changing the way we tell stories. Then I joined Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab, started the executive education course Strategic Storytelling, and put together the toolkit that inspired The Sea We Swim In. The ostensible subject of all this was storytelling, but the common thread, I came to realize, was the role stories play: They facilitate pattern recognition, the skill we need to make sense of our random world. The pattern that’s governed the past 15 years of my life, in other words, has been pattern recognition.
The most basic, the most life-determining story is the one you tell yourself about yourself. Who are you? How did you get to be that way? And by the way, what is reality?
I reviewed this book for The Wall Street Journal and found it eye-opening. I was struck by Berns’s account of “how other people’s narratives worm their way into our brains,” creating a consensus version of reality he calls “a shared delusion.”
This delusion can become self-limiting, even self-destructive. And so we have counterfactuals, the narratives of possibiity that allow us to escape these constraints—to change our story, if we have the will to do so.
A New York Times–bestselling author reveals how the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, are critical to our lives
We all know we tell stories about ourselves. But as psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns argues in The Self Delusion, we don't just tell stories; we are the stories. Our self-identities are fleeting phenomena, continually reborn as our conscious minds receive, filter, or act on incoming information from the world and our memories.
Drawing on new research in neuroscience, social science, and psychiatry, Berns shows how our stories and our self-identities are temporary and therefore ever changing. Berns shows how we…
I read widely and in many genres, so coming up with a thematic list was a difficult task. However, in working on my forthcoming novel Dead Ends, in which a quiet neighborhood descends into paranoia and insanity driven by fear, politics, and technology, I sought out novels that engaged with conspiratorial thinking and violence. I admire writers who don’t hold back and fully engage with their characters and material, particularly if it means going to dark, imaginative and strange places in their work. Please keep an eye out for Dead Ends, coming from Flame Tree Press in 2023.
Nick Mamatas never writes a typical novel and his latest offering is no exception. Built on the very real rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding mass shooting events in the United States, Mamatas' work offers hints and innuendos throughout of an invisible force seeking to create chaos, death, and destruction in collusion with a conspiracy theorist radio host fanning the flames. Like a real-life conspiracy theory, it’s all connected — somehow. Mamatas’ ability to draw a plot line and themes so at odds with our general perception of reality, the story, sadly, begins to reflect our real world of conspiracy theories and political paranoia in what has become a bat-shit age of American life.
"There was video of the second shooter. There was video."
In the first reports of every mass shooting, there's always mention of a second shooter-two sets of gunshots, a figure seen fleeing the scene-and they always seem to evaporate as events are pieced together.
Commissioned by a fringe publisher to investigate the phenomenon, journalist Mike Karras finds himself tailed by drones, attacked by a talk radio host, badgered by his all-knowing (and maybe all-powerful) editor, and teaming up with an immigrant family of conspiracy buffs.
Together, they uncover something larger and stranger than anyone could imagine-a technomystical plot to 'murder…
I’m a law professor who, among other things, writes about the culture and law of secrecy. I’ve written two books: Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, the second edition of which was published in 2008, and The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (2017). I hold a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I teach at the University of Florida.
Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style is more a work of historiography than history and attempted to explain the rise of a right-wing “paranoia” to a liberal intellectual audience in the early 1960s. By contrast, Jesse Walker’s book offers a more detailed, engaging, and sympathetic history of U.S. conspiracy theories and the individuals and groups who have made and circulated them. It’s funny and deadpan, with a keen eye for subcultural details and the singular American oddballs that have traveled from the margins to the mainstream. As Walker demonstrates, Qanon is not the first example of a bizarre, syncretic set of beliefs that has attracted a surprisingly large number of adherents.
The United States of Paranoia is a history of America's demons. Conspiracy theories, Walker explains, aren't just a feature of the fringe: They've been a potent force across the political spectrum, in the center as well as the extremes, from the colonial era to the present. Walker argues that conspiracy stories need to be read not just as claims to be either believed or debunked but as folklore. When a tale takes hold, it says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I’ve been fascinated by how people behave and how in-group bias can change who they are. That interest led me into computational sociology (I study human behavior for a living), with my work appearing in The New York Times, USA Today, WIRED, and more. But my deepest fascination has always been with people’s propensity for the horrific. I LOVE the liminal space where fear, secrecy, and belonging collide. Being neurodivergent, living in a small Virginia town with my wife and our neurodivergent, queer son, I see how communities can both shelter and suffocate. That tension is why I’m drawn to stories saturated in dread, beauty, and what lives in the shadows.
I’ve never read another book that got under my skin like A Head Full of Ghosts.
I felt unsettled, not just by the horror, but by the way Tremblay made me question memory, faith, and family. I remember finishing it and just sitting there, trying to figure out what was what. It’s rare for a book to make me feel compassionate and terrified at the same time.
That’s why I recommend it: because it doesn’t leave you when you close the cover. It lingers, and I love that.
The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to halt Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show.Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls the terrifying events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets…
Researching DevilsGame, about an Internet meltdown caused by an unknown evil, I exposed myself to some harrowing truths. I learned how astonishingly frail our internet ecosystem is and how imperiled it is by bad actors who have burrowed deeply and often invisibly into its infrastructure. So, beyond writing a fictional thriller, I was moved to ring a warning bell! And I hope by formatting DevilsGame as “hyperlinked fiction,” mixing real news sites with fictional sites created for the novel, readers will experience the story in a way that parallels and parodies the way we experience real, live crises these days: navigating from fact to fiction, often without observing the boundaries.
I was impressed by the way author Auerbach distills what has changed in our relationship with the internet over the past 20 years: there has been a gradual but momentous shift from “search” on the web” to “recommendations” offered by the web. Initially, we searched for what we were interested in–but now, networks tell us what we are interested in!
Auerbach defines the meganet as that “new creature…born [to] manage the data boom and absorb, filter, and recommend it,” and I was sobered by his graphic warning of the dangers that emerge from “off-loading our decision-making” to the internet.
How the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives - as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics - are transforming life, society, culture, and politics.
David Auerbach's exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China's Social Credit System and India's Aadhaar.
I grew up in the 1970s, still in contention for America’s most paranoid decade (thanks, Watergate). Practically everything I watched, listened to or read (right down to my beloved superhero comics) was asking, what’s hiding behind the world around you? I don’t think of myself as a paranoid guy – I don’t, for instance, believe in a real life Deep State – but these are the sorts of stories that resonate for me. Taken less literally, they do ask worthwhile and still disturbingly relevant questions: what is beneath the world you know and see every day? What is right in front of you, both good and bad, that you aren’t seeing?
Agent Scylla was dead, but they brought him back because someone is holding a contest, a contest to see who can create the deadliest weapon. As Scylla navigates a world he’s been out of touch with for too long, he finds that there’s something on its outskirts, pulling all the wrong strings. A thrilling espionage adventure drenched in paranoia, this was the most fun I ever had being terrified to learn the truth. The only book I ever read that I literally could not put down. Its momentum – the need to find out what the contest was about and where the search would lead Scylla – was so powerful, I could not stop my fingers from turning the pages.
When I started writing The Majesties, I wanted the narrative to be a continual excavation of secrets, one after the other. This sort of multi-layered story has always intrigued me and my fascination with it has influenced all my written work so far. I am particularly fascinated by books where characters unconsciously keep secrets from themselves, and where the line between the “real” and the fantastic is blurred beyond recognition. Sometimes it’s not just about solving a mystery, but articulating its mysteriousness—giving it flesh and bone, stitching its parts together, and bringing it to life through words.
This novel starts out in an almostMrs. Dallowayish way—Lovely has gone out for the day to buy something. Then you realise that Lovely at the age of forty has never gone out by herself for a day. Then, as the day unfolds, the novel brings you backward into the past as you find out about Lovely and Beauty’s paranoid and controlling mother, the oppressiveness of their home life, the dark secret at the heart of their parents’ marriage…
