2 Books Like The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather's Whiskers

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!

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.… show more.