100 Books Like Zero Sum Game

Confession time: I tend to be picky about mermaid stories because life under the sea is such a dramatic difference from our reality that it’s often hard to really reflect that difference. In this book, you never forget that these people aren’t human, and you never lose their connection to the sea. It’s everywhere, from the way they think about distances to their relationships with the other creatures around them to the way Yetu’s disabilities are handled.

In the same way, the trauma that created their people was always lingering at the forefront of my mind as I read, even when it wasn’t the subject at hand. This is another one where my experience was elevated even further by the audiobook, as narrated by Daveed Diggs. 

On the planet of January, one side is in permanent daylight and the other side is permanent night, with people managing to live on a strip of moderate light between the two extremes.

Sophie, a shy teenager, breaks the rules and is sent to the dark side to die, only she survives.  While she is in the dark, she meets telepathic creatures who, despite their terrifying visage, are kind-hearted—a shock to someone raised in a community who believes the creatures (and others) are awful because of the way they look.

Together with her best friend, Bianca, they decide to save the human race, against all dark odds, including secret outlaws. 

This TV series would showcase all the strange glory of Anders, along with the emotional depth that will have us rooting for our young heroines who literally go between the darkness and the light. Hey, J.J. Abrams, you listenin’?

A lot of speculative fiction involves “basic” technologies like animal domestication, farming, and written language. This well-organized, thoroughly sourced non-fiction book will tell you just how difficult developing all that stuff was on our planet, let alone in whatever fictional universes you may find these technologies in! I will never again take charcoal, or the concept of zero, for granted.

Aside from the book’s valuable content, its language is simple. The author integrates the facts into the fiction that our time machine has broken down, stranding us in a previous era where we are a long, arduous journey away from ever eating microwaved ramen again. North also points out, at every opportunity, all the ridiculousness and hilarity involved in invention, civilization, and attempting to do everything by ourselves. Please, read the footnotes in this one.

If you, like me, have to consciously choose to read more poetry, this is a fascinating book to add to your collection. The poems’ subjects range from pop culture to body horror to the titular implications of algorithms and AI, and every one of them is a well-structured look at an apocalypse, large or small. Chances are excellent that you will encounter an English word you can’t readily define. Many of the poems are illustrated with haunting and/or humorous line art which even the ebook format renders well. Everything ends, but not every description of those endings are as beautiful as the ones in this book.

Picture books are a unique genre because there are really three people who participate in telling the story – the author, the illustrator, and the children who are reading and/or listening. With each page turn, ADA Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine brings us to another time and allows us to become part of that history – a time before computers and other electronic devices proliferated our lives and before women in science were accepted. The lush illustrations and the lyrical text capture my heart each time I read this book, and I love how we get a small peek into the life of the main character’s famous parents, Lord Byron, and Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke.

Dava Sobel is the unquestionable queen when it comes to writing the history of women in science. You can’t go wrong in choosing anything she’s written, but I particularly enjoyed this group portrait of the women hired as “human computers” at the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s to interpret astronomical data and observations collected by the male astronomers.

While some of these women were trained scientists, many were simply wives, sisters, or daughters of the Harvard astronomers. Sobel deftly shows how, when given a chance, women were capable of incredible scientific inquiry. I love all of the vivid scenes Sobel recreates and how she is able to bring these women to life so eloquently. 

Mandy Keifetz’s book is about grief over a lover’s suicide, but her voice is so wise and amusing that her story didn’t make me sad.

I’ve lost humans; we all have. I lost my best friend and my best dog. How can we grasp what was there and now is gone? I instantly related to this story—the author is a fellow New Jersey girl living at the misfit margins and drifting along, gig by gig. She’s scrappy and willing to do what it takes to survive. I love being swept into a curious mind through a book.

I enjoyed the book’s spiral narrative, which drills down on loss with the sense of a dog chasing its own tail in fury and glee. And then, yes, there is Pascal’s Wager. Why not keep one foot on the side of belief in an afterlife or soul’s lingering on? What do you have… show more.

The daughter of a poet and a scientific mother, Ada is shown growing up in the early 1800s with both imagination and a bent toward math. As a girl, she dreams of building a steam-powered flying horse. She’s fascinated by machines and eager to tour factories. Seeing how cards are used to set patterns for cloth on looms inspires her to create the first computer program. Whimsical illustrations adorn clear explanations of calculations. At the book’s end we see Ada in red-striped stockings and green goggles flying over symbols of some of what her ideas will bring to the world.

Math reigned supreme in the USSR. I was never particularly good at it. I had to immigrate to the United States to marry an American nuclear engineer turned math and physics teacher. In Divide Me By Zero the heroine’s widowed mother describes love in mathematical terms. The passage reminded me of my husband. I forced him to listen to me read it out loud to him. “Wow,” he said. "That’s hot." Read this book for the heart-wrenching story—and the hot math.

I've always been inspired by the story of the Black women mathematicians at NASA — the "human computers" who calculated the formulas to launch rockets and astronauts into space. Shetterly's book brings them to life, making their feats even more remarkable, especially given their tools (adding machines, pencils, and slide rules) and challenges (they worked in the Jim Crow South).

The four amazing women the book focuses on—Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden—deserved to be brought to light. There's a movie version that conveys their brilliance in a dramatized way, but the book gets into depth in ways the movie can't. It's a great narrative about what it takes to be an innovator, no matter if you're a woman or a man.