100 More Books from the 21st Century (Part 2)

Let’s not drag this out too long.

The first half of this list is here. Non-listicle stuff at the end. Scroll down for some good links.

‘The 100 Most Interesting* To Me Books Published in the 21st Century.’

*Interesting in a positive way, as measured by memorability, discussion, recommendation and ‘oh, damn, that book’ factor.

Last week, I got through to 2012 - which was roughly (conveniently!) the halfway point. Here’s 2013 through to the present day:

• Robert Jackson Bennett - American Elsewhere (2013) - Bennett is a phenomenally under-appreciated author, and I think some of this still stems from his early career with genre-hopping standalones. American Elsewhere is a small town horror/science fiction blend, that’s King-esque in its use of a small town, but - I think - a lot more brutal in the way that it tries to discuss ‘Americana’ and a notion of the American Dream.

• Roberto Calasso - The Art of the Publisher (2013) - Another one I cite all the time. This book is half ‘yelling at clouds’, half 'aspiration as to what publishing should be’. I use Calasso’s notion of form a lot beyond publishing as well. Does your brand have form? (No.)

• Katie Coyle - Vivian Versus the Apocalypse (2013) - Compiling this list, there were two books that were Oh wow, THAT book! moments, both, ironically, from 2013. I was obsessed with Vivian Apple, but for some reason, it just dropped off my radar. There was a sequel and then Coyle seems to have stopped writing. Boo.

• Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad (editors) - We See a Different Frontier (2013) - I owe this book a lot for teaching me about global science fiction and getting me out of my shell. Although a lot more rough and ready than, say, the new (and very good) The Best of World SF series, there’s something inherently energetic and rebellious about the bootstrapped vibe.

• Saad Hossain - Escape from Baghdad! (2013) - Madcap pulp heist and a brilliant fusion of myth and modernity. Hossain’s more recent work is more polished (while still being excellent), but the page-turning mayhem of Escape! will always stick with me.

• Charlie Human - Apocalypse Now Now (Baxter, #1) (2013) - Human’s series (duology?) hovers near the top of my ‘this should be filmed’ list.

• Leila Sales - This Song Will Save Your Life (2013) - The other Oh wow, THAT book! book. Absolutely terrific YA novel about a girl who finds herself through being a secret DJ. It is silly and great. Sales kept writing, unlike Coyle, but moved to middle grade. I need to catch up with the backlist. I reread it a few days ago and can confirm that it is, indeed, still remarkable. If you’ll excuse the digression into actual strategy stuff, one of my spiels is that communications planning is about picking your metaphor. Not necessarily for the project, but for how you approach the planning challenge. At various times in my career, my metaphor-of-choice has been editing (go figure), curating (see below), military strategy (see below) or even DMing (I’m a nerd). Were I even slightly musically proficient, DJing would be way up on the list, and the way that Sales discusses the trade and craft as a combination of technical and ‘soft’ skills is absolutely glorious. More campaign planning as beat-matching, please. (Also, this is a great book.)

• Sarah Weinman (editor) - Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (2013) - I read a lot of anthologies (support your local anthologist!), and it is not a surprise that there have been a few on the list. None of them, though, are on here because of the individual stories, in that, I’m flagging it as ‘golly, that Margaret Millar piece was a banger’. These are antholgoies that I find interesting because they’re all very, very good anthologies as a whole: they have something to say as a holistic work, a consistent theme, and an interesting point of view. Weinman’s work here is a slim (but defining) introduction to the ‘domestic thriller’, putting these important and overlooked genre into its contemporary and historical context.

• Becky Chambers - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014)

• Stark Holborn - Nunslinger (2014)

• Morgan Matson - Since You’ve Been Gone (2014) - Even I’m surprised by the number of YA novels on the list. But this is another one (like the Dessen, qv) that is not about ‘a floppy-haired boy solved my problems!’, and instead about discovering self-reliance, inner strength, and a positive friend group. Also funny.

• Hans Ulrich Obrist - Ways of Curating (2014) - Obrist is passe now, right? I kind of feel the curating ‘moment’ passed, but, man, I still love this metaphor and fall back on it all the time.

• Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni - Red Sonja (2014) - I’m wildly, madly in love with the second arc (collected as The Art of Blood and Fire), but Simone’s entire run is spectacular fantasy.

• James Smythe - No Harm Can Come to a Good Man (2014) - Another one of those authors who writes something different every time he picks up a pen (or whatever authors use these days; I expect a pen wasn’t actually involved, but I digress). No Harm has always been one of my favourites of Smythe’s particularly harrowing ouevre, and it is one of those books that has proven very prescient in terms of our relationship with both politics and technology. It is the sort of science fiction that might be soon outpaced by the weirdness of reality, but, at this moment, it would be hard to find a book more relevant to the now. Weirdly fitting to think that this was published in the Last Year of the Great Anglo-American Normalcy™. I look forward to teaching my kid about the Banal Age in-between World Wars II and III.

• John Allison - Giant Days (2015) - This was SUCH a good year for comics. Squirrel Girl, Nimona, The End of Summer were also jostling for position. Perhaps it is recently bias, but I’m giving it to Giant Days. (Also feeling sad for having to drop Bad Machinery.)

• Cecilia Ekback - Wolf Winter (2015) - This book is dark ‘vibes’ before I knew what ‘vibes’ meant.

• Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen - Descender (2015) - Speaking of great comics. I always preferred Descender to the - also great, but more famous - Saga.

• Jillian Tamaki - Supermutant Magic Academy (2015) - Ok, another comic (2015!), but it is very different from the above. It is a - mostly - limited-panel webcomic serial that is part surrealist X-Men parody and part heart-rending teenage ennui. It is deeply weird, a uniquely comicky form of storytelling, and I have a lot of time for it.

• Tiffany Watt Smith - The Book of Human Emotions (2015) - An actual literal collection of vibes, come to think of it.

• Chelsea Cain - Mockingbird (2016) - This series got caught up in the Moment: Trump, marches, etc. There was a lot of dudebro reactionary hate, and the comic didn’t back down. Cain got badly harassed on social media because humans suck. (The industry, as always, totally did hashtags, so everything was fine.) It was also a very good, very funny, very quirky comic. It was delightfully weird.

• Malin Persson Giolito - Quicksand (2016) - This Scandi noir takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting, focusing on the trial of a young woman who is accused of being complicit. It is excellent on many levels: as tense noir, as legal drama, as domestic thriller. Is society looking for someone to blame? Or was she actually involved? It is a perceptive, insightful, very sad book. It is also incredibly bittersweet. The shooting is never portrayed as anything less than an apocalyptic, seismic, uniquely terrible event. Something that should never happen, and certainly never, ever be repeated. The entire society is stricken with absolute horror at the notion of children being shot in a school, and that has stuck with me. It feels (even as it did at the time) like a window into an alternate universe, where priorities aren’t, y’know, fucked.

• Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (editors) - The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) - Given the size of this volume and the fact that my mate David dragged me along on his weekly reread project, the BBoSF will live rent-free in my head FOREVER. But (see above), this is a great anthology as an anthology: the VanderMeers have a really punchy point of view on what science fiction is and what significant science fiction is. It is, as a great anthology should be, far, far more than the sum of its parts.

• Susan Wolfe - Escape Velocity (2016) - A legacy from my big mysteries read. A con artist becomes an in-house counsel at a Silicon Valley tech firm. Hijinks ensue! It is a very televisual book: it feels like a Netflix series in structure. This feels relatively common now, and is a storytelling structure I seem to stumble on a lot - especially in romance-related categories and/or by authors from fan-fiction backgrounds. Escape Velocity is neither of those things, and is a very entertaining legal thriller that was, in many ways, ahead of its time.

• Silvia Moreno Garcia - Prime Meridian (2017) - Another strong entry about ordinary people in extraordinary settings (in this case: a near future Mexico City, while dreaming of Mars).

• Jordan Harper - She Rides Shotgun (2017) - The British edition was retitled A Lesson in Violence, which is a GODDAMN SHAME.

• Will Hill - After the Fire (2017) - Another harrowing ‘in the wake of a disaster’ book. I’m fun at parties.

• Darren McGarvey - Poverty Safari (2017) - McGarvey’s book (thanks for the rec, Clare) has informed a huge part of my thinking. To the point where I am that guy at workshops that keeps interjecting ‘LET LIBRARIES BE LIBRARIES’. Amongst other things, I wish more policy-makers had read this ahead of the pandemic. I think we, as a society, would’ve been better prepared for the ‘second-order’ effects that come with digital poverty and the removal of public spaces.

• Sami Shah - Boy of Earth and Fire (2017) - This is American Gods with teeth, which is a description I hate to use because I like this book so much more than American Gods. (Also, I think I’m done referencing - much less recommending - Gaiman for a while, so that’s that. Anyway, Shah deserves better than a long parenthetical about someone else, so…). This book - a fusion of Shah’s duology - has a young adult structure: kid, secret world, myths are real, quest, etc. But it is so unrepentently hard-hitting that it almost feels horror-inflected. Myth is not nice. If fantasy did overlap with reality, there would be a lot of horrible things with big teeth that don’t hold us in very high regard hopping around. Shah writes a great adventure with brilliantly terrifying fantastic elements - the type that make us grateful for reality.

• Angie Thomas - The Hate U Give (2017) - I have seen a disturbing number of ‘Top 100’ lists that don’t include this book. By every concievable metric: influence, scale, contemporary relevance, sheer commercial success, number of imitiators… it is one of the most important books of the past 25 years.

• John Lewis Gaddis - On Grand Strategy (2018)

• Drew Williams - The Stars Now Unclaimed (Universe After, #1) (2018)

• Sarah Dessen - The Rest of the Story (2019) - The DessenVerse is like the inverse of Gossip Girl (qv). The latter, the books at least, are snarky and biting and extremely self-aware of the painfully privileged world in which they take place. Dessen’s books are not. They’re about very talented, beautiful, much-loved people going to quirky small-town places and learning - thanks to a summer waitressing job, a floppy-haired boy and some Girl Power - that they are talented, beautiful and much-loved. They’re sentimental and very sincere, and a real sense that this is the everygirl and/or Quintessential American Experience™. Yet… I did the math in a previous newsletter and a ‘Dessen Girl’ is something like one-tenth of one percent of the American population. I really, really enjoy these books, but this WB-ian projection of the Middle Class experience is, for most people, just as much of a fantasy as Gossip Girl’s Upper East Side (or, for that matter, Middle-Earth).

• Jonathan Metzl - Dying of Whiteness (2019) - Metzl tackles the fundamental question of ‘why do people vote (or otherwise behave) against their own self-interest?’. He looks at places badly affected by gun violence who vehemently oppose gun control and others where people actively fought against health care measures, fully knowing it would impact their own quality of life. These are not, Metzl argues, ‘irrational’ decisions - they are rational choices made by people who are weighing these personal costs against their values. It is a fascinating book with huge communications significance.

• Claire North - The Gameshouse (2019) - Rules are made to be broken. (That’s a reference both to this incredible book and the fact that I have put this author on the list twice. I’m clever.)

• Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra Two? (2019)

• Nina Jankowicz - How to Lose the Information War (2020)

• Lavanya Lakshminarayan - Analog/Digital or The Ten Percent Thief (2020) - I’m such a ‘I read it before it got republished in the UK with a new title’ hipster, but also, I did. I read it on vinyl, as the artist intended.

• Adrian Miller - Black Smoke (2021) - Three reasons. First, it is a book about taking a seemingly frivolous thing very seriously, and giving it the attention and respect it deserves. Second, that thing is BBQ, which is meaningful to me - personally, and my (wave hands) ‘culture’. Third, it is a great book and fun to read.

• Erica Satifka - How to Get to Apocalypse (2021) - I recommend her so much! Over the past few years I’ve (shock) spent a lot of time lurking around cyberpunk spaces on the interent, and, invariably, someone wanders in and goes ‘nO TrUe cYbeRpUnK sIncE GiBsoN!’. Which is annoying, but it does mean I get to shove this collection down someone’s throat. Satifka is like if you rebooted the genre in 2020, shedding the 1980s aesthetic entirely and thinking in completely contemporary terms.

• Craig Calcaterra - Rethinking Fandom (2022) - We’re definitely in the territory where I’m building thematic bookends. There’s a lovely golden threads that links this back to Henry Jenkins and possibly even Adam Roberts. I’m fascinated by identity (ooh, Elif Shafak link too!), and how fandom is an identity that we choose. Calcaterra’s book looks at sport, specifically, but applies in a much broader sense.

• Emily McGovern - Twelve Percent Dread (2022)

• E.J. Swift - The Coral Bones (2022)- One of the many things that struck me while reading this glorious book is that, at some point, speculative fiction moved from what if drastic climate change to what happens after drastic climate change. It is no longer a possibility to be explored through fiction; it is a certainty that provides a platform for other stories to tell. Cheering.

• Zoe Thorogood - It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (2022) - Another I’ve written about recently. And another one that made me sniffle a bit, so, I guess that theme keeps going.

• W.P. Wiles - The Last Blade Priest (2022) - The eagle-eyed will have spotted an absolute dearth of fantasy since (scrolls up) 2013. This came as a surprise to me, too. It isn’t that I wasn’t reading fantasy - this list is by publication date, and I read all sorts of new, newish and old books in any given year. But there’s a rather suspicious ten year gap where I have failed to tag any fantasy books as super-interesting to me. When reading TLBP for The Kitschies, I distinctly remember the feeling of being excited about a fantasy book again. It is a big magic epic in a secondary world with all sorts of characters and… I was loving every page of it. I compare it to Abercrombie (qv) and Parker (qv), but it isn’t ‘just’ a throwback: the major element that’s shared with those two is the sense of surprise. Finding freshness is wonderful. Is fantasy back? Am I back? What’s happening? But got to love the thematic resonance of #2 and #98 occupying the same part of my brain.

• Rebecca Yarros - Fourth Wing (2023) - Fantasy again! BRING ON THE TRUMPETS. I binge-read this book over the course of a plane flight, and then binge-read the sequel in a night, and, honestly, I’d happily do both again. This book is fun. We spend a huge portion of our lives reading, watching, listening or otherwise having Content Inflicted Upon Us. Never feel bad about reading something that makes you happy. #livelaughlovesexydragonriders

• Sarah Adler - Happy Medium (2024) - Round off the list with a very charming contemporary romance about a fraudulent medium who accidentally sees an actual ghost and also there’s a sexy farmer. After a half-dozen books that brought me to tears, a dozen more that are heavy introspective pieces about culture and a couple about school shootings (?!)… it feels good to end on laughter.

Skimming back across the hundred, the main lesson is an obvious one - and common sense. Books that made me emosh are more memorable. This is not a shock! That’s the most fundamental principle in communications: emotion makes for connection and recall. In this Very Scientific Experiment (n=1), it is not surprising to find many of the books are here because they made me laugh and/or cry. That made them more interesting at the time and more memorable later (even decades later).

things I’m reading (online)

The Katsuification of Britain (by Vittles, via Web Curios):

Garbage Day on the reactivation of hope and cringe:

Anne and I have a regular column in ParSec called In the Weeds, the most recent was on the topic of ‘community’. It is (inadvertantly and depressingly) topical, given the recent ‘revelations’ about superstar authors.

Futurist Paul Graham Raven’s latest newsletter gently barbecues lot of the sacred cows of strategy. As someone that’s done a lot of ‘comms for good’ work in areas such as climate change, his dissection of the false dichotomy between ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘structural forces’ is a good one - and I’ll absolutely be nicking it from now on:

A charter for a better place to play & chill together (Discord, via Rachel Kowert). Principles for behaviour based on 30-odd global focus groups with teens. It is very tidy, and a little gimmicky, but also a nice way to develop and present the values of what Discord is, what it does, and who it is for. I like the four principles (‘come as you are’, ‘what’s yours is yours’, ‘take space, make space’ and ‘know the deets’):

I like the way Discord expresses the ‘your role / our role’ power-sharing, and where, as the ‘structure’, Discord can support the individual. With the power of coffee in me, I’m just going to go ahead and link this to the two quotes above - when it comes to communities, everyone is complicit - and everyone has a role to play.

This reminds me: if you haven’t left Twitter yet, there’s no reason to put it off any further. It isn’t getting better. Your life will be better without it, and by leaving it, you’ll make the world an incrementally better place.

I know there are some very good people who stay on board deliberately and who are consciously trying not to abandon the space. They want to show that positive voices are still welcome there. That’s a noble objective, but one that, I believe, is no longer achievable. Twitter is no longer a contested space, nor a space worth contesting. It isn’t a town square, it is a KKK rally. Positive voices aren’t welcome there, and shouldn’t be encouraged to stay. Leave and role model leaving; encourage others to leave with you.