WIRED’s Picks for the 10 Books You Have to Read This Winter
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Hello, you’ve reached the winter of our discontent. Or, well, the winter wherein we mark the one-year anniversary of Covid-19 lockdowns and, while finding hope in the new vaccines, still must spend quite a bit of time at home, distant from friends and family, unable to go out. One upside to this? It’s the perfect time to catch up on reading. What’s that? You’ve already gone through your quarantine book stash? Fear not, there are tonnes of tomes on the way. Below, you’ll find all of our favorites.
- Courtesy of Riverhead BooksNo One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
The poet and memoirist Patricia Lockwood conveys what the internet does to the human mind better than any other working writer today. She’s been called “the poet laureate of Twitter,” and in her first novel, she captures both the absurdist joys of living online and the profound limitations of doing so. No One Is Talking About This is an autobiographical novel split into two halves, the second part both building on and repudiating the first as the protagonist turns her attention away from the internet and toward a decidedly offline family crisis. Lockwood is an incredibly funny and insightful writer, so I was expecting No One Is Talking About This to be witty and wise. What I wasn’t expecting was how moving it would be. This is a special book. —Kate Knibbs
- Courtesy of HMHBlack Buck
by Mateo Askaripour
The polysemic title of Mateo Askaripour’s debut, Black Buck, is meant as an obvious wink to anyone who’s endured the absurdities of corporate culture as The Only Black Employee. Buck is the name of 22-year-old Darren Vender, or rather, the name he assumes after quitting his job at Starbucks and joining Sumwun, a trendy online startup that provides virtual therapy services. Before long, he’s a top sales associate and the envy of coworkers, but success comes at a cost. At work, Darren is Buck, our endlessly confident hero, but he’s also Buck (as in the slang term for money), Buck (as in the racial slur), and occasionally Buck (as in the linguistic sense of the word; to resist and oppose, to go against). Askaripour suggests that to engage racism in the workplace, where it can be especially noxious, one must also engage privilege and the systems of power that prop people up while holding others down. Thematically, the book is kin to Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow and Boots Riley’s acid-trip of a film, Sorry To Bother You—dark comedies about race, exploitation, labor, and the masks Black people wear to survive “the whiteness of it all” (as a friend once eloquently put it to me). Rhapsodic and incisive, Black Buck is a journey into a post-racial dystopia born of tech-fueled greed and racial ignorance. In other words: It’s a doozy. —Jason Parham
- Courtesy of Tor BooksThe Echo Wife
by Sarah Gailey
Fembot thirst gasps through the science fiction canon. It speaks to a longing some men have to replace human women with yielding woman-shaped constructs. For me, that unexamined yearning for submission has always been a source of simmering unease. It’s a relief that the trope has now come due for subversion. Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife is a creepily personal rendition of what happens when a man in your life wishes you were a doll instead. Dr. Evelyn Caldwell, a brilliant scientist, discovers that her husband is having an affair—and then some. He has used her own research to clone her, minus a few key personality traits. Caldwell’s clone, Martine, has been polished over like a ‘50s housewife from a soap commercial: she is family-oriented, simperingly attentive, obedient, and seems totally unlike Caldwell. It’s barely a spoiler to tell you that the confrontation between this strange trio culminates in murder. The real fun, though, is seeing Caldwell and Martine work together to hide the mess, and in learning that, for Caldwell, this grisly grunt work is hardly new. It’s gross, and totally engrossing. —Emma Grey Ellis
- Courtesy of Simon and SchusterWhite Feminism
by Koa Beck
White feminism is feminism. As Koa Beck lays out in her new book, feminism, whether led by suffragettes or Lean In types, has often focused on goals that benefited middle class, cis, straight, white women more than women of color or queer, trans, or poor women. Even as Black feminists have done the work of organizing and building, their efforts have been overshadowed or ignored in favor of glossy #Girlboss-style feminism. Why? As Beck explains, it’s capitalism. Instead of forming more intersectional coalitions that addressed the needs of, say, Latinx women or trans sex workers, feminism has become about a form of individualism that adheres to the notion that making a lot of money or finding success in business as a woman is a feminist act. To do that, to stop at personal achievement, ignores the need of feminism to address the struggles of all women, to organize for, say, a federal Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights or Black Lives Matter. This is wrong. “The revolution,” Beck writes, “will not be you alone, despite what white feminism has told you.” In other words, more smashing of the patriarchy and white supremacy, less #feminism. —Angela Watercutter
- Courtesy of Akashic BooksA River Called Time
by Courttia Newland
Colonialism is a science fiction mainstay. Humans are constantly leaving dying planets to harvest the resources of others, or else aliens arrive to subjugate (mostly white) humanity. In A River Called Time, Courttia Newland—best known for co-writing Amazon’s British anthology series Small Axe, starring genre alums like Letitia Wright and John Boyega—imagines a world where colonialism never happened at all. Which isn’t to say it’s some airy-fairy paradise. It’s a traditional sort of dystopia: the have-nots eke by in an urban wasteland while the tech-addled haves are ensconced in a bubble they call the Ark. But rather than enslaving Africans, the Europeans of Newland’s alternate history traded with them, and the resulting world is full of the legacies of that choice, one of which is magic. The book’s protagonist, Makriss Denny, can astral project, which lands him a spot in the Ark and in a slipstream of alternate timelines, one of which is our own. It’s speculative fiction that genuinely made me speculate. —Emma Grey Ellis
- Courtesy of Greywolf PressWild Swims
by Dorthe Nors
Isn’t it funny how taking in your surroundings in one place often makes you think about being somewhere else? The characters in the 14 stories that make up Dorthe Nors’ Wild Swims travel to Minneapolis, London, Los Angeles, and all corners of the writer’s native Denmark, but each of them is secretly elsewhere, bouncing across borders and years in search of something different. Nors’ writing is spare and direct and each vignette is no more than a few pages, just long enough to convey a mood or a moment. One interviewer described Karate Chop, her first collection of short stories, as “alarmingly succinct,” and Wild Swims definitely follows suit. Originally published in Danish in 2018, the English edition, translated by Misha Hoekstra, comes out next month. Its release is timely: This is a book for winter. Curl up on the sofa and read it in one go, thinking about all the other places you could be, wishing you were back at home. —Eve Sneider
- Courtesy of Simon and SchusterYolk
by Mary H.K. Choi
In essence, author (and WIRED contributor) Mary H.K. Choi writes YA that’s for adults young and old. With her third novel—Emergency Contact came out in 2018, Permanent Record a year later—she is doing the same, only this time, rather than diving into the messiness of young love, she’s looking at the dynamics between two sisters. Which are also just as messy. June works with hedge funds and lives in a Manhattan high rise; Jayne is a creative student who has some, um, emotional maturing to do. When June is diagnosed with cancer, they’re forced to confront a lot of issues they’ve been ignoring for years. It would be unfair to spoil more than that, but suffice to say Yolk is just as painfully insightful and often funny as Choi’s previous work. It also goes even deeper, dealing with issues like disordered eating and family trauma in a way not common to YA. It feels like a comfort. —Angela Watercutter
- Courtesy of CatapultThe Inland Sea
by Madeleine Watts
“In a word, I was drifting,” the young narrator of Madeleine Watts’ The Inland Sea confesses. While temping as an emergency hotline operator in Sydney, Watts’ unnamed protagonist becomes increasingly unmoored over the course of a particularly long, hot summer. After graduating from university, the aspiring writer spends her days fielding calls from people dealing with fires, floods, and dangerous heat waves, and her nights drinking to oblivion to forget what she hears when she answers the phone. Watts, a debut novelist from Australia, renders her hero’s erratic, anxiety-and-alcohol soaked existence and search for comfort in vivid but unfussy style. While the past few years have given us a deluge of climate-change fiction, The Inland Sea is notable for how delicately it explores how a global crisis can intersect and amplify a personal one. I started reading it skeptical that something so potentially hokey as a bildungsroman pegged to climate change could work. But it does! And Watts has written a surprisingly dreamy new standout in the climate-fiction canon. —Kate Knibbs
- Courtesy of Harper CollinsLand of Ingary Trilogy
by Dianna Wynne Jones
At least once a year, some little animation nerd comes along to rank the Miyazaki movies. To this day, I’ve never seen anyone get the top slot right. It’s Howl’s Moving Castle, you fools. You know, the one where young Sophie is turned by a witch into a very old lady, and she’s like—who cares? Show me literally any other protagonist in all of popular entertainment who reacts to rapid-onset senescence with a similar sense of sanguineness. Can’t just thank Miyazaki, though. He adapted the movie from a young-adult novel by a master of the genre, Diana Wynne Jones. It’s the first of her Land of Ingary trilogy, recently reissued by HarperCollins. That’s right—two more stories! Not entirely about Sophie, true, who by this point is young again, but that’s OK. She’ll live on, forever and ever, as the best of us, someone who looks in the mirror and sees possibilities and potentials—not excuses to give up. It’s no wonder she lands Howl, the sexiest wizard in history. —Jason Kehe
- Courtesy of HarperViaAlmond
by Won-pyung Sohn
In a world dominated by Covid-19, racial injustice, violence, and politics, Almond is a respite. It’s a book that will whisk you away and make you want to hold on tight to family and friends, as well as appreciate the little things such as our ability to understand and express. At times both devastating and uplifting, South Korean author Won-pyung Sohn’s Almond is a dive into the world of Yunjae, a young Korean boy growing up with his mother and grandmother and navigating school life. It’s a brisk, vignette-style narrative, but what makes the book so captivating is Yunjae’s view of the world as the result of his condition—he has Alexithymia. Due to the underdeveloped amygdala in his brain, Yunjae has trouble processing and describing emotions and interacting with others. As a result, Yunjae has to deal with loss and make sense of a world he doesn’t understand or see the way others do, and in turn makes us evaluate our own interactions and perceptions of others’ emotions, seeing them in a whole new light. —Saira Mueller
