Looking for something new to read? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!
Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure by Maggie Jackson
In an era of terrifying unpredictability, we race to address complex crises with quick, sure algorithms, bullet points, and tweets. How could we find the clarity and vision so urgently needed today by being unsure? Uncertain is about the triumph of doing just that. A scientific adventure tale set on the front lines of a volatile era, this epiphany of a book by award-winning author Maggie Jackson shows us how to skillfully confront the unexpected and the unknown, and how to harness not-knowing in the service of wisdom, invention, mutual understanding, and resilience.
You can learn more about this book through this blogpost or by listening to an interview with the author!
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.
Read more about the book (and the drama it caused) here!
Bog Queen by Anna North
When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. Agnes has always been more comfortable with the dead than the living, but this body is not like any she’s ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved. The mystery of the Iron Age body draws the attention of numerous groups with competing interests : the archaeologists who want to study the surrounding bog, the peat-cutters who want to profit from the land’s resources, and a group of environmental activists and neo-pagans who demand the body be returned to its resting place and that the moss-layered bog — a marvel of carbon capture on a warming planet — be left undisturbed. Then there’s the moss itself ; a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell. As Agnes is drawn into the controversy stirred by the body and its habitat, she must face not only the deep history of what she has unearthed, but also the relationships she has forsworn in her bid for independence. Vividly flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with climate urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.
Listen to an interview with the author!
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris
David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend. He tries on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery, and both succeeds and fails. He buys his sister a cape and discusses his brother with a jaded Duolingo bot. He walks dozens of miles with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. Ever adding to his list of ‘Countries I Have Been To,’ he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest’s cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo. There is sadness here–scrolling through his address book, he realizes how many dear friends are now deceased–but also delight: he revels in authors’ biographies, the malapropism that becomes a decades-long inside joke, and pair of well-made cotton underpants. He is bitten by a dog. A train passenger vomits in his face. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn’t. Look how hard it is to be alive! Throughout these essays, Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity this fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.
Find out more about the book through this review or a conversation with the author!
From an award-winning University of Oxford professor comes a brilliant, urgent new look at prophecies–the predictions that determine our lives, from our personal finances and the quality of our healthcare to the news and social media we consume and the produces foisted upon us. Today’s computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world and the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern predictions not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, but algorithms and statisticians also now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our own lives. In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, University of Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others’ predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception. Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of insights: predictions about humans tend to be self-fulfilling; more data doesn’t guarantee better outcomes; AI is more likely to increase risk than decrease it; and a free and robust society requires not more prediction, but better preparation. Véliz argues in this incisive and bracingly original book that the main promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future, but rather power over others. Prophecy is an invitation to defy those orders and live life on our own terms.
Read more about the book here! (And, if you want a prophecy of your own, pull a tarot card.)
The post What to Read this Month: September appeared first on Duke University Libraries Blogs.
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