Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu & Ursula K. Le Guin
Turning to these poems at the end of many a dark day has felt like holding the gift of a small, fierce light.
Blindsight
Peter Watts
Siri Keeton, missing half his mind, is sent out on a mission to discover the source of thousands of probes that surrounded Earth and screamed an unintelligible alien signal before burning up in the atmosphere.
The Word for World Is Forest
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Athsheans live among a forest, on a planet that “yumens” are attempting to colonize.
Lost in Work
Amelia Horgan
“Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.”
The Problem with Work
Kathi Weeks
A provocative and irresistable argument that the need to “work for a living” is not a natural order but rather an invention—and one that can change.
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
An expansion of the immensely popular essay of the same title, here David Graeber takes a long hard look at why so many jobs are rank bullshit, and what can be done about it.
Breaking Things at Work
Gavin Mueller
A brisk read that locates echoes of Luddism in current practices like the free software and right-to-repair movements, and makes the case for rescuing Luddism from the dustheap.
Work Won’t Love You Back
Sarah Jaffe
From the title through every chapter, paragraph, and sentence, this book is a deeply researched polemic against the myth of the “labor of love.”
A Collective Bargain
Jane McAlevey
A brisk, fist-pumping read from veteran labor organizer Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain tells stories of unions who won big—and who won during the Trump years, perhaps the darkest time in decades of waning worker power.
Cubed
Nikil Saval
An insightful history of professional work, Nikil Saval’s Cubed interrogates how we work by digging into where we work, and the way those workplaces have changed and evolved.
Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener
I avoided this book when it first came out because I feared it would hit too close to home. I wasn’t wrong.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Andreas Malm
This is a clear-eyed call for the climate movement to go beyond peaceful protest in order to avert ecological collapse.
Under a White Sky
Elizabeth Kolbert
“We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide
Cyd Harrell
This concise and cogent book offers clear and accessible guidance on what it means to do tech work in the public sector.
The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson writes science fiction that aspires to be a New Yorker essay. This is not entirely bad.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg
I am rather enamored with this book from Verlyn Klinkenborg, which presumes that most writing instruction is bullshit.
The Unreal and the Real
Ursula K. Le Guin
The titles of the two parts of this selected edition of Le Guin’s stories are Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands—Le Guin leaves it to the reader to decide which of these is real and which unreal.
Witches, Midwives & Nurses
Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English
First published in 1973, this pamphlet outlines the ways in which the medical establishment created generations of women ignorant of the workings of their bodies and disempowered from their own care.
Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley
“Bro!” begins Headley’s delightful new translation of Beowulf, and from there unravels a tale of heroism and machismo and masculinity that honors the origins of the epic poem while also carrying it forward.
A Stranger in Olondria
Sofia Samatar
As he travels to Olondria to sell the family harvest, Jevick meets a young woman on the verge of death.