A quick collection of some of my favorite books from this year.
I read way more this year, but I still didn’t read enough. This year was really important for my brain and my worldview I think, and there are a few books that I think are crucial for this. I hope you find something you like in here.
Mark Fisher – Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction
I need to reread this book. This was foundational in developing the perspective that would define my thesis project, I feel deeply grateful to Fisher for creating and releasing this. It felt like it split open my brain, and made me realize so many incredible new ways to think about the world. In particular, I felt he gave me the courage and vision to really embrace theory and see it everywhere. There really is no line between fiction and non-fiction, human and machine, living and dead, we have to see past it all. This book also led me to a number of other books on this list, for which I’m immensely thankful.
Thomas Moynihan – Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History
What I think Moynihan does so spectacularly well in this book is take a lot of the things that Fisher is approaching, and the things CCRU are rambling about, and making them feel like an actual real perspective to think about the world. There is one particular flash of genius where he mentions Daniel Barker’s supposed CCRU interview, that really crystallizes this whole work as a sort of speculative theory fiction, one where the “truth” of a certain fact or moment doesn’t actually matter, and actually adds to the meaning and importance of his observations.
Italo Calvino – If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
I don’t want to tell you about this book, I want you to read it if you haven’t already. It’s both a paean and an embodiment of the pure ecstasy of reading, of becoming someone else and making a story real. Unbelievable genius prose, and some real soaring highs where it felt like Calvino was just winking at me and I was in on the joke. Essential reading.
Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman – Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth
This was another cornerstone of my thesis, and was a book I continually came back to, even though it’s connection was rather oblique. The idea that more things are capable of sensing than we normally accept pairs perfectly with Fisher, and is important to understand if you really want to break down and get at questions about AI. Beyond that, this book really reignited my passion for reading and thinking, without it I have no idea what my thesis looks like. I think it proves that academic writing can be cool and important and mind expanding.
Jorge Luis Borges – Collected Fictions
It’s hard to properly describe a huge body of work like this, other than its all great. Reading Borges feels like travelling the world, at times he is wondrous and mystical, at other times bitter and heartbroken, he can do it all. I know I’m going to return to lots of his early short stories, there are so many interesting ideas and principles that he uses, and no one else really sounds like him. I think he forms a very interesting body of work in conjunction with Calvino, or even CCRU.