Benjamin Ho's 3 favorite reads in 2023

No book has ever sucked me in so fast. Chapter 1 felt like it was written for me, set at the college I went to (MIT), after the snowstorm that defined my freshman year, filled with 1990's nerd references like grok (from Heinlein) and Magic Eye.

The novel follows the relationship of two friends, video game designers, and tells their story through the video games they create. The protagonists are averse to shooting games, so the games imagined in the novel push the boundaries of video game as art form, and made me long to have them be real so that I could play them. 

It’s kinda cool that we live in a time where the hit literary fiction sensation of the summer could be a book about the magic of video games. Beyond that, the novel was just a touching story about two friends and their life together, told with compassion and care. A cozy read for a rainy day.

For those who loved Netflix’s The Diplomat and Asimov's Foundation, this book has got you covered.

A story about a small-time space diplomat as she tries to navigate the overwhelming capital of a galactic empire. I appreciate that the characters here are all savvy and smart as they navigate galactic politics. I enjoyed the inventive sci-fi elements, and the sprawling world building which was inspired by a mix of Aztec mythology and Byzantine history (the author is a Byazantium scholar). But I mostly appreciated that it's a light and breezy read with big ideas, a space opera escapist pleasure.

Foundation was the sci-fi book series that helped inspire me to become an economist. (As I talked about recently for NPR but that series feels out of step with the times. Though the recent Apple TV+ series does a good job modernizing it. The show gets better in season 2 for those who gave up on it after season 1.)

But A Memory Called Empire is the book I’d recommend today for those looking for something similar.

As a nerd growing up in the 80s and 90s I read a lot of X-Men comics which were the premier super team of that era. The advent of the MCU meant the Avengers stole a lot of the spotlight away from the X-men, but it was a joy to return to the franchise with this 2019 reimagining of the franchise.

In some ways, it does what X-men has always done best, embracing moral ambiguity, with the X-men joining forces with former nemeses like Magneto and Mr. Sinister with a new vision of the world based on Mutant supremacy. It also manages to bring epic-ness to a new level.

Every comic book event is faced with the daunting task of having to outdo the prior one. (How do you compete with a villain who manages to snap away half the galaxy.) But House of X/Powers of X manages to do just that, with epic storylines that involve the fate of entire timelines, facing beings whose intellect spans exponentially across galaxies.

8 year old: “I like its jokes because its jokes are really funny. Well not just the jokes, but I like comics a lot, which is why I like it.”

6 year old: “You know what I like, same thing, for the same reason.”

A cute whimsical silly modern kids’ comic about a narwhal and a jellyfish, with random non sequiturs that delight my kids. Written in language easy enough to read for a kindergartner, but still engaging for a third grader. When I hear them giggling uncontrollably from the other room, I can guess what they are reading.