I love nerds. I’ve always identified as one and years working in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley made me appreciate their passion, dedication to optimization, and wonderful senses of humor. I once scheduled a meeting with a programmer and afterwards he said “this meeting wasn’t the complete waste of time I expected,” and I took that as a compliment. A lot of books and movies make nerds pretty and shiny and one note. The nerds in these books all rang true to me—they approach difficult situations with logic and humor. They’re complex and compassionate and the kind of people I want to know more about.
Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist making her way in a very sexist lab in the 1960s who ends up creating a chemistry-inspired cooking show that empowers everyone who watches it. She’s inspiring and relentless and funny as hell. It was a GoodReads Choice winner in 2022 and I’m not surprised.
This book helped me to slog through some low moments in my own life and made me think about cooking in a whole new way. “I’m disrupting the egg’s internal bonds in order to elongate the amino acid chain,” she told the dog in typical nerd fashion. (The dog survives.) I loved her precision in language and life and the absurdity it brings.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • Meet Elizabeth Zott: a “formidable, unapologetic and inspiring” (PARADE) scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show in this novel that is “irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel. It reminds you that change takes time and always requires heat” (The New York Times Book Review).
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Oprah Daily, Newsweek, GoodReads
"A unique heroine ... you'll find yourself wishing she wasn’t fictional." —Seattle Times…
You can’t talk about nerds in trouble without mentioning Andy Weir. This one came out in the pandemic and it’s about a man who wakes up in a spaceship and doesn’t know who he is or what he’s supposed to do. I read this during the second year of the pandemic and I very much sympathized with his plight—he can’t go outside because it will kill him, he senses that he has important things to do, and he has a lingering feeling of existential dread. But even with all those worries, Ryland Grace manages to find his way forward with science and logic and humor. He’s nerdy and funny and he’s going to try to save the world.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
I read this novella in one long insomniac night, snorting with laughter so much that I eventually had to leave the bedroom to keep from waking up my husband. A murderous bot overrides its programming so it doesn’t have to do quite so much murdering and instead can sneak off to watch television shows. But pesky humans keep pressing it into service to keep them from killing themselves and each other. It’s science fiction and crime fiction and a wry study of the human condition all rolled up together.
Murderbot is cynical, funny, and surprisingly heartwarming. We all have inner Murderbots, but we’re very lucky that we don’t all let them out. Too much. First in a series.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells begins The Murderbot Diaries, a new science fiction action and adventure series that tackles questions of the ethics of sentient robotics. It appeals to fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or lain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans. In a corporate dominated s pa cef a ring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by…
A nonfiction book about an actual nerd who stubbornly investigated a 75 cent accounting error and ended up uncovering an international espionage ring during the Cold War. As nerds do. Along the way, he invented many techniques still used in cybersecurity. It ought to be dry, but it’s funny and charming and it perfectly evokes Berkeley in the 1980s. I was a computer operator at Carnegie Mellon and my workday was very similar to Stoll’s. For me this book was a time machine to my early 20s. I could see, hear, and feel every scene. If you ever think that your nerdy obsessions don’t matter—this shows that they do.
Before the Internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive U.S. citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" (Smithsonian).
Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system. The hacker's code name…
This one’s darker than the others on my list. I’ve worked in high-tech for years and the world of the Circle is far too close to my working life. The dystopian story of a young woman who stumbles into a dystopian world filled with surveillance and the eradication of privacy is chilling. And the veneer of toxic positivity that the Circle presents to the wider world is too familiar to ignore. I’ve worked at places that are only a few small steps removed from the one in this story, and I worry that we will all end up living in that world. These are not funny, happy nerds who will save the world if they can. But they’re nerds and they’re definitely causing trouble.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - a dark, thrilling and unputdownable novel about our obsession with the internet
'Prepare to be addicted' Daily Mail
'A gripping and highly unsettling read' Sunday Times
'The Circle is 'Brave New World' for our brave new world... Fast, witty and troubling' Washington Post
When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails,…
Ivy Corva’s first novel makes her the target of online trolls. As the threats get nastier and her address is posted on the Internet for all to see, she runs from her old life and moves to San Francisco to work for her friend Shelby. But Shelby isn’t there.
Shelby threw herself off the Golden Gate Bridge right after their phone call to avoid her own demons: accusations of financial fraud and lying about her new immortality drug. As the world seeks to destroy her friend’s legacy, Ivy searches for the truth. But when Ivy's trolls move from the virtual world to the real one and Shelby's foes close in, Ivy fears that the price for the truth will be her life.
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
