Fans pick 100 books like Europeana

All that happens throughout most of this book is that a Nigerian grad student in psychiatry nightly wanders end-to-end the streets of New York City, observing. And yet I couldn’t put this book down, riveted by this angry mind on fire and the differences in the landscape he sees from the one I thought I knew so well.

Author Teju Cole is highly visual, as one would expect from one whose other job as he wrote this was as photography editor of the New York Times Magazine. But then, as you get to the ending of his narrator’s musings, as you feel you have a handle on this plotless novel, the trap is sprung so that you cannot but reevaluate everything that has come before. This book is a stunner!

What a breathtaking scope Tokarczuk gives us! This Polish novelist was new to me when I first picked this book up, but even though she won a Nobel Prize, I think she will be new to most U.S. readers.

This book begins as a meditation on travel and human movement, moving episodically through different fictional and historical plots, investigating sexualities, artificial humans, geographies, and the human compulsion not to sit still. But this just scratches the surface, as she has a kind of Garcia Márquez touch for identifying stories where bodies (both real and fake) exert their magic, even as the stories she tells are purportedly historical.

Did an 18th-century noblewoman during wartime smuggle a jar that contained Chopin’s heart in her undergarments? Tokarczuk answers: Is this so unbelievable? 

This was the first book I’ve seen that re-oriented the United States within a cultural understanding of “the Americas,” a complete resituating of our usually conceived “unique” history. Doing this, Bolaño, a Chilean, puts our own fanatic, right-wing weirdos–religious fanatics, militarists, unhinged hyper-patriotic dictatorial aspirants–into a context where Americans can see ourselves in hemispheric context; these are political pathologies that have historically been seen as much throughout Central and South America as within our own borders.

I found this mind-blowing. This is a collection of fictional biographies, fantastically imagined and yet achingly familiar, and as relevant now as when it was first written more than two decades ago and translated and published in the US in 2009, such that our current politics seem almost pre-scripted by Bolaño’s vision. 

I loved the brash daring of this novel by an unknown writer of my own generation that I first read in the manuscript. I don’t believe it has yet gotten its due. Sarah Falkner has taken the near-familiar twentieth-century mise en scène of the Alfred Hitchcock-ish animal thriller movie and created characters in starlet Kitty Dawson and her son Rory who create their own inventions with this space.

Kitty founds a big cat sanctuary, and Rory trains as a lion tamer and turns this into performance art. Throughout, I felt like I was in a live-action museum of Post-War American Psycho-Cinema, powered by Falkner’s mimicry of discourses–interviews, publicity releases, film theory, and memoir–and the blend of excitement for film, language, and compassion for animals and their magnificence.

Yuri Slezkine’s classic book on the history of Russian Jewry is not a work of migration history strictly speaking. But there is no Jewish history without migration, and Slezkine shows us, among many other things, how Russian Jews ended up in the US, Israel, and the Soviet Union, representing three ideological choices—liberalism, nationalism, and communism.

I read this book back in university, and few works, if any, have had such a profound impact on my historical thinking.

This is an anthology of all of the written sources on the Taj Mahal from the period of its construction in the 17th century. It brings together translations of every description or mention of the building in Mughal court histories, or accounts by foreign travellers, and explains all of the historical and religious inscriptions that are written on the building itself. The book is meant for the serious student and lacks narrative flow; but the focus exclusively on written sources dating from the same time as the Taj really helps you understand it in its own time. 

This is a popular science book, so a little different from the others on this list. It is a beautifully written book that is accessible to people who don’t know much about AI but is simultaneously thought-provoking for experts.

It contains probably the best discussion of "intelligence" that I've read, interesting insights into how Google and other tech giants came to develop their machine learning strategy, and a fascinating chapter that views recommendation engines and their users as parts of a single intelligent organism. It's concise and easy to read.

I've read many popular AI books, which are highly variable in quality, and this criminally underappreciated work is the best by miles. 

This is a collection of essays by Fisher that originally comprised his K-Punk blog and that I return to again and again.

Fisher has a unique voice, a kind of critical conscience for the times that navigates the complexities of what he called "capitalist realism" through the lens of popular culture. These essays are the reason I got into bands on the Ghost Box label, like Pye Corner Audio, The Advisory Circle, and Belbury Poly. They speak to a loss of promised futures in a political context that has increasingly emptied out hope.

I find Fisher’s diagnosis of the culture of late capitalism to be the most compelling out there. His critique of “retro” bands like The Arctic Monkeys is scathing, while his writings on “hauntological” culture are ground-breaking. I’m a big fan of Burial, and Fisher’s reflections on the post-rave come-down are spot on.

Be warned: the collection can… show more.

I have always doubted the claim that people are predominantly violent and egotistical and can never change. Jeremy Rifkin, in this well-researched book, shows that despite humanity’s history of conflicts and misery, human beings have the potential, and have already begun, to create an empathic, global society.

A book such as this is needed to help us understand history as a process of humanity’s gradual maturing.

The only work of fiction on this list, Motel of the Mysteries set me laughing, first at the book itself, then at historians more generally, and finally at myself.

Macaulay invites us to join a fictitious archaeological team from the future excavating a twentieth-century American motel that had been buried under a tsunami of junk mail. If this team is misunderstanding American culture so ridiculously and profoundly, how far have real historians missed the mark when writing about their subjects and their religions? If the Christians and Muslims of the fifteenth century read my Jesus book, would they be laughing at me?

This book makes me more cautious, more reflective, and more creative when I'm doing my own excavations of past religious cultures.