Fans pick 100 books like Technologies of the Gendered Body

This book is unlike anything I’d ever read, but I desperately needed it. As the title suggests, the book flows with deep wisdom from within oceans. As a long-time resident of a landlocked state, I’ve always approached large bodies of water with a sense of awe (and, quite honestly, fear).

This creative nonfiction tells the story of possibility, kinship, and collective kindness available in the depths. The book itself is a technology for living well with others and ourselves.

Imagine waking up to discover you’ve become the City of New York. And meeting the avatar of São Paulo walking around trying to be a mentor. As a New Yorker, I’m all for it, and I was hooked right from the start of this urban fantasy. Aliens are trying to eat the cities of Earth, but the cities fight back by choosing champions from among their populations.

New York, being New York, has six—one for the City as a whole and one for each borough because we do things right here. I got such a kick out of every borough’s particular personality and approach to being part of the whole, when just the other day, these were all ordinary people pursuing their own aims. Sudden, magical, consequential reinvention. Love it.

This is such a beautiful, gentle and cozy book that I couldn’t put it down. In this story, people were left with no choice but to completely rebuild their society, and they did something wonderful.

This book is like a breath of fresh air, like a quiet, healing journey that doesn’t rely on action—it’s an exploration, a celebration of nature, and society, and connection. It touched me in a profound way. It made me go outside to check if it was raining and stand with my bare feet in the grass, enjoying the coldness and softness of the sensation. 

A great, approachable book on the omnipresence of connected technology. I’ve read this book several times. It was—and remains—an unsettling read because it demonstrates the extent to which digital technologies are, as Sadowski notes in the title, “Taking Over the World.” 

Sadowski encourages me to think expansively about the impact of emerging technology. It’s not only that we’ve got more smart “stuff” (which we do), but that the ideas behind always-on technology are becoming so normalized to be somehow unremarkable. This book is clear about the remarkable impact of smart tech—and it paints a bleak picture. Maybe pair it with “Undrowned” or “A Psalm for the Wild Built” to even you out.

This one doesn’t involve a game in the traditional sense but indulge me for a moment. Imagine an online world of subterfuge and countermoves where the stakes are the revelation of your true identity and the loss of your freedom. It's a world where digital avatars mask influential hackers determined to bring down real-world institutions, and the manipulative games they play against each other aren’t for points or pride, but power. This is the world of True Names, arguably the first book to lay the foundations of cyberspace fiction. This short 1981 novella is like an ancient artifact reflecting the beginnings of a major shift in civilization. Although some of the tech references are so dated many readers won't even recognize them, a lot of the concepts were far ahead of their time.

I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.” This is the funniest, wittiest book I’ve read in a long time. 

Agent G is like James Bond with cyborgs. It’s an action-driven spy thriller with cyberpunk elements that become stronger in the later books of the series. I love James Bond, the older movies in particular, and I love cyberpunk, so this book grabbed me from the first page. Although it’s more of a technothriller than a classic cyberpunk story I still recommend this book because I think it’s such an interesting and fun read. Definitely worth checking out if you like stories about high-tech spies saving the world!

Anna is another fellow author I’ve worked with in the past.

In her futuristic novel about warring mega-corporations, cyborg Nephilim and her elite cyborg squad are sent on the most dangerous missions to protect the interests of their company at any cost. But then one of her implants malfunctions, and she’s freed from the controlling grid. She learns that everything she has believed in all her life is a lie. To defend her newfound freedom, she must run from the elite killer squads she once belonged to. 

There are actually two undeniably kickass women in this book: one is the perfect hybrid of humanity and technology created to pilot gargantuan killing machines, while the other is a foul-mouthed outlaw who routinely climbs inside these machines and blows them the heck up. You can imagine the chaos that ensues when these women finally join forces and set their sights on destroying the oppressive supercity of Godolia—along with its vast army of terrifying mecha gods. I was delighted by this book for a number of reasons, not the least of which being its many bloody battle scenes and its cast of endearing characters. The tenuous relationship between Sona the Pilot and Eris the Gearbreaker kept me on edge until the very end. This is an impressive debut novel from a talented young writer, and I am looking forward to the next installment.  

Pierce was a contemporary of Claude Shannon (inventor of information theory), so he learned information theory shortly after it was published in 1949. Pierce writes in an informal style, but does not flinch from presenting the fundamental theorems of information theory. Some would say his style is too wordy, and the ratio of words/equations is certainly very high. Nevertheless, this book provides a solid introduction to information theory. It was originally published in 1961, so it is a little dated in terms of topics covered. However, because it was re-published by Dover in 1981, it is also fairly cheap. Overall, this is a sensible first book to read on information theory.