Hi everyone, here are our five suggested reads of the week!
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Data Empire The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam
During 11,000 years of global history, recordkeeping has taken countless forms–tally sticks, clay tablets, knotted cords, scrolls, codices, ledgers, formularies, databases, and digital content–but people have always collected and classified information in pursuit of power. According to Risam (digital humanities, Dartmouth Coll.; New Digital Worlds), collecting and making sense of data drives commerce, conquest, and social control. Powerful elites decide how to interpret data and create narratives. Empires gather intelligence, draw maps, deed land, tax trade, and conduct censuses. Traditions and customs may endure, but information is authoritative only when recognized by authorities. Over the past century, data has become an empire in its own right, shaping institutions and worldviews, powering surveillance capitalism and the rise of artificial intelligence, and reducing all ideas and actions to raw data and predictive modeling. The author’s arguments will resonate with readers of Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and The Power of Knowledge by Jeremy Black. Readers are left with the impression that information and its uses produce exploitation, failing to enrich or empower lives. It is high time to reclaim data for good.
VERDICT A sweeping and convincing argument that information undergirds power. –Library Journal Review
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Dooneen by Keith Ridgway
A surreal, magical realist joy of a novel, highly acclaimed Ridgway’s (A Shock, 2021) latest is a remarkable work sure to feature on best-of-the-year lists. The opening sees Bartholomew Port–Mew–mysteriously transport from a London park to a near-future Dublin with no cars, shifting roads, and a still-worsening housing crisis. As Mew drifts around a recognizable but off-kilter Dublin seeing acquaintances and family, he describes all to his lover Mootie, whom he longs to rejoin in London. Mew stumbles into being part of a reckoning of sorts, led by those seeking a collective solution to the housing crisis, and here the novel truly takes off with a staccato, breathless pace that sweeps the reader up and refuses to let go. Like the intoxicating, dreamlike prose of Evan Dara and Kazuo Ishiguro, this suspenseful tale explores community, identity, housing, and the remorseless power of the state. The vividly described backdrop of monuments of Irish revolutionary history contrasts with the contemporary feeling of powerlessness many people feel. A love letter, a puzzle, a haunting–Doneen unsettles and entrances like Susanna Clarke’s dreamlike Piranesi (2020) but also packs a political punch. A stunning achievement, Ridgway’s novel is urgent, profound, and shimmeringly beautiful. — Starred Booklist Review
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The Forty-Year Grudge by Liza Tully
The guests at an exclusive sorority reunion include murder. Aubrey Merritt, “the nationally renowned private investigator,” never intended to leave Gramercy Park for the wilds of New Mexico even though she was an invited member of Sarah Lawrence College’s Sigma Delta Tau chapter. She changes her mind when her old friend John Fitzroy tells her of a note announcing that “she who lives by the sword shall die” that his wife, retired Brigadier General Joan Battersea, received shortly before her guests were scheduled to arrive at the Muddy River Ranch. Merritt decides to make the trip in the company of her assistant and amanuensis, Olivia Blunt. Sure enough, someone’s shot to death during the festivities, but it’s not the general. Instead, the victim is MIT biochemist Eve Exeter, who together with her husband, entrepreneur Conrad Zander, had been about to launch Lifespan, Inc., as a public corporation dedicated to using Eve’s research to extend the lives of its clients. As the newly married Blunt mingles with the guests, all of them old enough to be her mother, she learns one of them has held a grudge against Eve since they were in school together. In case you’ve forgotten that original threat against the general, someone hides no fewer than five scorpions in her bed. Of all the possible antagonists, the one Blunt takes most seriously is Merritt, who challenges her to solve the mystery herself if she wants to keep her job. Considering Merritt’s national reputation, which actually ends up being an important plot point, the mystery is, as she acknowledges, not very challenging at all. Looking for a reason to avoid your college reunion? Tully is happy to oblige. –Kirkus Review
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It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez
The dazzling first collection by novelist Nunez (The Friend, 2018) includes 13 stories published over the past few decades. They range from the nightmarishly surreal “Airport Story,” in which an unnamed woman spirals downward after being diverted to an airport she doesn’t know, to the noir-tinged “The Plan,” in which an increasingly unstable narrator contemplates murder, to the wild, coming-of-age tale “Imagination,” in which a high-strung 14-year-old sees one guest at a party at her parents’ country home “turn into a small dog, no, a large dog” as he enters the bathroom, and the deceptively casual title story, which asks, “Aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own lives?” Nunez has a gift for surprise, whether it’s in the turn a sentence or a story takes, the little revelations that detonate as a seemingly matter-of-fact story unwinds or the variety of protagonists and settings in her stories. She also knows how to calibrate despair and surprising joy, leaving the reader giddily off-balance. Each of these stories, even the most ostensibly wispy, reverberates long after it ends. – Starred Booklist Review
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Shadow Step: A Detective Miller Novel by Mark Billingham
The Cookie Monster with a badge personified, or as the Brits might say, a biscuit fiend with a warrant card: Billingham’s peripatetic DS Declan Miller takes his third turn, following The Wrong Hands (2024), tearing around Blackpool on his trusty blue moped. His dead wife, Alex, continues to manifest herself as needed. This is one rambling and wildly funny tale that is set in motion by Ruby, a wobbling, incontinent sausage of a dog who is the companion of the unfortunate Barry Cheshire. The pair are involved in a contretemps with a mean dog owner in the park, and when that man is found dead, Cheshire is the likely suspect. It turns out the victim was involved in a major drug network with ties to Alex’s death. The story branches out from there, with intermittent fox-trotting for Miller, who proudly displays his tango trophy on his mantelpiece. Not spiraling out of control, by any means, this is as carefully plotted as expected from Billingham. There is the promise of redemption for some, although for “Google” McDougall, maybe not so much. – Booklist Review
Reader’s Note: If you’d like to start reading the Detective Miller Mystery Series from the beginning, check out book one: The Last Dance.
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the four library catalogs
The Digital Catalog aka Libby: https://stls.overdrive.com/
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout content on a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
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Hoopla Catalog: https://www.hoopladigital.com/
The Hoopla Catalog features on demand checkouts of eBooks, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla companion app, also called Hoopla is available for mobile devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
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Kanopy Catalog: https://www.kanopy.com/en
The Kanopy Catalog features thousands of streaming videos available on demand.
The Kanopy Catalog is available for all Southern Tier Library System member library card holders, including all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders!
You can access the Kanopy Catalog through a web browser, or download the app to your phone, tablet or media streaming player (i.e. Roku, Google or Fire TV).
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StarCat: The catalog of physical/traditional library materials: https://starcat.stls.org
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
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Have questions about how to access Internet based content (i.e. eBooks, eAudios)? Feel free to drop by the Reference Desk or call the library and we will assist you! The library’s telephone number is: 607-936-3713.
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Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 