The Book Report: Washington Post critic Ron Charles (October 13)

By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles

Here are four great new books to sink into this fall. 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers is back with “Playground” (W.W. Norton­), a brilliant new novel about artificial intelligence and the race to save the oceans.

The story moves along three tracks: There’s a computer genius looking back at his life; an oceanographer recounting her love for sea creatures; and a small group of people on a tiny island in the South Pacific who’ve been offered a fortune by a shadowy group of tech billionaires.

How Powers manages to draw these three stories together will change the way you see the world. 

Read an excerpt: “Playground” by Richard Powers

“Playground” by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton­), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Richard Powers (Official site)

“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner (Scribner) looks like a spy thriller, but it’s even trickier than that. The narrator is a freelance agent who specializes in infiltrating radical groups.

She’s been hired to pose as a translator in France and work her way into a commune of environmental terrorists who follow a spiritual leader who believes we should live more like the Neanderthals once did.

But as she gets closer to sabotaging this group, she falls under the spell of this Neanderthal philosophy.

Read an excerpt: “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner

“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner (Scribner), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Rachel Kushner (Official site)

Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television” (Riverhead Books) is a sharp, witty satire of our attitudes about racial identity and pop culture.

At the center of the story is a writer who spent years working on a vast history of biracial people, only to discover that nobody will publish it. And so, desperate for money, she turns to Hollywood and tries to sell her idea for a biracial TV sit-com.

But what would that be, and why would it be funny? That remains a mystery, but this is a wickedly funny novel about trying to make it in America.

Read an excerpt: “Colored Television” by Danzy Senna

“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna (­­­­­Riverhead Books), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Yuval Noah Harari is a genius at helping people imagine and comprehend enormous spans of time. A decade ago, he published a bestseller called “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

And now, his new book – “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” (Random House) – looks at the way information was used to control past human societies, and how artificial intelligence is already reshaping our world.

“Silicon chips,” he warns, “can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, despots that never die. How will this change society, economics, politics?”

Read an excerpt: “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari

“Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” by Yuval Noah Harari (Random House), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Yuval Noah Harari (Official site)

For more suggestions on what to read, contact your librarian or local bookseller. 

That’s it for the Book Report. I’m Ron Charles. Until next time, read on!

     
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For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles: 

     
Produced by Robin Sanders and Roman Feeser.