New Year Reading: Books with Fascinating Themes and POVs

 Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves 

I dip in and out of many books looking for interesting premises. I don’t always read all of the books I find from cover to cover, as there are so many I want to get to, in the end. Here are a few.

The Mind Electric

A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

June 10, 2025; Washington Square Press, NetGalley

by Pria Anand

Description: In The Mind Electric, neurologist Pria Anand reveals—through case study, history, fable, and memoir—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story.

I am looking forward to reading these stories in depth, as the brain is an investigation that is absorbing and compelling.

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, Sept. 17, 2024; William Morrow, NetGalley

Fiction

I chose this book as it's a complex and yet fascinating subject for modern society. Which of us has never had to deal with rejection in one form or the other, and how did we manage? 

Description: An electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos.

Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

Tony Tulathimutte’s first novel Private Citizens was called “the first great millennial novel” by New York Magazine. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has written for The Paris Review, The New York Times, VICE, WIRED, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Playboy, and others. He teaches the writing class CRIT in Brooklyn.

Unassimilable

An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century

by Bianca Mabute-Louie Publication: Jan. 14, 2025, Harper, NetGalley

Descripton:  A socio-political examination of Asians Americans who refuse to assimilate and instead build their own belonging on their own terms outside of mainstream American institutions, transforming how we understand race, class, and citizenship in America.

The author transforms the ways we understand race, class, citizenship, and the concept of assimilation and its impact on Asian American communities from the nineteenth century to present day.

My thoughts: I think this description of a group of minority peoples who build their own society do it in the same way that many immigrants have done through American history. Think of Chinatown, Italian town, Greek town, and many others who form a wide ethnic America.

Bianca Mabute-Louie, MA is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant in the Sociology department at Rice University. Her research examines how religious socialization shapes the racial attitudes and political engagement of Asian Americans.  

Nexus: a Brief History of Information Networks by Yuval Noah Harari

Description: the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

What are you reading or watching this week?