Wired magazine named its 12 best books of the year, with titles by Rachel Aviv, Adrienne Buller, and Dan Saladino all making the cut.
Kate Knibbs, a staff writer at the technology magazine, praised Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, about people dealing with mental illness, writing, “It doesn’t offer easy answers, but provokes fascinating questions.”
Knibbs also recommended Buller’s The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, calling it “a galvanizing, tough book,” and Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need To Save Them, which she said is “a travelogue infused with reverence for the sheer variety of foods found on this planet that is somehow never precious or cloying. Instead, it simply feels urgent.”
Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures made the list, with Knibbs praising it as “lively prose about marine biology mixed with an intimate, thoughtful, emotionally affecting memoir.” Knibbs also gave a shoutout to her Wired colleague Amit Katwala’s Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector, which she called “fast-paced and elegant and fun.”
Knibbs recommended two novels that former President Barack Obama has also praised: Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility and Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers.
Other books making the Wired list were David Musgrave’s Lambda; Emma Healey’s Best Young Woman Job Book; Percival Everett’s Dr. No; Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur; and Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, translated by Martin Aitken.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
