Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Know This : Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments - ed. John Brockman

Work Rules - Laszlo Bock

Timeline - Michael Crichton

Timeline - Crichton, Michael

Summary: Michael Crichton's new novel opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. Any moment of the past can be actualized -- and a group of historians can enter, literally, life in fourteenth-century
feudal France. Imagine the risks of such a journey.

Booklist Reviews
Crichton sets himself another technical challenge: plausibly taking a group of characters 600 years into the past. This shouldn't be too much of a chore for the man who brought dinosaurs back to life, but readers familiar with his work will note that he seems to struggle a bit harder than usual to sell the premise, as though he's having a hard time buying it himself. Once that's out of the way, though, the novel is a splendid read. The plot is pretty straightforward: Edward Johnson, a history professor, is stranded in France in the year 1357, and a trio of his graduate students must go back to extricate him. Unlike some writers, Crichton doesn't use his historical setting merely as window dressing. He immerses his characters, and his readers, in the past: its politics, its language, its social structure, even the way it looks (early scenes, in which the young grad students marvel at being in this place they've only seen as ancient ruins, are realistic and, for any reader with an interest in history, thrilling). The story itself, which involves a French siege upon an English castle (England controlled France at the time), is packed with adventure and surprises.

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The circle - David Eggers

The circle - Eggers, David

Summary: "The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last throughthe night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Most of us imagine totalitarianism as something imposed upon us—but what if we're complicit in our own oppression? That's the scenario in Eggers' ambitious, terrifying, and eerily plausible new novel. When Mae gets a job at the Circle, a Bay Area tech company that's cornered the world market on social media and e-commerce, she's elated, and not just because of the platinum health-care package. The gleaming campus is a wonder, and it seems as though there isn't anything the company can't do (and won't try). But she soon learns that participation in social media is mandatory, not voluntary, and that could soon apply to the general population as well. For a monopoly, it's a short step from sharing to surveillance, to a world without privacy. This isn't a perfect book—the good guys lecture true-believer Mae, and a key metaphor is laboriously explained—but it's brave and important and will draw comparisons to Brave New World and 1984. Eggers brilliantly depicts the Internet binges, torrents of information, and endless loops of feedback that increasingly characterize modern life. But perhaps most chilling of all is his notion that our ultimate undoing could be something so petty as our desperate desire for affirmation. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers' reputation as a novelist continues to grow. Expect this title to be talked about, as it has an announced first printing of 200,000 and the New York Times Magazine has first serial rights. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.

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Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore - Robin Sloan

Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore - Sloan, Robin

Summary: After a layoff during the Great Recession sidelines his tech career, Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore in San Francisco, and soon realizes that the establishment is a facade for a strange secret.

Staff Comments: This book almost lost me about 3/4 of the way in, but successfully pulled me back in the end, and with secret codes, covert orders, underground libraries, old mysterious eccentrics, and young programmers and hackers, what's not to love?

BookPage Reviews

A 21st-century tale of wonders

Robin Sloan’s funny debut novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is both a celebration and a send-up of the clashing worlds of technology and those who cling to dead-tree books. After losing a job at the corporate headquarters of NewBagel, where “ex-Googlers” developed software to create the perfect bagel, Clay Jannon gets hired at an unconventional bookstore in San Francisco. Unconventional because it’s open 24 hours, has very few customers, is vertical—there are three stories worth of books you have to climb a ladder to retrieve—and the books are written in secret code. What at first seems to be a front for an illegal operation turns out to be connected with a cult, and Clay goes on a mission to solve the mystery that has been plaguing its members for centuries, enlisting the help of a quirky team, like the Google acolyte he’s dating, the friend who got rich by developing “boob-simulation software” and Mr. Penumbra himself, the hopeful store proprietor.

Though there’s a code to be cracked in these pages, the real treat of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is Sloan’s energetic storytelling—and the many, many lines that you will surely want to share on Facebook and tweet to the masses. (“He has the strangest expression on his face—the emotive equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.” Or: “If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.”) Readers who don’t know a hashtag from a wiki will still appreciate the book’s ultimate message about friendship, and the conclusion that nothing—not even a world full of programmers and hackers—can substitute for a cunning mind.
Copyright 2012 BookPage Reviews.

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Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland - Doctorow, Cory

Summary: When Marcus, once called M1k3y, receives a thumbdrive containing evidence of corporate and governmental treachery, his job, fame, family, and well-being, as well as his reform-minded employer's election campaign, are all endangered.


Staff Comments:  I always walk away from a Cory Doctorow novel feeling a little smarter and a lot more paranoid.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Marcus is back in this sequel to the crossover thriller Little Brother (2008). While attending the Burning Man festival, Marcus receives a USB drive from a hacker, Masha, with more than 800,000 incriminating government documents, and she advises Marcus to publish the material if anything happens to her. Meanwhile, a contact at the festival recommends Marcus to California Senate Independent candidate Joe Noss as a webmaster, and he has his first real job, but can he fulfill his promise to Masha and keep his new position? Doctorow sends readers into a world of Darknet secret websites, Occupy protests, kidnapping and interrogation, and hacking. The narrative is threaded with geek teen culture, economic problems, election strategy, corporate greed, government conspiracies, and privacy issues, and technology nerds will eat this for breakfast with a cup of really good coffee—Marcus says cold-pressed is the only way to go. Libraries are going to want to "pwn" multiple copies to meet demand, and hope that readers take up the activism call to use their "skillz" for good. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Doctorow's international following is already lining up for this long-awaited sequel. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Makers - Cory Doctorow

Makers - Doctorow, Cory

Summary: What happens to America when two geeks working from a garage invent easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity, and crowd-sourced theme parks? Lawsuits against Disney are only the beginning in this major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America in the age of open source and its hero/hacker culture.


Library Journal Reviews
After winning acclaim and awards for his YA novel Little Brother, Locus Award winner Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) returns to adult sf. His latest involves a corporate executive who funds high-tech microprojects—they cost thousands of dollars instead of millions—a pair of inventors who can make anything out of anything, and a blogger who chronicles their careers. Doctorow isn't Pollyannesque about the effects of rapid technological change: change of such scope and force is often devastating—boom followed by bust, then boom again, then bust. The ending of this well-written, well-conceived novel is bittersweet. VERDICT In speculative fiction, too often the ideas outrun the writing, but not here. Doctorow's novel features a good, modest story, appealing characters, and extremely interesting ideas that will appeal to his fans and sf aficionados as well as readers interested in cogitating on the social consequences of cybertechnology's near-exponential growth. Enthusiastically recommended.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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