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This was not intentional, but three of the four books are sci-fi and/or have something to do with the end of the world. I tend to compile the selections in the order I’ve seen them or given them, making my way through an updated list. And clearly, my mind keeps turning into post-apocalyptic themes. Apropos of nothing, I’m sure!
Have you received any good book recommendations lately? Let us know in the comments!
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Everything Must Go
Anyone else listen to The Besties? It’s a podcast with two of the three McElroy brothers and two of their colleagues from Polygon. It’s mostly a podcast about video games, but they do dabble into pop culture and books. Anyway! This was recommended in their recent episode newsletter and, as someone who remembers Y2K, I immediately added this to my TBR pile.
A rich, captivating, and darkly humorous look into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world.
As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them, from H.G. Wells, Jack London, W.B. Yeats and J.G. Ballard to The Twilight Zone, Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max and The Terminator.
Prescient and original, Everything Must Go is a brilliant, sweeping work of history that provides many astute insights for our times and speaks to our urgent concerns for the future.
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I’ll Love You Forever
This is a mixture of memoir and an essay collection, but with K-Pop and Korean culture at its center. I was a K-Pop fan in high school and traveled to Korea twice last year. If you have any K-Pop fans in your life, or you are one, perhaps check this out.
Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror meets Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings in a meditation that blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore how the author’s love affair with K-pop has shaped her sense of self, charting K-pop’s complex coming-of-age through some of its biggest idols.
I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan is a smart, poignant, constantly surprising essay collection that considers the collision between stratospherically popular music and our inescapably personal selves. Giaae Kwon explores the influence of K-pop artists, from H.O.T. to Taeyeon to IU to Suga from BTS, and reveals how each one illuminated and shaped her own life.
In centering intimate experiences to explore larger cultural topics, this singular work breaks new ground in its consideration of K-pop. I’ll Love You Forever blends the critical with the personal while spanning the history of K-pop from the perspective of a bilingual and bicultural Korean American. Kwon interweaves profiles of different K-pop idols with topics such as Korea’s obsession with academics, and its attitudes toward plastic surgery, and female sexuality and desire, among others. Combining insightful critique and adoring analysis, I’ll Love You Forever provides readers with a fuller picture of a culturally and socially complex industry and the machine and heart behind its popularity. Through it all, Kwon offers up the passion of a superfan, finding joy in K-pop along the way.
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The Last Gifts of the Universe
Look…there’s a kitty on the cover in a spacesuit. It’s name is Pumpkin. Do I need to provide any more incentives?
A dying universe. A search for answers. An adventure at the end of a trillion lifetimes.
When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilisations. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last ones left – and whatever came for the others will one day come for them.
Scout is an Archivist who scours the dead worlds of the cosmos for their last gifts: interesting technology, cultural rituals – anything left behind that might be useful to Home and their survival. During an excavation on a lifeless planet, Scout unearths something unbelievable: a surviving message from an alien who witnessed the world-ending entity thousands of years ago.
Now Scout, their brother and their sometimes-fearless, space-faring cat, Pumpkin, must race to save what matters most.
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This World Is Not Yours
The marketing copy makes comparisons to Cassandra Khaw and I think that’s pretty accurate. It certainly shares the elements of forced proximity, a toxic group of people, and body horror.
This World is Not Yours by USA Today bestseller Kemi Ashing-Giwa is the perfect blend of S.A. Barnes’ space horror and Cassandra Khaw’s beautiful but macabre worlds. An action-packed, inventive novella about a toxic polycule consumed by jealousy and their attempts to survive on a hostile planet.
After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.
The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.
As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself.
There’s more than one way to be eaten alive.
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This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in
our posts, as well. Thanks!
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