Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain. But there are a smaller number of books that matter.
Though what matters can mean different things. Some books matter because of their consequences over time. Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each. Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.
However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards. Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world. For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago, has clearly become a book that matters. Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally. Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."
Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter. Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters. Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future. Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan. That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)
But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique. Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read. I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so. It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum. The order in which I present them does not imply rank. What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world. In that sense, they bring the news.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work. Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story. The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons. It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism. Who loves this story? The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution. Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.
According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression. We carry some of their genes.
Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban. All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids. There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers. The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.
This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy. Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.
This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book. We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies: it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
by Ed Yong
In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease. She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.
This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular. But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.
That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice. These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.
All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.
The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull. It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do. As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably. Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.
Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different. Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails. Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.
Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions. That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more. Some of these discoveries are astonishing: for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range. We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other. At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.
Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here. Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot. “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”
But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives. Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.
Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating.
This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence
By James Bridle
Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations. He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines. “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes. “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”
Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it. As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.
The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.
This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from. Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.
One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation. That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.
The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World
A novel by Dave Eggers
In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality. Welcome to The Every.
Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside. She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.
Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.” Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments. The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference.
The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.
Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives. This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.
It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.
There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now. The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.
These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves. Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.) They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action.
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