Booklist Booklist, Vol. 120, No. 22, 8/1/24

News about AI is omnipresent. I read articles on AI and I review books on the subject. Every day, it seems, I’m peppered with promotions for the latest AI tools that help with everything from taking notes to setting agendas, creating presentations, improving personal decision-making, creating immersive experiences, discovering efficiencies, and expanding entertainment. There are myriad AI dangers, as well, involving privacy, bias, data ethics, and deliberately misleading disinformation. Frighteningly, image recognition and weaponry powered by AI are now used in warfare and global conquest. I read an article in The Guardian noting that July 21, 2024, was the “hottest ever recorded day.” Immediately thereafter, I read an article from March 2024 in Vox titled, “AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.” Thinking…

Philosophy & Psychology Habits of a Peacemaker: 10 Habits to Change Our Potentially Toxic Conversations into Healthy Dialogues. By Steven T. Collis. Sept. 2024. 256p. Shadow Mountain, $26.99 (9781639932979). 158.1. As a law professor who specializes in the First Amendment, Collis has had his share of uncomfortable conversations. In this logically argued book, his aim is to give readers strategies for defusing toxic conversations and coming up with usable solutions to today’s problems. His advice sounds basic: assume the best about people, be open to change, and spend time with people with differing viewpoints. What gives his advice weight are the examples he gives from his own conversations and life experiences. It’s not easy to keep an open mind when others are shouting at you or flinging daggers on social…

What’s on the horizon for fall and beyond? Just-announced memoirs, a series surprise, a revisited classic, and more! —Annie Bostrom City of Night Birds. By Juhea Kim. Ecco, $30 (9780063394759). Nov. In St. Petersburg, a ballerina wrestles with a career that may be behind her and with two opposing male dancers in the second novel from the author of the much-celebrated Beasts of a Little Land (2021). Death of the Author. By Nnedi Okorafor. Morrow, $30 (9780063391147). Jan. Sf giant Okorafor offers a metanovel in which an author of midlist literary fiction decides to write a sf epic and, shocking her most of all, the book changes everything. Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. By John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Doubleday, $30 (9780385550444). Oct. Legal-thriller star Grisham teams up…

Keep your Spanish-language collection fresh and relevant with these works of enticing nonfiction and popular and literary fiction. This list includes a variety of genres and interests as well as translations from the original English of works by Latine writers. Not included are Spanish translations of such best-selling authors as Colleen Hoover, James Patterson, or Joyce Meyers, but those are also sure bets! Nonfiction ¡Cómo salir del pozo!: Las nuevas estrategias de los países, las empresas y las personas en busca de la felicidad. By Andrés Oppenheimer. 2023. Vintage Espanol (9781644739495). Argentine journalist and Miami Herald columnist Oppenheimer delves into the global phenomenon of dissatisfaction, offering new perspectives along with concrete, accessible solutions. Hijas de América Latina: Una antología global. Edited by Sandra Guzmán. 2023. HarperCollins Espanol (9780063245136). This fabulous…

General Fiction Blue Sisters. By Coco Mellors. Sept. 2024. 352p. Ballantine, $28.99 (9780593723760); e-book (9780593723777). The three remaining Blue sisters are estranged and living very different lives. Avery is the oldest and has always cared for her sisters. She appears to have gotten her life together, having recovered from her addictions, and is a successful lawyer, married to a beautiful woman. Avery enjoys being needed, but ever since her sister Nicky died of an accidental overdose, she has been sabotaging her future. Bonnie was a champion fighter, up until Nicky’s death. After losing a match, Bonnie walked away from it all. Lucky is a beautiful model who flies all around the world, but her increasing dependency on drugs and alcohol is no longer deniable. An email from their mother informs…

Absolution. By Jeff VanderMeer. Oct. 2024. 464p. Farrar/MCD, $29 (9780374616595); e-book (9780374616601). With this prequel to the best-selling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, 2014), VanderMeer lures readers back into the hallucinatory clutches of Area X, an anomalous coastal region in the United States. Three linked stories explore the years leading up to the Area X Event, weaving deftly in and out of the time line established by the trilogy, obliquely referring to key characters and moments that will reward careful readers. “Dead Town” takes place 20 years before Area X, as Old Jim, a Central agent turned analyst, reconstructs events from Central’s piecemeal files concerning a team of biologists surveying the Forgotten Coast as they fall prey to an uncanny figure called the Rogue. The next section, “The False Daughter,” takes…