Book I’m hoping to read before 2016 arrives: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

—Cari Romm, assistant editor

A Vast Machine by Paul Edwards

MIT Press

For the last three years, clever and kind friends, with inquisitive brains and mental senses of the world I trust, would reference phrases from Paul Edwards’s A Vast Machine. It would be a different friend every time, and a different phrase every time too: Maybe “shimmering data” or “computational friction.”

Where is that from?, I’d ask. A Vast Machine, the answer would come. Oh, right, I’d say. I want to read that.

Finally this year I did.

Edwards’s book is a history of climate science as a “global data infrastructure,” (which sounds dull but is not), but it’s not only that. It’s a biography of a field inventing tools and coming to terms with them—but it’s not only that, either. It’s scholarship about the origins of our modern abundance of data, and a thoughtful work about what it means to create and think with models—but it’s neither of those by themselves.

A Vast Machine tells of how humanity came to understand the planet as a global system. It’s a history of thinking with and through technology—about our home, about our species, about their profound interdependence.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2016 arrives: The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne

—Robinson Meyer, associate editor

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Tor Books

What addicted me to Liu’s novel, the first in a trilogy whose other installments I have yet to read, was how dissimilar it was from any other science fiction I’ve recently consumed. There are no chosen ones, or wise old men, or galactic despots, or warrior princesses, or any of the other worn-out tropes of sci-fi storytelling today. Also refreshingly absent is the familiar veneer of American politics that shapes so much Western sci-fi, for better and (more often) for worse.

The story sets itself against the backdrop of modern Chinese history, tracing its characters from the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution to the dynamism of the country’s present day. Even a brief summary can’t do justice to its intricate plot. Liu employs secret military projects, mind-bending astrophysics, virtual-reality games that meld science with philosophy, and a puzzling extraterrestrial signal to vex his nuanced (and numerous) characters.

Connecting all these storylines is Liu’s palpable sense of unease. You can feel his anxiety about China’s struggle to adapt to its rapid rise, the looming threat of climate change, the dizzying pace of technological advancement, and most of all, his concern about humanity’s ability to overcome these problems. He’s not the first author to explore these themes, but he does it exceptionally well. By the time I turned the last page, I felt like I’d just read the first true 21st-century novel.

Book I'm hoping to read before 2016 arrives: Black Earth by Timothy Snyder

—Matt Ford, associate editor

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

Knopf

I moved away from New York this year, and one of the last things I did before I left was watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge. I hadn’t started City on Fire yet, but it’s impossible to think about those fireworks now—or New York, even—without thinking about Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel.

The story is about the shooting of a girl on New Year’s Eve in Central Park, and how the lives of the people around her converge in reaction. Initially a mystery—who shot the girl and why?—the book ultimately encompasses the decay of late-’70s New York, culminating in the blackout of 1977. The main characters are wealthy bankers, anarchist punks, Long Island teenagers, a heroin addict, a California expat, a grizzled journalist, a dogged detective, and an aspiring writer from Georgia. (It’s over 900 pages long, and stuffed to the max.)

While Hallberg delves into the gritty locale of a city teeming with lost souls, the most resonant impression left by the book is one of fireworks. They’re on the cover in technicolor, eye-popping glory, and reading it is just like watching them: exhilarating. “Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks,” a character thinks at one point, “they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.” City on Fire, by contrast, promises to endure.

Book I’m hoping to read before 2016 arrives: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall

—Jillian Kumagai, editorial fellow

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Anchor Books

I finished 2014 thinking Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah was the greatest book I had ever read, maybe even the greatest book of all time. This year, I read her older novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, and loved it even more.

Half of a Yellow Sun was originally published in 2006 and tells the story of the Nigerian Civil War, or Biafran War, in the late 1960s. Like Americanah, Adichie uses a nonlinear style of writing to switch between three narrators. The war unfolds through the eyes of Richard, a British expatriate studying Igbo art in Nigeria; Olanna, the daughter of a wealthy businessman; and her houseboy, Ugwu.

I remember learning about Biafra in school as a journalistic tragedy, the beginning of an era where conflict in African countries was reduced by Western media to images of starving Nigerian children on the cover of Life magazine. I like to believe Adichie’s use of intercutting narratives is her way of piecing together a chapter of Nigerian history that was told wrongly so many times before. By focusing on the stories of individuals, she proves that love, life, and humor can survive even the darkest times of war.

While seemingly disjointed at times, the change in narrators prevents readers from relying too much on any single story from this turbulent time in Nigeria (a concept Adichie famously addressed in her TED talk). It also makes the book that much more unpredictable and compelling to read.

—Jaclyn Skurie, editorial fellow