Eat More Better: How to Make Every Bite More Delicious, by Dan Pashman
Recommended by L.V. Anderson, assistant editor
Dan Pashman is a friend of Slate – he adjudicated the Slate Culture Gabfest’s infamous granola contest and co-hosted Table to Farm with me – and a mad food scientist. On his podcast The Sporkful, he devotes his wacky imagination to determining the very best way to eat – well, everything. This year, he published his many insights in the form of a book, Eat More Better: How to Make Every Bite More Delicious. I strongly disagree with some of his conclusions – for instance, that vegetarians need a complicated centerpiece on Thanksgiving, and that it’s OK to cherry-pick through snack mix. But I have no quibbles with the entertaining way he makes his arguments.
Spoiled Brats, by Simon Rich
Recommended by Ben Blatt, staff writer
The newest collection of humorous short stories from writer Simon Rich is a must-read for any fans of the form. The piece “Guy Walks into a Bar,” about a hard-of-hearing genie who grants a “12-inch pianist” instead of a “12-inch penis” and ends with a punch line a mental cut above most blue comedy, illustrates Rich’s talent. His humor is equal parts accessible and witty. The book will likely be read in one sitting, both because of its length and ability to make anyone laugh.
Lock In, by John Scalzi
Recommended by Torie Bosch, Future Tense editor
Sci-fi writer John Scalzi’s latest novel is a deeply engrossing detective story, set in a future in which a devastating epidemic of a new disease called Haden’s syndrome has left more than 4 million Americans with lock-in – unable to move their bodies but sound of mind. Thanks to medical and technological advances made possible by unprecedented government research funding, those with lock-in are able to navigate the world via mechanical surrogates, nicknamed “threeps” for C-3PO. In some ways, a threep is superior to a human body – it can’t get hurt – but at the same time, Hadens (who hate to be called victims) suffer discrimination and often find that they don’t have much in common with the rest of the world. The murder mystery is decent, but what makes “Lock In” so special is the fascinating, cohesive world Scalzi sets up, with challenging questions about disability rights, medical research, liability, and social stratification. After you read“Lock In, check out the Kindle Single Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, which fills in a lot of the backstory about the epidemic and the Haden’s rights movement.
Infinitesimal, by Amir Alexander
Recommended by Boer Deng, editorial assistant
Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal reminds us that the path toward progress has always been difficult. The notion of infinity underpins much of mathematics, but was once rejected even by brilliant Jesuit mathematicians and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (who actually had a deep interest in Euclidean geometry, and once tried to present the proof for “squaring the circle” – a classic problem later found to be impossible). Alexander documents the early drama surrounding a revolutionary idea.
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
Recommended by Simon Doonan, Slate columnist and Barneys Creative Ambassador
How can one book be so dismal and so utterly unputdownable? Having been born in a rooming house I resonated wildly with the squalid claustrophobia of shared accommodations, but La Waters is such a good story-teller that you will be sucked in, regardless of how posh your background.
Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (20th Anniversary Kindle Edition), by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood
Recommended by Jonathan L. Fischer, senior editor
If you want to understand Marion Barry, the “mayor-for-life” of Washington, D.C., who died in November, start with this magisterial account of his rise in the promising early years of D.C. Home Rule, his fall amid the city’s “murder capital” era, and his comeback in the 1990s. The book was first published in 1994; this 20th-anniversary e-book edition includes a new afterword by the authors connecting the Barry era to today’s moneyed, very different District of Columbia, where the office rents are starting to rival Manhattan’s and municipal leaders express concern about gentrification and displacement, not poverty and the crack epidemic.
Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, by Walter Kirn
Recommended by David Haglund, senior editor
Every so often, my wife and I pick a book to read together, aloud. More precisely, I read a chapter or two each night until she falls asleep. Two kinds of books work especially well for this approach, which is hands down my favorite way to read something: 1) funny books and 2) page-turners. Walter Kirn’s “Blood Will Out,” which we read together this past summer, fits the latter category: In it, Kirn describes his messy and, ultimately, somewhat embarrassing relationship with Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German con man who claimed to be a Rockefeller and who was charged with murder in 2011. Kirn not only details Gerhartsreiter’s crimes and his subsequent trial, he also investigates his own willingness to be taken in, and why. Kirn ends up feeling that he let himself be duped, in part, as a writer, one who had begun this friendship by giving Gerhartsreiter “the indulgent loyalty that writers reserve for their favorite characters, the ones, it’s said, we can’t make up.”
Do Not Sell at Any Price, by Amanda Petrusich
Recommended by Jack Hamilton, pop critic
Petrusich’s fantastic book about old 78rpm records and the oddball heroes who rescue them isn’t a history tale so much as a travelogue into the most beautiful corners of obsession. Petrusich is a top-flight music writer – meticulous, generous, and deeply informed. But she’s also a terrific curator of human subjects, from the lovesick collectors who make up the bulk of her narrative to the towering, still-shadowy names that grace these circular hunks of shellac: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Geeshie Wiley, the peerless Charley Patton. Do Not Sell At Any Price is as idiosyncratic, alluring and totally alive as the scratchy sides that consume it, and anyone who’d accuse Petrusich or her protagonists of caring too much about these recordings has probably never heard them.
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, by Mark Harris
Recommended by Aisha Harris, staff writer
Mark Harris is one of the smartest living film essayists today. His first book, Pictures at a Revolution, fascinatingly dissected the five Best Picture nominees of 1967 from a historical and critical standpoint, and Five Came Back takes on a similar and equally winning formula, this time by looking at five renowned Hollywood directors – Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston and George Stevens – and their cinematic and militaristic contributions to World War II. The book will easily please both film buffs and history buffs.
How to Build a Girl, by Caitlin Moran
Recommended by Amanda Hess, staff writer
Of all the 2014 hardbacks aimed at the blossoming niece demographic (Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, Amy Poehler’s Yes Please!, Megan Amram’s Science … for Her!), Moran’s book is the one I most want to plant in the hands of the nearest 13-year-old girl. Like her fellow pop-feminist famous ladies, Moran mines her own witty wunderkind bio for bildungsroman fodder (How to Build A Girl’s teen rock-critic protagonist, Johanna Morrigan, is Moran by another name). But Moran’s fictionalized approach frees her to get realer than the celebrity memoir genre typically allows: Where her compatriots detour into euphemisms and platitudes for PR purposes, Moran delivers deliciously graphic details about what really happens when a teenage girl enters a man’s world.
Console Wars, by Blake J. Harris
Recommended by Derreck Johnson, designer
Console Wars is a deep and thorough dive into the intense rivalry between the Sega and Nintendo video game companies in the 1990s. As a former owner of an NES, a Sega Genesis, an N64 and a Sega Dreamcast, I can say with confidence that it doesn’t get any more informative than this.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami
Recommended by Chris Kirk, interactives editor
A man searches for answers a decade after his close-knit high school clique inexplicably ostracizes him. It’s a reflective quest through aging and alienation, and every reader will experience it differently, but it will speak most to anyone who has ever lost friends, whether by a dispute, death, or merely the diverging circumstances of life.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, by David Shafer
Recommended by Dan Kois, culture editor
I really loved this weird, funny techno-thriller, in which three somewhat lost souls – Leila, an NGO worker who sees something she shouldn’t in Myanmar; Leo, a fired nursery school teacher who writes manifestoes in Portland; Mark, who accidentally ended up the in-house guru to a CEO who is maybe totally evil – uncover, yes, a conspiracy. But the conspiracy, while zingy, is the least exciting part of “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” Instead I enjoyed watching Shafer’s appealing screw-ups fall in with each other, finding kindred spirits and a common enemy. And I thrilled to Shafer’s language, which is clever and humane, as when Leo complains about how far he’s sunk: “Then his pot dealer cut him off. Out of concern! Like pot dealers are bound by the Hippocratic oath.”
The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, by Jonathan Eig
Recommended by Miriam Krule, assistant editor
The 10th-grade history teacher at my religious high school liked to ruffle feathers by telling his students that the pill was the most important invention of the 20th century – for what it’s worth, Jonathan Eig was inspired to write this book after hearing something similar in a rabbi’s sermon. Indeed, it’s not really a feather-ruffling statement; it’s a fairly easy argument to make when you think about it, and especially after you read Eig’s well-crafted and comprehensive account of the four main shakers who brought the pill from an idea to, as the title suggests, a revolution. But you don’t need me to tell you what you already know about how the pill has allowed women to choose their own fate or that women’s reproductive health has become one of the most contentious topics in today’s political landscape. You will, on the other hand, appreciate how Eig explains why the pill has reached the iconic status that no other pill seems to have achieved, or for that matter, any other product. As Eig writes, there’s “no such thing as The Soap or The Vacuum or The Car.” What Eig does, as Margret Talbot explains in The New Yorker, is tell the story of a pill that “matters so much, in ways both thrillingly intimate and sweepingly sociological.”
