Hot off the press!

get some books, ye of the last minute

Researchers from the University of València have analyzed 25 recent studies, pulling in data from nearly half a million people, showing that when you read on paper—real, physical paper (in the ole days we usually called that “a book”)—your reading comprehension is 6 to 8 times greater than when you read on a screen.

Visca València!

Reading from print also increases your empathy, tends to be more enjoyable (whereas reading from a screen is much more likely to increase anxiety), and is better for your eyes and your hands. Even reading to children from a book rather than from a screen increases their comprehension and focus.

You know what else? Lately, we’ve been having banner years in terms of the Right trying, and often succeeding, to ban books.

But you know what else else? We can still get books! Real physical books! There may even be an independent bookstore near you (most of the corporate bookstores that destroyed most of the independent bookstores in the 90s have been gobbled up by Amazon! Suckas!!!) You probably might have a public library! A pagan institution the good Christians used to torch, but they’re so popular they’re still around, 3000 years later!

And guess what else else else? A whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of backgrounds buy presents for a whole slew of reasons around this time of year, and so many of us are habitually late!

So here are some recommendations, some of the best books I’ve come across recently! Get these for people you care about! And if you’re feeling extra generous, like Hallmark movie generous, ask your library to order copies of these.

(And if your brain is mush lately and you can’t find the energy to get anyone a present, much less read anything, watch the Christmas episode of Bob’s Burgers, season 13).

You know someone who likes speculative fiction?

Get them The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon. The story traces a borderland between queer cyberpunk and sentimental post-apocalyptic mech fantasy. And it’s fucking amazing. The characters are right there with you, in doubt, in disappointment, and even, sometimes, in redemption. And the storytelling moves you with all the craziness of world and its catastrophic denizens, human, other, and even otherer.

Don’t get it from Amazon please! They’re actually and truly evil!

Do you want a book that takes apart the society we live in, the structures and culture that built it, and also the social movements purportedly trying to change it? And at the same time a book that’s wholesome, that at its core is about healing?

And it’s also from a small independent press? Get No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred by Klee Benally (from Detritus Books).

And I won’t be diving into it until later this week, but Modibo Kadalie’s Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom (On Our Own Authority! Publishing) looks really promising too!

And finally, if you want to give a shot at this poor writer’s scifi, try Hermetica, a novella that got one reader “obsessed,” “so emotionally entangled with the lead” that they didn’t see the twist. (Genre fiction is the most monopolized part of the writing realm, so it’s especially important to support the few independent presses that still put out fantasy, scifi, and adjacent genres.)

Or, got any friends or relatives who love Tesla, think green energy or global climate agreements are going to save us, don’t see a connection between colonialism and extinction, or think that capitalism is compatible with a living planet?

Get them The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below (Pluto Press), which In These Times described as offering “grounded, realistic ideas about resistance based on the bold, sustained, complex, risky, principled experimentation ordinary people are taking up together all over the world.”

But seriously, if all you can manage is the Bob’s Burgers, you’re doing fine.

And maybe give this a share?