Want to know what books Lev Grossman recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Lev Grossman's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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The Once and Future King
T. H. White, Neil Gaiman
4.2
T.H White′s masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend is an abiding classic. Here all five volumes that make up the story are published in one volume, as White himself always wished. Exquisite comedy offsets the tragedy of Arthur′s personal doom as White brings to life the major British epic of all time with brilliance, grandeur, warmth and charm.
TH White’s The Once and Future King. White is less famous than Lewis and Tolkien, but he was a better writer, at least as far as style goes, and his book is a true masterpiece in its own right – a thoroughly modern re-imagining of the great English epic, the story of King Arthur. Like Tolkien, White takes an ancient, mythic landscape and scales it down to human size (or perhaps he scales us up). But White’s world is more brightly lit than Tolkien’s – he dispenses with all those Wagnerian storm clouds. White’s England is all streaming banners and sun-splashed meadows and shining walls, and he lingers longer over his characters, making them more complex and flawed and divided against themselves. The first part alone, “The Sword in the Stone”, about Arthur’s early years and his education by Merlin, may be the best story of a childhood ever committed to paper. [source]
Atul Butte
@ZachWeiner The Once and Future King. Awesome book, can't forget the lessons 35 years later. [source]
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Clay Shirky
3.9
A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.
With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’être swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.
One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.
Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know
Randall Stross
3.6
"In this spellbinding behind-the-scenes look, Stross leads readers through Google’s evolution…the unfolding narrative reads like a suspense novel" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Based on unprecedented access to the "Googleplex," Planet Google goes deep inside the company to unveil the extraordinary scope and scale of its ambition to become the master gate-keeper of "all the world’s information," including its users’ most personal information. New York Times columnist Randall Stross provides a lively tour through Google’s flurry of new information gathering initiatives. Will Google stay true to its famous "Don’t Be Evil" mantra? Will it protect all of the personal information it collects? Planet Google is a much-needed wake-up call about how powerful the Google juggernaut has become.
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum. (back cover)
First up, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by JRR Tolkien. But you knew I was going to say that. This one book, which was published in 1937, defined so many variables for the fantasy tradition that are still in place today. Tolkien’s extraordinary achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, bring them back to life, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could see the details up close, at human scale. The Hobbit is both mythic and relatable at the same time – The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik recently called it “an arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and The Wind in the Willows”, and I think that’s entirely fair. Though I would give more credit to the bass register of Tolkien’s imagination, its abyssal depths. Mole never delved as deep as the Mines of Moria. [source]
Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]
The Hobbit is such a richly imagined fantasy that, especially as a child, you can live in it. It is so completely immersive. [source]
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The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)
C. S. Lewis, Kenneth Branagh, et al
4.5
Narnia...the land beyond the wardrobe door, a secret place frozen in eternal winter, a magical country waiting to be set free.
Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first her brothers and sister don't believe her when she tells of her visit to the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund, then Peter and Susan step through the wardrobe themselves. In Narnia they find a country buried under the evil enchantment of the White Witch. When they meet the Lion Aslan, they realize they've been called to a great adventure and bravely join the battle to free Narnia from the Witch's sinister spell.
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Recommended by Chris Anderson, Chris Anderson, Chris Anderson, and 3 others.
You win some Turkish delight. Everyone knows Lewis’s Narnia books are a foundational work of the modern fantastic. But I don’t think Lewis gets enough credit for his craft as a writer. Those books are deceptively simple. Look at the way he constructed the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He puts the shadows of the war in the background, the excitement of a new house in the country in the foreground. Look at how he carefully sketches all the relationships between all four of the Pevensie children. And when he sends Lucy through the wardrobe (it’s on page five – he doesn’t waste time), it’s like nothing else in fiction up to that point. There are no sparkles, no wondrous rhetoric, just one precisely observed sensory detail after another: A dead bluebottle on a windowsill; some soft coats; some cold crunchy snow; some prickly pine branches – and then you’re in Narnia. People dismiss Lewis as a Christian propagandist, but that’s a mistake. He was a novelist before he was a Christian. [source]
Chris Anderson
As a child, they exploded my imagination. [source]
Chris Anderson
As a child, they exploded my imagination. [source]
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A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
4.2
Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth.
Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.
It was published in 1968 and it was a revelation for fantasy readers, and possibly a revolution…Le Guin brought fantasy back to its pagan roots. She used as the foundations of her story the building blocks of nature and sex and language. [source]
The school on Roke, a school for magic where you can learn how to be a wizard, was such a glorious idea. [source]
Scott Perry
I don’t read much fiction these days, but favorites from my past are A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham. All three are well crafted tales of the struggle to find meaning and one’s place in the world. [source]
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Life on the Screen
Sherry Turkle
3.3
"Life on the Screen" is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. "Life on the Screen" traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity-- as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.
Turkle is a brilliant observer of the online world, and what makes the Net incredibly interesting is that it was never intended to be a social medium. [source]
Aleks Krotoski
One of the first academic and one of the first popular and accessible looks at how the web is transforming who we are, and how we view ourselves. [source]
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The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Shepard Fairey
4.1
The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.
If you really want to look at what everybody else is building on, it’s really McLuhan’s ideas. [source]
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Weaving the Web
Tim Berners-Lee
4.1
English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee quietly laid the foundations for the World Wide Web (and consequently Hypertext) in 1980, created a prototype in 1990 and unleashed it to the public in 1991. Now overseeing his creation's growth, he tells the story of its growth and future development.
Tim Berners-Lee is the guy who designed and named the World Wide Web. He was a physicist, he was working in CERN, and this book is extremely engaging and readable. It’s very similar in some ways to Francis Crick’s The Double Helix, and he really just talks about where his invention came from, how it happened, and what everything you read about the history of the Internet tells you that a lot of it happened by accident. [source]
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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
Katie Hafner
4.2
Considering that the history of the Internet is perhaps better documented internally than any other technological construct, it is remarkable how shadowy its origins have been to most people, including die-hard Net-denizens!
At last, Hafner and Lyon have written a well-researched story of the origins of the Internet substantiated by extensive interviews with its creators who delve into many interesting details such as the controversy surrounding the adoption of our now beloved "@" sign as the separator of usernames and machine addresses. Essential reading for anyone interested in the past -- and the future -- of the Net specifically, and telecommunications generally.
If you want to go all the way back, Janet Abbate’s Inventing The Internet really takes it all the way back to the Eisenhower administration and the very beginnings of electronic computers. [source]
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke
4.0
Librarian note: Alternate cover edition of 9780765356154.
Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.
But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.
All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.
It’s a magic that feels absolutely real, as if the book were an eyewitness account. Not since Lewis has the supernatural been such a thrilling, immediate, concrete presence on the page. It’s no accident that I began The Magicians in 2004 – Strange is the book that woke me up to the power of the new fantasy. Read it, and you may be woken up too. [source]
Tendai Huchu
I chose this book because it really blurs the line between fiction and history. Just the use of footnotes and references to texts that likely don’t exist yet unless Susanna Clarke writes them in! [source]
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