The Stack. Vol 1, Issue 01.

Take a look, it's in a book...

There's a thing I do when I'm holding a book, and I'm not sure when I started doing it... but I find myself doing it when I've just read a sentence and have stopped to sort of roll the thought around in my mind like trying to pull the individual flavor of ingredients from your tongue after a delicious bite: I hold the book away from me, just enough that I can't really focus on the words anymore, I let my eyes blur a little, and I just... look at it and wonder at the idea of it.

The shape and the construction of a book, covers bound together holding pages with text between them. Lines of text that turn into sentences, sentences that stack into paragraphs, paragraphs that build into chapters, chapters that arc into a story with a rising action and a crescendo and a climax and a quiet exhale at the end — yet the whole time, the entire architecture of it has been just words. Symbols on a page that we collectively agreed mean something, arranged by a person who wanted to tell you something, and now you're holding it.

What a strange, miraculous, almost embarrassingly low-tech thing a book is.

I've been thinking about this lately, partly because I've been working through the redesign of the Book Bros Book Club and have been swimming in the metadata of books — covers, ISBNs, page counts, ratings — and partly because the more I work in tech, the more I keep coming back to the realization that the thing I love most about reading is how analog it is. Pages are finite. They have edges.

You can hold the whole thing in your hand and feel the weight of where you are in the story by how the bulk has shifted from the right side of your hands to the left. There's no infinite scroll. There's no algorithm guessing what you should look at next. There's just the next page, and then the page after that, and eventually you reach the back cover.

In a culture raised on television and movies, then steeped in the ambient hum of social media rife with dark patterns and doom scrolls that don't end because they're not designed to end — books are kind of an act of resistance.

You sit down. You're alone with someone else's mind. You get pulled into a world and you have to do the visualizing yourself — you get to construct faces of the characters, you see the landscapes and the rooms they walk through, the inflections in their voices, the cadence of how they speak, it all inferred by the way the author writes it yet built by what you apply to it in your mind. The book gives you the script and your imagination does the staging. That's a participatory act, and its rare to find much else in modern life that asks that of you anymore.

Vocabulary is such an great thing too. I notice when I'm reading regularly, my own writing tightens. I find words I hadn't reached for in months. I get the rhythm of a good sentence back in my head, and it bleeds into how I talk and how I write everything else. That's been good for the blog, frankly, but I know Lynds' eyes might just roll out of her head if I don't tone it back a bit.

Physical copies

Then there's the thing about used books and library books, which I'll keep coming back to because it might be my favorite part of all of this.

I love physical books more than any other format, especially used and well read books, because there's this connection they offer, a physical tie to other people who've read them, and an olfactory connection to those who sniff them... I'll explain.

The smell of any book, but especially an old one, is a wonderful thing. It is a particular and unique and addictive scent that is softly warm and warmly familiar and it spreads a calm over me. It's a strangely grounding and centering thing to do. Lynds will snatch a book from me mid-read, stuff her face between the pages, and deeply inhale.

I think about how many people love that smell too, how many sniffs a book has had, and how many noses have been pressed between the pages. Used books and library books must have an impressive read count that has been accumulated, something I'd love to see, as well as a smell count.

I also think about someone laying in bed late at night when they know they should be sleeping, reading light on, holding the same copy I'm now holding — both of us completely unaware of each other's existence but connected by the words on the same pages. Did they have someone they love asleep next to them while they read? Was there the cadence of a pug's snores and the white noise of a ceiling fan droning on while they tried to stay quiet and suppress their amazement or surprise too? That copy passed through their hands and ended up in mine, with whatever invisible residue a stranger leaves on a story. Library books and used books both have that magical quality and I love thinking about it during quiet, special, moments like these.

Two of the books I'm about to talk about came from my local library.

The other three came from Thriftbooks.

Five strangers, somewhere, held these books before me. I like that very much.

This Stack of Books

This is The Stack... my stack really. It's a new series I'm kicking off — a running log of what I've been reading, with brief, spoiler-free reviews of my most recent five reads.

The reviews are short on purpose. I don't want to summarize plots — that's what the back cover is for. I want to tell you how the book felt, what stuck with me, and whether I'd nudge you to pick it up. A word of caution though, most books I read I love in one way or another and tend to be a bit loquacious about, usually recommending them every one, but I'll try to really emphasize it when I find one to be a must read.

Here's what I just finished:

Upgrade — Blake Crouch

4.5 out of 5

Crouch is one of those authors I'll just keep buying without thinking about it. Dark Matter and Recursion both read as if your were binging a TV show — fast, propulsive, almost cinematically structured, in a way that really felt like I was burning through a season rather than a reading. Upgrade is a little different. It's still a page-turner, still has that Crouch pacing where you keep telling yourself one more chapter, but it reads more like an actual novel — more interior, more willing to slow down inside a moment. I appreciated that. The premise is the kind of thing that quietly hooks into your imagination and won't let go. The whole time I was reading it, I kept catching myself thinking I'd want this. I'd want the upgrade. Then a chapter later I'd think no, I absolutely would not, because look at what it costs. That's the trick of the book — it gets you to want the thing, then makes you sit with what wanting that thing actually does to the relationships that matter to you. The vital ones. The ones you don't get back if they break.

Worth picking up if you've liked any of Crouch's other work. If you haven't read him before, this is a fine place to start, though Dark Matter is still where I'd send a first-timer, and then a fast follow with Recursion... or vice versa really.

Vicious — V.E. Schwab

4.5 out of 5

I came to this one fresh off The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which I adored — full body adoration, the kind where you finish a book and immediately want to find more of whatever this person has written. The prose was poetic and descriptive and stayed with me all day between reading sessions. So Vicious was me investigating what else Schwab does, and the answer is a lot, and very differently.

This is a book about superpowers, sort of, except that's underselling it. It's really a book about how a person's mind — their fixations, their wounds, their convictions about what they deserve — shapes what they actually become. The mechanism by which people in this universe acquire abilities is intertwined with their psychology in a way I found completely fascinating. The person you are when the abilities arrive is the person the abilities calibrate to. That's a deeply Schwab idea and she does it well.

I loved the central rivalry between the protagonist and his friend turned enemy. Schwab writes antagonism with a precision that doesn't feel cheap — both sides have legitimate grievances, both sides are kind of the villain depending on the chapter, and the book doesn't try to resolve that for you.

"I want superpowers too" was my recurring thought through this one, in the same way Upgrade made me want the upgrade. Different flavor, same itch, and same feeling of be careful what you wish for buddy.

Worth reading if you liked Addie LaRue, or honestly if you just like character-driven genre fiction that doesn't condescend to you.

A Short Stay in Hell — Steven L. Peck

4.8 out of 5

This is the book I keep wanting to talk to people about and can't, because anything I say beyond the broadest strokes ruins it.

So I'll keep it broad.

It's barely 100 pages. It opens almost like a comedy — a setup so absurd you're half laughing at it. Then it tilts. The comedy curdles into horror, the kind that sits with you and gets worse the longer you think about it. Then it tilts again into something deeply, almost unbearably philosophical — a meditation on time, meaning, identity, and what a soul might look like when stretched across an unimaginable scale.

The fact that Peck does all of this in roughly the page count of a long novella is, to me, kind of an astonishing feat. The magnitude of what this book pulls off in such a short span is one of the more impressive things I've read in years. The journey it takes you on is enormous and it never feels rushed. I almost hope this is the version of hell I'd find myself in if that were my fate.

Almost.

That's a sentence I didn't expect to ever write about a book, but here we are.

If you'll read anything from this list, read this. It's short. It's cheap. It will live in your head rent-free for weeks afterward.

Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro

4.8 out of 5

Some books make me think and some books make me feel and a small handful do both at the same time, and Klara and the Sun is one of those.

I felt protective of Klara almost from the first chapter. I worried for her in a way I don't usually worry for characters — quietly, persistently, in the back of my head while I was doing other things during the day. Ishiguro builds that protectiveness through the smallest possible interactions. A glance, a misunderstanding, a moment where she gets something almost right but not quite. The accumulation is what wrecks you.

I kept being reminded of The Velveteen Rabbit while reading this — the wistfulness of objects that were once cherished and then set aside, and what they might think about being set aside if they could think anything at all. I don't think Klara ever quite reaches the level of love that the Velveteen Rabbit does. The book is honest about that asymmetry.

What Klara feels for people is its own beautiful thing, and the way Ishiguro renders it — patient, restrained, never sentimental — is masterclass-level writing.

This one connects in a quiet way to a lot of what I've been thinking about with AI lately. There's a section in the book that sat with me for a few days afterward, about devotion and observation and the limits of what a watching mind can actually understand about the thing it's watching. I'll leave that there.

If you haven't read Ishiguro at all and want to start somewhere quiet and devastating, this is a good door.

There Is No Antimemetics Division — QNTM

4.6 out of 5

This one is strange, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. It's a book about ideas that erase themselves from your memory the moment you encounter them — and the people whose job it is to fight things they can't remember they're fighting. Just sitting with that premise for a second is enough to give you a small headache, and the book is essentially that premise dialed up for the entire run time.

It's mind-bending and reality-distorting in the way the best speculative fiction is — the kind where you have to put the book down occasionally to let your brain catch up. QNTM does something I haven't seen many other writers attempt: they construct a story whose central horror is epistemological. Not gore, not violence, not death itself — but the inability to know what you've forgotten, or whether you've forgotten anything at all. There are sequences in this book that are unsettling for reasons I couldn't explain to you cleanly even now.

What I loved most is the creativity of the thing. It feels like a book that could only have been written by someone who had this idea, fell in love with it, and then refused to let go until they'd built every possible architecture around it. That kind of obsession shows up in the writing.

Worth reading if you like SCP Foundation–style storytelling, weird fiction, or anything that messes with the reader's sense of reality in interesting ways.

Less worth it if you want a clean linear plot delivered in a tidy bow.

A Note on the Stack

That's five. Two from the library, three from Thriftbooks, all physical, all paper, all dog-eared in the places I wanted to come back to, and all have passed through some other set of adventurous hands.

The Stack will keep moving — I never quite know what's going to jump the queue. Sometimes a recommendation from Wood or Nick will leapfrog whatever I had planned. Sometimes a book club Book of the Month takes the lead. Sometimes I'll be standing in a used bookstore and I'll catch a whiff of something old and battered and that will come home with me and it will become the next great thing.

That's part of the point of doing this as a series, I think.

The stack isn't curated, it's accrued. It's the books that found me, in the order they found me, and writing about them is just a way of slowing down enough to notice what they did to my head before the next one shows up.

If any of these jump out at you, pick one up. Better yet, pick one up used. Be the next stranger to leave invisible residue on the pages. Open it up and press it your face and take it in through your nostrils. Wonder, while you read, who held it before you and what they were doing the night they finished it. Perhaps we'll have shared that very same copy! There's something quietly beautiful about being one stop on a book's slow journey through a series of imaginations.

The next issue of The Stack will arrive when there are five more to talk about. Someone has to keep track of these things.