Recently, there’s been an increase in the amount of content generated procedurally on the web. At the same time, search engines like Google are relying more and more on AI to give you results. I also noticed that I find myself opening up YouTube and finding nothing there to watch, as the algorithm seems to show me the same videos every day.

Because of this, I have started reading books. Previously, for mysterious reasons, I had found I was unable to read books: I’d pick them up, get bored and put them down. I thought this was due to maybe a bad attention span, but I discovered that it was mostly due to bad books.

Here’s the deal: the book industry is also affected by this lack of quality, and the books that do get published and advertised in platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Store, are, to put it mildly, not the best books ever written.

I tried various ways of finding “good books”, i.e. those books that you can’t put down. I tried various algorithmic recommendation engines, community sites, reddit. In the end, the best solution came in the form of “Librarian’s choice.” This is a list maintained by librarians in my local city, Wellington.

To quote Wellington City Council:

Librarians are good people. They love books and they love reading - these are good things.

As I slowly start to work my way through this list, I thought I’d recommend particularly great books that I’ve enjoyed the most. I’d like to start with “American Dirt”.

American dirt (2020) – By Cummins, Jeanine

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While the book recommendations are great, I have noticed that a suspiciously large percentage of the books are about book lovers and librarians. This is also the case for this book, which tells us the story of a book store owner named Lydia Quixano Perez.

In this book, I felt the dread of walking with Lydia and her son, as they embark on the journey from their home town to the USA as refugees, escaping from a particularly heinous persecutor, the new cartel that is terrorising their town. The writing style is so good that I felt the pain, the confusion and the fear as these characters keep making the only choice available to them in dire circumstances.

Originally, while reading the title of the book, I expected the book to be similar to “To Kill a Mockingbird”, i.e. based in the south of the USA some time in the recent past. While this book was written a few years ago, I think it is particularly striking because of what is happening today in the world, with the prosecution of hispanic people in the USA, as it gives humanity to this group of people who frequently are only a statistic or a number. The book also reflects on the nature of the US-mexico border, and the historical tendencies of people within these regions to move between these zones.

I feel that this is one of the better thrillers I have read recently, and I couldn’t stop reading it as soon as I picked it up. I highly recommend it.