Zachary Kai

I read often. Always. Several books at once (often to my detriment, but always useful for pattern-seeking.) I never thought I'd grow fond of a specific publisher. I'm aware of some imprints, but never a specific 'style.'

Perhaps that says more about the publishing industry than me, but I've found a house I trust and delight in: Verso. The sense I get after reading several titles is deep engagement with 'esoteric' subjects, surprising connections that all make sense, and intellectual rigor.

This book has all three. No surprise there! The author has spent two decades making invisible systems visible: classified satellites, secret prisons, the hidden architecture of surveillance. This essay collection (part cultural criticism, part field guide) traces how generative AI and computer vision have rewired our relationship with images. Who makes them, who they're made for, and what they're doing to us.

What I didn't expect was the detour through UFO mythology and Cold War psyops. But each page earns every strange turn, and it all coheres.

Images have always been tools. But also weapons.

The question isn't whether machines are watching us. It's whether we know how to watch back.

There's a specific grief in living under artificial light: we've traded the liminal hours for convenience and barely noticed. At least the author has.

Is this creative nonfiction? I'm calling it that. Perhaps strange to describe a book as generous, but this blend of natural history, folklore, and memoir argues for the ecological and meaningful weight of dusk and dawn.

The hours we rush through. The ones we've stopped looking at.

She makes the twilight zone feel teeming with consequence. Because it is. Night-bloomers, crepuscular mammals, deep-sea creatures lit from within: each chapter opens the world wider. The everything-filtered-through-Yorkshire-seasons approach is a brilliant grounding tactic, anchoring the science without overtaking it.

I'm embarrassingly bad at going outside to look at the stars. Or to appreciate the dusk. Ironic, given I write space fantasy.

This book is a quiet indictment of the tendency to skip the in-between.

So, resist the temptation. Read the book. Regain the sense of wonder you didn't know you'd lost.

The best books arrive in the least expected manner: serendipitous, sideways, sorely needed. Diane Shiffer, ‘the internet’s favorite nana’ is much appreciated for her gentle videos about coffee-making, feline friends, and needlecraft.

While this book is exactly what it sounds like, it’s exactly what it needs to be.

Short essays, organised by season, each one a pause: a prompt to notice what’s already here. It doesn’t ask you to become someone else or achieve anything new.

It just asks you to slow down and gather the smallest joys.

Not every book (and everything worth doing) needs to change the world. Some just remind you that the world is worth being in.

Old Hollywood's always been a setting that promises both glamour and heartbreak. This book delivers on the former but softens it beautifully and sidesteps the latter (which is precisely the point.)

Like their previous co-written series, this is set in a world where queerness just...exists. No one fights, they just live. I'll admit I struggle with queernormative fiction, not because it's 'unrealistic' but rather because it feels so radical. It's life-and-hope giving in the most extraordinary way possible.

Working that into a story is a gift for the reader, and the authors do it well.

I have no preferences in relationship arcs, but here, the shift from friendship to romance is handled beautifully: a slow, inevitable turning toward each other. The chemistry is warm rather than electric, which suits perfectly, because it isn't about discovery so much as recognition.

This is a book you devour in a day or two and one that sits for weeks afterwards.

Okay, yes, the title is doing...a lot. And yes, this is a business book by a man who’s completed roughly 500 merger transactions and made himself ridiculously wealthy across six publicly traded corporations. Not exactly my usual reading.

The sequel to his first work delivers what it promises: a detailed guidebook for business at scale, from partnering with global investors to integrating acquisitions without everything imploding. Tactical, specific, practical.

Fine. Fair enough. Useful!

Except...Brad Jacobs is genuinely strange, in the best possible way.

Because what I mentioned above is only the second half. The first?

Meditation practices, psychological tools for staying centred in chaos, and frameworks for reframing cognitive distortions.

The wealth-creation machinery isn’t for everyone. The bit about staying present when the whole thing is on fire? Useful regardless of your ambitions.

Strange, specific, and oddly grounding. Which I didn’t predict.