Of the 70 Books I Read This Year, These Spoke to Me Directly by Charles Mudede This year, I read 70 or so books. All of them were great because, to be honest, I no longer have the time or energy to read bad books. The bulk of what I read in 2025 will not interest the general public because the books are concerned with some decade-old project in my head: structuralism, post-Marxism, the Scottish Enlightenment, anything academic to do with Spinoza, Leibniz, Octavia Butler, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Robinson, and, most importantly, thermodynamics—particularly the contributions by Sadi Carnot, Rudolf Clausius, and the melancholy Ludwig Botztmann. In fact, the best thing I read in 2025 concerning these 19th century scientists was a 94-page chapter, “A History of Thermodynics,” that a foolish editor at Basic Books removed from Julian Barbour’s highly speculative The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time. What might interest readers are the small number of this year’s books that spoke to me directly, rather than to one of my ongoing (and often doomed) projects. What I present here are three such works. And although they’re all very good and deserve to be on any 2025 list (all were published this year), a good part of their importance, for me, is their close connection with my upbringing: my time in newly independent Zimbabwe, my time in my father’s bar, and my devotion to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which began when I was 10.  Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam by Minh Nguyen One afternoon in 1978, I heard my mother, Tracy Mudede (then a graduate student at Catholic University), on the radio. I was in the Washington, DC, apartment my family rented. She was explaining to a reporter what the war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was about and why the Black African freedom fighters, those fighting for majority rule, were not terrorists. That war ended in 1980, and Zimbabwe, a socialist experiment, was born. We returned to the new nation in 1981. But within seven years, my mother wanted out, resigned from her post at the University of Zimbabwe, and took a professorship in Botswana, a capitalist country with no socialist baggage. What went wrong? Why did the revolution fail? These thoughts appeared like ghosts in my mind as I read the pages of Minh Nguyen’s short but brilliant book, Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam. Nguyen, who presently lives and works in New York City, was born in Vietnam. As a young girl, in 1996, she moved with her family to a town not far from where Twin Peaks was filmed in Washington State She soon became an American; but as she became a young woman, questions about her original country, and its transformation in the 1990s from a socialist society to a market-based one, began to grow in her mind. The book is about how she now faces and processes these complicated and haunting questions: What happened to the dreams of national liberation? What to make of a government that claims to be communist on paper while actively promoting private enterprise? And the war against American imperialism: What does it now mean in a country that’s connected to a world market dominated by the US dollar? Nguyen examines these questions through prewar and postwar Vietnamese visual arts, cinema, and literature. The first, visual arts, is continually harassed and monitored by a government that’s, apparently and increasingly, confused about its own postsocialist identity. The second consists of movies that emerged after a film school was established in 1959, the Vietnam Film School. And the third, literature, explores key postwar texts. Nguyen’s personal experience with the country synthesizes these elements into an account that’s written with a voice that’s attentive, receptive, and at times vulnerable. Nguyen makes no grand statements about the recent cultural, political, and economic transformations in Vietnam, but she refuses to entirely let go of the dreams of emancipation and self-determination. We end the book wanting more, to see more, to think more about these new and often profoundly puzzling postsocialist (and postmodern) conditions. Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso TrilloSoon after my dad became an economist for Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Industry and Technology in spring of 1982, he purchased a house in Chisipite, Harare, that had its own bar. He practically lived in this bar, slowly drinking whiskey and reading books and journals. Now and then, he’d call me into the bar and show me the numbers for that day’s stock market (called ZSA), which mostly exchanged the shares of tobacco companies. The market was small, and I soon gained a command of its movements. Economics, I concluded at the time, really came down to finance, and not farmers or other producers.  Many years later, I visited Berlin and became acquainted with niko mas, one of the members of Becoming Press. Six months after that encounter, mas sent me a manuscript for a book Becoming Press planned to publish in 2025 titled Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits. Its authors, Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, get to the heart of the matter: What is really new about the capitalism of our times? It is the software economy. And although this form of wealth accumulation and concentration is still exploitative, its configuration and processes make nonsense of trad Marxism, particularly with its focus on the “hidden abode of production” (the factory) What separated Exocapitalism’s reading of capitalism from those Italian ones that saw hope in the “general intellect” (the working-class subject who, beginning  in the ’70s, replaced the classical proletariat of production) is: There’s no liberation to be found in the software economy’s "immeasurability." Indeed, the system needs a certain amount of uncertainty, of the unknown, to thrive. It’s not accurate accounting that makes money today, but mistakes, breaks, blockages, and drags.  This book proved to be an important step beyond the apotheosis of the general intellect. The software economy is not about people, it's about “lifting” people—not out of poverty, they remain there, but into the ether of financial flows. So enamoured was I by Exocapitalism’s mode of thinking and conceptual reasoning that I provided the book (which is distributed in the US by Seattle’s very own Fangtooth Books) with a preface that, in hindsight, I should have dedicated to my father’s bar. What Is Intelligence? by Blaise Agüera y ArcasWhen my family settled in the newly independent Zimbabwe, I was happy to discover that ZBC (Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation), which operated between 5 p.m. and midnight, programmed, on Sundays, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I had watched the show religiously in the living room of my Sharptown, Maryland, home. I watched all of the episodes again and was not disappointed. Sagan’s vaginal Ship of the Imagination became my church. He also provided a complete description of the origins of life in Episode 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue: microbes naturally emerging from a chemical soup and evolving to sea and land animals.  This description of the origins of life is with us even to this day. Indeed, you can find it in the pages of a new and excellent book, What Is Intelligence?, by one of Seattle’s leading AI researchers, Blaise Agüera y Arcas. Now, many of you have never heard of Michel Serres and his work—and there’s nothing wrong with that because he, a post-1968 French philosopher, never became as famous in the English-speaking world as, say, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. But Serres’s intellectual project, as presented in his encyclopedic five-volume Hermes (part of which, “Volume 1,” I read this year, by the way), is very close to Agüera y Arcas’s. Indeed, the latter is the former of our times. Both integrate many disciplines (literature, biology, mathematics, computation, chemistry, physics, art) to examine and explain the technological and scientific developments of our times.  In What Is Intelligence?, which is certainly Agüera y Arcas’s masterpiece, we see AI not so much as a machine but as something that lives as much as it thinks. Agüera y Arcas’s insistence on this point, the living-ness of AI, emerges from its predictive abilities. And in a sense, this is Agüera y Arcas’s definition of life: not the storage and retrieval of the past, but its combinatorial projection into the future. But is AI human? In one part of the book, Agüera y Arcas brings up Voight-Kampff, a mysterious device that, in the movie Blade Runner, determines, by a series of questions that excite emotional responses detected in the eye, if a person is a human or an android. If the latter, they are “retired” because Earth is restricted, for reasons the movie never explains, to humans. And here we have, for me, the big question at the heart of Agüera y Arcas’s new and defining book: Why does AI have to be human? What if it’s a form of intelligence that’s novel and even radically different from that of its creators? Why does AI have to be exactly like us? If this assumption (AI is human life/like) is dropped, we may see another and unexpected side of this machine and its methods of learning and communicating. AI might not be human, in the way an ant is not at all a great ape but is, without a doubt, intelligent.  If an alien were ever, in the deep future, to encounter a spacecraft from Earth, it would most certainly not be operated by humans but by AI. We as living and thinking animals are pretty much stuck on this planet; AI as a living and thinking machine can easily travel to a distant star in the cosmos.    ...read more read less