Happy World Book Day! I don’t have a character-inspired costume to share, so how about a few books I’ve recently enjoyed instead?

Maybe it’s a reflection of where my brain is currently at, but ‘dreaming’ seems to be a shared theme across all of these – specifically, what we choose to actively dream into (and out of) existence.

📚 Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Dunne & Raby)
A welcome reminder of the awesome power of dreaming, and that sometimes we need to apply “excessively imaginative thinking to seriously large scale issues.”

📚 Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)
Philosophical, mythological and rich with dream-like imagery. I loved inhabiting this strange world with the gentle and curious Piranesi.

📚 Atlas of Anomalous AI (Ignota)
A welcome antidote to the current bombardment of derivative, unethical AI content dominating much current eyeball space. This brain-stretching collection of poetic reflection, indigenous wisdom and philosophical exploration explores how “like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.” (Plus – it’s always a bonus to re-read Borges’ meditative short story The Circular Ruins, which surely should be compulsory reading for all?)

I like to keep track of the year’s reads on Pinterest (it’s a bit less time-intensive than writing a load of reviews on Good Reads!). Here’s this year’s list so far:

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/mickeypip/reads-of-2024/