53 new books coming out July 16 – 22, 2024

By Kobo • July 16, 2024New eBooks and Audiobooks

A few of the books we’re most looking forward to this week

Lev Grossman’s 2009 novel The Magicians—about a fantasy book-reading young adult who discovers that the realm he’s spent countless hours imagining is real—was exactly the type of book that adult readers who grew up on Harry Potter were looking for. It’s been 10 years since the release of The Magician’s Land, the 3^rd book in The Magicians Trilogy, and now Grossman is back with The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur. Readers expecting a retelling of familiar tales of Camelot should be warned that the book bears a somewhat misleading subtitle. Yes, it takes place in Camelot, but this story begins following the death of Arthur (at the Battle of Camlann), and only scholars of Arthurian legends are likely to recognize any of the characters gathered at the Round Table (does Sir Dagonet ring a bell? How about Sir Palomides? Morgan Le Fay appears here, and in the 2^nd book of Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Le Fay series, also out this week). The primary concern of these hitherto tertiary (at best) characters is what to do about a kingdom being torn apart by warring factions. Through their perspectives and the perspectives of characters who never laid eyes on Excalibur, readers get a view of a world where myth is real, but so is money, work, and all the messy problems of being human. If The Magicians traveled across a bridge from reality into fantasy, The Bright Sword makes a similar journey in the opposite direction, bringing figures out of myth into reality.

The new book by celebrated science writer Anil Ananthaswamy aims to dispel the mythology around a different kind of magic. In Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI he explains how AI was developed, what its earliest uses were (long before “GPT” was part of the common lexicon), and how it came to be the technology that seems to be in the process of devouring the modern world. The core of his argument is that the underlying math of AI is simple—what makes AI remarkable is only the speed at which millions of simple calculations can be made. Given the essential comprehensibility at the centre of artificial intelligence, Ananthaswamy suggests that the difference between it and natural intelligence is less a matter of kind than degree.

The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA by Los Angeles Magazine’s Jesse Katz is a true crime story built on not one but two plot twists. First, a young man growing up in LA sets his desperate sights on being admitted to Columbia Lil Cycos, a gang known for inflicting violence on the vulnerable—but he colossally screws up the murder that would have been his initiation, killing a baby instead of the intended victim, a street vendor who wouldn’t comply with the gang’s demands for regular payment. Since gangs like Lil Cycos don’t keep applicants’ CVs on file for the next opening, the young man is brought lured into what is supposed to be his murder… You can get more of a setup by reading the book’s synopsis, but we believe the next thing you should read if this has intrigued you is the first page of this book.