What We Are Reading Today: Sleeping Giants

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Updated 19 May 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Sleeping Giants

  • Sylvain Neuvel has won the Aurora Award for Best Novel in 2017 for the book

RIYADH: “Sleeping Giants” is the first book in a science fiction fantasy trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel, published in 2016.

The book follows Dr. Rose Franklin who was a little girl when she fell into a giant hole that turned out to be a large metallic hand. As an adult, Franklin, a highly trained physicist, leads a team of scientists to crack the hand’s code in order to investigate its origins.
The scientists realize that the hand is just one piece of a larger, ancient artifact that has been scattered around the world.
What makes the novel compelling is its structure; the story is told through a series of interviews, journal entries, and transcripts of conversations between the characters. The readers get to see the story unfold through multiple perspectives.
As the team digs deeper into the mystery of the artifact, they uncover a vast conspiracy involving governments, secret organizations and alien technology. The story explores themes of power, ambition and the ethics of scientific discovery.
The “Themis Files” trilogy has been praised for its inventive storytelling, strong characters, and thought-provoking themes. “Waking Gods” and “Only Human” follow the first novel.
Neuvel has won several awards for his work, including the Aurora Award for Best Novel in 2017 for “Sleeping Giants.”
Neuvel’s work explores the impact of technology on society. His novels are inspired by his educational background in linguistics and his experience in the field of software development.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rare Tongues’ by Lorna Gibb

Updated 27 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rare Tongues’ by Lorna Gibb

Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life.

‘Rare Tongues” tells the stories of the world’s rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity.

Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices.


What We Are Reading Today: The Teacher in the Machine

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Updated 26 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Teacher in the Machine

  • Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education

Author: Anne Trumbore

From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short.

Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in “The Teacher in the Machine,” the promises of today’s cutting-edge technologies aren’t new. Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education.

 


What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page

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Updated 25 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page

  • “All the World on a Page” gathers 34 poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts

Author: Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky

The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. 

“All the World on a Page” gathers 34 poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts.

The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova’s lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov’s Symbolist erotic dreamworld, and Joseph Brodsky’s pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate.

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘What Is Ancient History?’ by Walter Scheidel

Updated 24 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘What Is Ancient History?’ by Walter Scheidel

It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history —obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction.

In “What Is Ancient History?” Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history — a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today.

For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today’s ways of life were created and spread — from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. 

Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘I Was Working: Poems’ by Ariel Yelen

Updated 23 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘I Was Working: Poems’ by Ariel Yelen

Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen’s lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York.

In the poems’ dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song, the poet writes from a cubicle as it is being sawed in half, and the speaker of the title poem decides “to quit everything except work.”