With El Niño slated to drop a warm, wet winter on most of the US in the coming months, everybody’s going to need something good to read while the weather outside is frightful. Engadget’s well-read staff have some suggestions: our favorite books of 2023! We’ve got a phenomenal assortment of genres and titles for you this year, from horror and true crime to rom-coms and fantasy adventures, here to provide months of entertainment for even the most voracious reader.

Berkley

Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (Karissa Bell — Senior Reporter, Social Media)

I love horror movies but horror novels are kind of hit and miss for me. I was immediately pulled into Final Girl Support Group, though, which does a lot of winking and nodding at classic slasher flicks while creating a completely unique story.

If you’re a fan of horror, then you’re already familiar with the trope of the “final girl.” Grady Hendrix’s novel doesn’t satirize the final girl, but imagines what life might be like for them after the end of their movie. Each of the main characters is (loosely) based on the final girl of a classic slasher, though their storylines don’t feel contrived or predictable. It reads like a fast-paced thriller but, like so many of the best horror movies, it’s also a poignant reflection on trauma. It’s also the rare thriller where I found myself wanting more at the end of the story. Luckily, HBO has signed on to develop a series based on the book, so I may soon get my wish.

The Chromatic Fantasy by H. A. (Avery Ellis — Deputy Editor, Reports)

2023 was the year I undertook to read a lot more books written by or centering characters who were like me: which is to say, trans. I tore through Nevada and Dream of a Woman, recognizing bits of myself reflected back and seeing versions of me that could exist in the future; I just barely slogged through Testo Junkie, cringed with Tiny Pieces of Skull, gravely nodded along with Whipping Girl and sobbed as Stone Butch Blues kicked me in the heart over and over again. (There's more. Ask me for recommendations!) The canon of trans literature is unfortunately not huge, and I speedran a good portion of it, always interleaving comics, zines or manga between novels.

Enter The Chromatic Fantasy.

It popped up in the new releases section of the newsletter from comics mainstay Silver Sprocket, which was all I knew going in. What I got, in what I assumed would be a break from often-heavy trans narratives, was… the most adorable T4T romance I've ever read?? Jules and Casper have some truly cute us-against-the-world chemistry, which is only further heightened by their status as literal outlaws — get in loser, we're robbing rich jerks at swordpoint. The fantastical setting is best described as polychronistic: while mostly hewing to gorgeously rendered high fantasy aesthetics, there are, for example, landline telephones (such the better to flirtatiously twirl a finger through the wire of), and seemingly the corporation Starbucks, none of which is explained or needs to be.

The Chromatic Fantasy slips effortlessly between swashbuckling glibness (benefits of a protagonist who literally cannot die) and genuine emotion. And did I mention it's gorgeous? No really, it's jaw-droppingly pretty. Congratulations to H. A. on joining Leslie Feinberg in the hall of Authors Who Made Me Cry Ugly Tears This Year.

Tor Nightfire

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy (Valentina Palladino — Senior Commerce Editor)

Nat Cassidy hooked me last year with his excellent novel Mary: An Awakening of Terror, and his sophomore release is certainly not a slump. Nestlings follows Ana and Reid, a couple with a new baby who move into the Deptford, an ancient, revered Manhattan apartment building overlooking Central Park. It seems almost magical that they even won the competitive lottery to move to this otherworldly place. Both Ana and Reid believe their new home could be the answer to their problems: Reid, a struggling musician with a lackluster day job trying to care for his new daughter and his wheelchair-bound wife; Ana, a voice actor with bubbling resentments toward her baby after a traumatic childbirth left her paralyzed from the waist down.

But there’s no peace for the little family once they move in. Disturbing events leave Ana paranoid and wanting to get out, while Reid dismisses her concerns as he dives deeper into learning about the gothic building’s history. Baby Charlie never sleeps and constantly fusses, and things go from bad to worse when the young parents discover needle-like bite marks on their daughter.

What follows is an absolute rollercoaster of terror, filled with gargoyles, vampiric creatures, sore–infested, suicidal neighbors, cockroach-chomping real estate agents and lots and lots of bugs. Cassidy does a great job of drawing readers in with questions about what the hell is going on in this apartment building that’s so hard to move into but also seems to have no one living in it aside from Ana and Reid. The plot is enough to keep readers guessing, but you really stay for the tension Cassidy builds between these complicated characters. Ana and Reid’s relationship is put through every test, and I found myself loving each of them and hating them both at various points of the novel. Cassidy thoughtfully explores a lot of topics in Nestlings through the struggles of his characters: marriage, parenthood, postpartum depression, ableism, antisemitism, grief and much more.

I particularly enjoyed the nuanced discussions around being a caretaker, being a mother and all of the other things that can suck the life out of a person. There are many complicated ideas surrounding motherhood in this book: What does motherhood give to you, and what does it take away? How much control does a mother have over their child? Where does a mother’s influence end? Even with all of those heavy themes running throughout this book, Nestlings, in my opinion, is even more fun than Mary thanks to its consistent pacing, complicated characters, creepy setting and downright disgusting imagery. – Valentina Palladino, Senior Commerce Editor

William Morrow

Alex Carter #3: A Ghost of Caribou by Alice Henderson (Valentina Palladino — Senior Commerce Editor)

I watched Animal Planet like it was my job when I was a kid. So my inner child was thrilled to discover Alice Henderson’s Alex Carter series last year. The books follow wildlife biologist Alex Carter as she monitors near-extinct animal species in the field, while also encountering a new unsolved murder in each sleepy town she resides.

The latest installment, A Ghost of Caribou, takes our hero to the mountains of northwestern Washington state to track a single mountain caribou believed to have wandered down from Canada into the contiguous United States. But she’s quickly met with hostility and violence: activists and loggers are duking it out over protected lands and the townspeople are on edge after the murdered body of a forest ranger is discovered in a local park. On top of that, Alex learns a hiker went missing a year prior in the same forest in which she’s conducting her research. Alex is soon forced to fight for her life, while also trying to solve at least two murders that may or may not be connected.

I love a good cozy mystery, and this series feels like one step up from those genre staples. It’s a little more serious with more threatening baddies, but you still get a hint of a cozy vibe thanks to the very careful choice of setting and the wildlife element. You actually end up learning quite a lot about the star animals in these books, thanks to the author’s experience as a wildlife researcher herself. Alex is a well-realized protagonist with a clear moral compass and a deep devotion to the protection of animals and the environment, but she’s also entertaining to follow. And while each book takes her to a different locale to study another species, there are throughlines in the series that make you want to pick up the next installment to see what’s going to happen. The side characters (recurring ones like Alex’s father and her best friend, along with single-book individuals) are also colorful and engaging. I can’t think of a better series to pick up if you love mysteries and suspense novels, and also have a fascination with the animal world.

St Martins

Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler (Sarah Fielding — Contributing Reporter)

At the center of Genevieve Wheeler’s debut novel is the titular character Adelaide, a 26-year-old American living in London who believes she’s found her very own prince charming in Rory. She’s sure he’s the love of her life, regardless of his complete disregard for her feelings throughout their relationship. Wheeler remarkably brought me deep inside Adelaide’s consciousness while seamlessly adding depth and a fuller story by jumping into the perspectives of both Rory and his ex-girlfriend Nathalie.

On the surface, it’s easy to put Adelaide strictly into the romance box, another story of girl meets boy. But, to do so belittles the nuanced experience of what it’s like to live a life of incredible moments of joy and piercing episodes of despair — namely to be human.

Adelaide deals with themes of trauma, friendship, heartbreak, mental health and, critically, the desire we all have to not just be loved, but to be understood. As a mid-to-late 20-something American living in London, it would’ve been difficult not to relate to Adelaide. But, these aspects of Wheeler’s novel made me reckon with the way I move through life and drove home the fact that — cheesy or not — we’re each the greatest love of our life.

Penguin Randomhouse

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Cherlynn Low — Deputy Editor, Reviews)

Project Hail Mary may not have been released this year, but I only came across it in one of my numerous attempts to read more books in 2023. Try as I might, I just had a hard time concentrating, and nothing managed to hold my attention. On Libby, I borrowed and skimmed titles by authors like Blake Crouch and Stephen King — people whose work I always liked. And nothing took. I’ll admit it took me more than 10 pages to really get hooked on PHM, too. But once I began to absorb the premise, I devoured the book in two days.

In PHM, Weir tells the tale of a man in space, off to investigate a mysterious substance that not only proves that life exists outside of Earth, but also might lead to the destruction of our planet. His is on a suicide mission, with not enough fuel for a return trip. Yeah, the stakes are high.

I’m not a scientist, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the book’s finer details, but Weir’s evocative descriptions helped paint a rich mental image of the spacecraft. And though one of the characters in the story remained an amorphous blob in my mind, I still formed an inexplicable emotional bond with them, the way you might grow to love a boisterous pet.

As with most space adventures, PHM’s characters encounter numerous challenges and setbacks, making for a gripping read. Throw in likable characters, an emotional turn of events and a somewhat satisfying end, and PHM easily nabbed the title of my favorite book all year (not to mention a spot in my heart).

Simon & Schuster

The Future by Naomi Alderman (Lawrence Bonk - Contributing Reporter)

Naomi Alderman’s last book, The Power, was a very big deal. It made both Barack Obama’s and Bill Gates’ best-of lists for 2016, and it even spawned an Amazon Prime Video show. All of the accolades were well-deserved, as I had never read something quite like it. The book examined the corruptible nature of power and how it impacts gender, all while remaining a rip-roaring yarn about women who have the ability to control electricity.

Alderman’s latest and greatest, The Future, isn’t going to set the world ablaze quite like its predecessor, but that doesn’t mean it's not an absolute page-turner. This is for one simple reason. There are already a ton of speculative fiction books that examine near-future technology and how it could impact humanity. It’s a whole genre unto itself. Still, The Future is a fantastic example of this type of book, and manages to fold in recent events, from COVID to Elon Musk and the rise of AI platforms.

To that end, the novel revolves around proxy versions of many of our big tech companies (Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI etc.) and boasts a sprawling narrative with multiple protagonists, including a tech vlogger that hits a bit too close to home. There are doomsday cults, narcissistic billionaires, depression-inducing social media algorithms and, of course, plenty of technological advancements. The tech in this book isn’t pie in the sky. It’s stuff that’s five or 10 years out. Alderman is careful not to give a year for when the story takes place, but she does refer to actor Ryan Reynolds as a “silverfox” and, well, he’s 47 right now.

The story is fast-paced and involves, surprise, a potentially game-changing AI. There’s also more biblical allegory than you can shake a stick at. Alderman, after all, previously wrote a book that examined the life of Jesus Christ. The Future is tough to put down and well worth reading, even if Bill Gates didn’t put a review up on his blog. Yes, Bill Gates has a blog.

Macmillan

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno (Cheyenne MacDonald — Weekend Editor)

Every time I recommend this book to someone, which is fairly often, I usually throw in a small apology for what it’s going to put them through. Here’s me doing that now: sorry, this one’s pretty heavy! But damn, is it a powerful read.

This Thing Between Us is often described as being about a haunted Alexa-style smart speaker called Itza, but that’s only partially true. Really, it’s about grief, cultural identity and inescapable cycles of hardship. It’s told from the perspective of Thiago, who seems to be recounting for his late wife, Vera, the increasingly bizarre and horrifying experiences he’s faced after her sudden death from a freak accident. The apparent supernatural possession of Itza is initially positioned as the catalyst for the horrors that play out across the novel.

Thiago’s unraveling mental state as he grapples with the loss of his wife and a haunting that starts to take on a more cosmic quality builds into a frantic sense of dread. It’ll break your heart over and over. There are some pretty solid scares, too, with more than a few deeply unsettling moments that have lingered in my memory, popping back up when I’m driving alone on a dark country road or taking my dog out at night. While This Thing Between Us didn’t come out in 2023 (it was published in 2021), I didn’t get around to reading it until this year, and it’s probably the book I’ve thought about most since.

Simon & Schuster

Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones (Cheyenne MacDonald — Weekend Editor)

Stephen Graham Jones is one of those authors who is just so good, you end up wanting to inhale his entire body of work immediately after finishing whichever book first got you hooked. At least, that’s how it went for me. I read one, and I needed infinitely more. So, I was beyond excited to find out that 2021’s My Heart is a Chainsaw — a love letter to slasher films and social misfits — was not only getting a sequel, but would ultimately be spun into a trilogy. Don’t Fear the Reaper, which came out in February 2023, is the second book in that series and it’s got all the heart of the first one, if not more.

Don’t Fear the Reaper continues the story of slasher-obsessed Jennifer “Jade” Daniels and the residents of Proofrock, Idaho, who four years prior endured a town-wide tragedy that irrevocably changed their lives. This time, because they cannot catch a break, a convicted serial killer known as Dark Mill South is on the loose after he managed to escape from a prison convoy nearby during a blizzard. And bodies are starting to pile up. In the first book, Jennifer/Jade’s acute knowledge of final girl survival skills took center stage as she tried to make people see the signs of a slasher in their midst before it was too late. Now, she’s repressed that part of herself and her protégé, a survivor of the previous book’s climactic event, has taken the torch.

It has all the elements of a good slasher story and tons of movie references for genre fans to latch onto. There are twists that will put your brain to work, plus a few moments that are purely supernatural. Like Graham’s other works, it also contains a lot of important subtext about being an American Indian. Jade, the final girl to end all final girls, is Native. So is the killer, Dark Mill South. In the end, Don’t Fear the Reaper is a surprisingly beautiful narrative about trauma (personal and generational), perseverance and healing. The third and final book in The Indian Lake Trilogy comes out in March 2024 — so you have just enough time to catch up with the first two before then.

FSG

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Amy Skorheim — Commerce Reporter)

I didn’t know much about Birnam Wood before picking it up — just that it had a Booker Prize winner for an author and a Shakespearean title that made me feel smart for vaguely remembering Macbeth. Turns out, it’s about the clash between an anarchist New Zealand gardening collective and a doomsday-prepping American tech-bro billionaire, which, had you given me a million guesses…

The story has plenty of meat on its bones, grappling with the Big Issues of environmentalism, capitalism, class struggles and the absurd ineffectuality of grassroots action in the face of unfathomable wealth. The main players in the gardening collective are idealistic but erratic Mira, her dissatisfied second in command, Shelly, and Tony, a Bernie-bro trust-funder with a self-righteous inflexibility that butts up against his desire for glowing recognition.

When Mira scouts out a vast plot of land the collective could potentially “borrow” for some guerilla farming, she meets billionaire Robert Lemoine who has already earmarked the property for his luxury end-time bunker. When he impulsively (sociopathically) decides to bank roll the gardening collective, the group has to make a decision. And at least one of them has to figure out what Lemoine is really doing out in the pristine lands of New Zealand’s South Island.

To talk too much more about the machinations of the plot is to give away some of the joys. But I will say that I ripped through the book’s 400 pages. Birnam Wood manages to meld the breath-holding pace of a genre thriller with the psychological archaeology of the best literary reads. And no other novel in recent memory has presented a better thesis as to what it may take to derail the runaway train of resource exploitation.

WW Norton

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis (Nathan Ingraham — Deputy Editor, News)

Girlfriend on Mars tells the story of a train wreck that I just couldn’t look away from. Told in both the first-person view of complacent stoner Kevin and in third-person of his girlfriend of 14 years, Amber, the story bounces between their two perspectives as Amber tries to win a reality show that’ll send her and another contestant on a one-way trip to Mars. The whole time, I was fascinated by whether Amber would win the contest and really walk away from Earth forever and equally engaged in watching Kevin’s descent into full-on agoraphobia as the one person he cares about essentially tells him she’s willing to leave the planet and him forever.

The two main characters are massively flawed, something that’s obvious right from the start, but you care about them finding some measure of peace and happiness regardless. Amber’s side of the story is a scathing critique of multiple parts of American culture, with the Elon Musk-esque billionaire funding the trip to Mars cutting corners and disregarding safety at every turn just to make a profit. Takedowns of the influencer world and the reality show obsession with watching beautiful people duke it out are well-trodden territory, but there’s an extra bit of grotesqueness to these proceedings, since the people flying to Mars are assuredly going to die there, sooner or later, and probably on camera.

Kevin’s story is a lot smaller, but the effects of his proximity to Amber’s growing fame are tough to watch — everyone wants a piece of her, which means they want a piece of him, all the while knowing that her success in the contest makes it more and more likely she’ll never see him again. The book is extremely readable, almost fluffy with its reality show tropes, but the last third is quietly devastating in a way that stuck with me more than I expected when I started. At first, Girlfriend on Mars feels as light as the image on the cover, but there’s surprising depth and darkness in these pages.

Counterpoint Press

Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki (Nathan Ingraham — Deputy Editor, News)

As the title suggests, Time’s Mouth has some elements of time travel to it, but it’s decidedly not science fiction — or at the very least, it’s not just science fiction. Edan Lepucki has some experience straddling genres, as her 2014 novel California deftly straddled a post-apocalyptic setting with literary fiction musings on family and environmental breakdown. In the same vein, Time’s Mouth focuses on a woman who can revisit any time in her past and the effects it has on both her and future generations of her family. Like any good time travel story, moving back and forth in time ends up having unexpected repercussions, and they come together in a very satisfying way as, years later, her son discovers his daughter can do the same thing.

It’s not an easy story to put into words, involving a sinister California commune of “mamas” who worship Ursa and her time-travel gift. Being brought up in such an environment makes her son Ray want a totally different life, but he’s drawn back to her world when his daughter Opal independently realizes she has the same skill as her unknown grandmother. At first, I thought the story would deal with Opal and Ray’s life without intersecting back with Ursa, who Ray has completely distanced himself from. But when the two worlds collide again after decades apart, it leads to a stunner of a reckoning for the family. Time’s Mouth made me both wish I could revisit my past and see it from a different light while also making me thankful that I’m stuck firmly in the present, aside from my memories.

Podium

Beware of Chicken by Casualfarmer (Andrew Tarantola — Senior Reporter, AI)

It’s the same reason I don’t watch prestige dramas: The world’s on fire and everything is already terrible, why would I watch rich and powerful people be horrible to one another as entertainment? I simply don't have the emotional bandwidth these days to follow along the intricacies of courtly intrigue, betrayals and political maneuvering among competing noble houses, but I will spare an afternoon to read a wholesome isekai progression fantasy like Beware of Chicken.

Set in an alternate universe of Qi cultivation (wherein its practitioners meditate and partake in vigorous training to achieve superhuman powers and godlike immortality), the story follows Jin Rou, an initiate cultivator who is having a very bad day. First our protagonist finds themself isekai’d from a previous life in modern day Canada into the body of a Warring State period initiate cultivator — one who was just severely beaten by his fellow disciples. Not about to hang around the jerks who just bludgeoned the last version of him into putty, Jin Rou picks up, leaves his sect behind and hightails it to the most remote, least magical (and therefore least dangerous) region he can find in his new world, intent on living out the quiet life of a hermit farmer. Too bad for Jin, the universe has other plans.

In this three-book continuing series, Jin Rou’s efforts to remain anonymous prove comically ineffective — whether due to his steadily growing menagerie of human and spirit animal disciples or his inexplicably fertile farming efforts — especially after members of his former sect come sniffing around. If you’re a fan of massively OP protagonists like John Sutton from Battlemage Farmer and Saitama of One Punch Man, or are into LitRPGs like Path of Ascension, Mark of the Fool and Unbound you’re going to love Beware of Chicken.

Sphere

Once Upon a Crime by Fergus Craig (Daniel Cooper — Senior Reporter, UK)

It’s always fun watching a professional pretend to be bad at their job, because it requires so much effort. There’s an art to doing something badly in an entertaining way that doesn’t just spill over into tragedy, or worse. Now imagine how hard it is to write a book that’s intentionally bad that never wears out its welcome, and you’ll see why I’m in awe of Once Upon a Crime.

Once Upon a Crime is written by Fergus Craig, but it’s really the debut novel from Craig’s comic character Martin Fishback. Fishback is a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road middle-Englander who, after his forced early retirement, aspires to becoming a crime writer. His lowbrow taste may far exceed his talent, but that’s not going to stop him writing his own crime novel, damnit.

Fishback’s main character, Detective Roger Le Carré, is the most obvious case of self-insert fic you’ll see all year. He’s a sprightly all-star police officer with an old school sensibility (read: He share’s Fishback’s provincial tastes and attitudes) and a knack for romance. Le Carré is also the only man who can tackle the grand criminal conspiracies on the mean streets of… rural Exeter.

As well as the general bathos of trying to pass off a sleepy cathedral city as a criminal hotbed, Fishback is prone to a tangent. Not to mention needing to pad some sections of his book where he’s gone to Wikipedia to help add ballast to the word count. All of this may sound bad, but in the hands of a master like Craig, it threads the needle to perfection.

I didn’t even know the book existed until I saw it on a table in a book store in London, clocked the name and reflexively started reading. In about three hours, I’d devoured it, hooting with glee to the great annoyance of my children and the other passengers on the train.

Hay House Inc.

The Year of Less by Cait Flanders (Malak Saleh — Health & Fitness Reporter)

The Year of Less is a biography of a woman in her late twenties stuck in a cycle of accumulating debt. She decides to make a complete life change after racking up nearly $30,000 in credit card debt. Looking back, she can't even recall most of the things she's mindlessly purchased. Flanders decides to challenge herself and not shop for an entire year. For 12 consecutive months, she only purchases absolute necessities like groceries and gas for her car. Her endeavor starts small, with a ban on things like takeout coffee and new books. By the end she's gotten rid of 70 percent of her belongings and saved more than half of her income. She keeps her readers looped in through her online blog the entire way. By the end of her project, she achieves her goal of only making purchases that are in alignment with her bigger life goals. Flanders' story might make you want to create your own version of a personal shopping ban. Though you might not feel compelled to make such drastic cuts in every aspect of your life, The Year of Less could inspire you to spend more consciously. 

Mint Mobile, the prepaid mobile carrier backed by Ryan Reynolds, notified customers via email this weekend that their information may have been stolen in a security breach, according to BleepingComputer. That information includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, plan descriptions, and SIM and IMEI numbers — which could be used for SIM swap attacks.

After a Reddit user posted a screenshot of the email and questioned if it was a scam, the Mint account responded to confirm its validity and said a customer support number has been set up to handle questions about the breach. Hackers did not access customers’ credit card information, which Mint says is not stored, nor were passwords compromised, BleepingComputer reports. The company also said it has since resolved the breach and customers do not need to take any action.

In a successful demonstration of new laser communications capabilities, NASA beamed an ultra-high definition video across 19 million miles of space from its Psyche spacecraft to Earth earlier this month. It’s the first time a UHD streaming video has been sent from deep space via laser. The history-making video? A 15-second clip of an orange cat named Taters chasing a laser dot.

The signal from the video, sent on December 11, made it to Earth in 101 seconds from Psyche’s location at the time, which was about 80 times as far as the distance between Earth and the moon. It was uploaded before the mission launched, and sent back home by a flight laser transceiver aboard Psyche at a rate of 267Mbps. The spacecraft, which set off on its journey in October, is on its way to study a metal-rich asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said Ryan Rogalin, the receiver electronics lead for the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”

Ubisoft’s internal services were compromised in a security breach this week when hackers attempted to steal 900GB of data, including Rainbow Six Siege user data, according to VX-Underground. Ubisoft spotted the breach 48 hours later, and was able to revoke the hackers’ access before they could successfully exfiltrate the data.

In a statement to BleepingComputer, Ubisoft said, “We are aware of an alleged data security incident and are currently investigating. We don't have more to share at this time.” VX-Underground posted redacted screenshots shared by the attacker that allegedly show they accessed Microsoft Teams conversations, the Ubisoft SharePoint server, Confluence and MongoDB Atlas. “The Threat Actor would not share how they got initial access,” VX-Underground wrote in a post on X. “Upon entry they audited the users access rights and spent time thoroughly reviewing Microsoft Teams, Confluence, and SharePoint.”

According to VX-Underground, the attackers’ attempt to get Rainbow Six Siege user data was unsuccessful. It’s unclear at this time if they were able to get any sensitive information before Ubisoft shut the whole thing down.

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium — these foundational materials are literally what the modern world is built on. Without sand for glass, say goodbye to our fiber optic internet. No copper means no conductive wiring. And a world without lithium is a world without rechargeable batteries. 

For the final installment of Hitting the Books for 2023, we're bringing you an excerpt from the fantastic Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. A finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award, Material World walks readers through the seismic impacts these six substances have had on human civilization throughout history, using a masterful mix of narrative storytelling and clear-eyed technical explanation. In the excerpt below, Conway discusses how the lithium ion battery technology that is currently powering the EV revolution came into existence.  

Thanks very much for reading Hitting the Books this year, we'll be back with more of the best excerpts from new and upcoming technology titles in post-CES January, 2024!  

Penguin Random House

Excerpted from Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. Published by Knopf. Copyright © 2023 by Ed Conway. All rights reserved.

A Better Battery

The first engineer to use lithium in a battery was none other than Thomas Edison. Having mastered the manufacture of concrete by focusing religiously on improving the recipe and systematising its production, he sought to do much the same thing with batteries. The use of these devices to store energy was not especially new even when he began working on them at the dawn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the very earliest days of the electrical era were powered almost exclusively by batteries. Back before the invention of the dynamos and generators that produce most of our electricity today, the telegraphs and earliest electric lights ran on primitive batteries.

Their chemistry went back to Alessandro Volta, an Italian who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had discovered that by stacking layers of zinc and copper discs separated by cardboard soaked in brine, he could generate an electric current, flowing from one electrode (in this case the metallic discs) to the other. His pile of electrodes was the world’s first battery — a voltaic cell — or as it’s still sometimes called, a pile (since a pile is precisely what it was). That brings us to the prickly question of what to call these things. Purists would argue that a single one of these units, whether it was Volta’s first effort or the thing you find in your smartphone, should be called a cell. A battery, they say, is a word only to be used about an array of multiple cells. But these days most people (including this author) use the words interchangeably.

Half a century later the French physicist Gaston Planté came up with the first rechargeable battery using a spiral of lead electrodes bathed in acid, housed in a glass container. Lead-acid batteries, versions of which are still used to help start car engines today, could provide quick bursts of power, but their relatively low energy density meant they were not especially good at storing power.

In an effort to improve on the chemistry, Edison began to experiment his way through the periodic table. Out went lead and sulphuric acid and in came a host of other ingredients: copper, cobalt and cadmium to name just a few of the Cs. There were many false starts and one major patent battle along the way but eventually, after a decade of experimentation, Edison landed upon a complex mixture of nickel and iron, bathed in a potassium hydroxide solution and packed into the best Swedish steel. 

“The only Storage Battery that has iron and steel in its construction and elements,” read the advertising.

Edison’s experiments underlined at least one thing. While battery chemistry was difficult, it was certainly possible to improve on Planté’s lead–acid formula. After all, as Edison once said, “If Nature had intended to use lead in batteries for powering vehicles she would not have made it so heavy.” And if lead was a heavy metal then there was no doubt about the lightest metal of all — the optimal element to go into batteries. It was there at the opposite end of the periodic table, all the way across from lead, just beneath hydrogen and helium: lithium. Edison added a sprinkling of lithium hydroxide to the electrolyte solution in his battery, the so-called A cell, and, alongside the potassium in the liquid and the nickel and iron electrodes, it had encouraging results. The lithium lifted the battery’s capacity by 10 per cent — though no one could pin down the chemistry going on beneath the surface.

In the following years, scientists followed in Edison’s footsteps and developed other battery chemistries, including nickel–cadmium and nickel–metal hydride, which are the basis for most consumer rechargeable batteries such as the AA ones you might have at home. However, they struggled to incorporate the most promising element of all. Decade after decade, scientific paper after paper pointed out that the ultimate battery would be based on a lithium chemistry. But up until the 1970s no one was able to tame this volatile substance enough to put it to use in a battery. Batteries are a form of fuel — albeit electrochemical rather than fossil. What occurs inside a battery is a controlled chemical reaction, an effort to channel the explosive energy contained in these materials and turn that into an electric current. And no ingredient was more explosive than lithium.

The first breakthrough came in the 1970s at, of all places, Exxon-Mobil, or as it was then known, Esso. In the face of the oil price shock, for a period the oil giant had one of the best-funded battery units anywhere, staffed by some of the world’s most talented chemists trying to map out the company’s future in a world without hydrocarbons. Among them was a softly spoken Englishman called Stan Whittingham. Soon enough Whittingham had one of those Eureka moments that changed the battery world forever.

Up until then, one of the main problems facing battery makers was that every time they charged or discharged their batteries it could change the chemical structure of their electrodes irreversibly. Edison had spent years attempting to surmount this phenomenon, whose practical consequence was that batteries simply didn’t last all that long. Whittingham worked out how to overcome this, shuttling lithium atoms from one electrode to the other without causing much damage.

At the risk of causing any battery chemists reading this to wince, here is one helpful way of visualising this. Think of batteries as containing a set of two skyscrapers, one of which is an office block and the other is an apartment block. These towers represent the anode and cathode — the negative and positive electrodes. When a rechargeable smartphone or electric car battery is empty, what that means in electrochemical terms is that there are a lot of lithium atoms sitting in the cathode — in the apartment block — doing very little.

But when that battery gets charged, those atoms (or, as they’re technically called, since they hold a charge, ions) shuttle across to the other skyscraper — the anode or, in this analogy, the office block. They go to work. And a fully charged battery is one where the anode’s structure is chock-full of these charged lithium ions. When that battery is being used, the ions are shuttling back home to the apartment block, generating a current along the way.

Understand this shuttling to and fro between cathode and anode and you understand broadly how rechargeable batteries work. This concept — the notion that ions could travel across from the crystalline structure of one electrode to nest in the crystalline structure of another — was Whittingham’s brainwave. He called it intercalation, and it’s still the basis of how batteries work today. Whittingham put the theory to work and created the world’s first rechargeable lithium battery. It was only a small thing — a coin-sized battery designed for use in watches — but it was a start. Per kilogram of weight (or rather, given its size, per gram), his battery could hold as much as 15 times the electrical charge of a lead–acid battery. But every time Whittingham tried to make a battery any bigger than a small coin cell, it would burst into flames. In an effort to tame the inherent reactivity of lithium, he had alloyed it with aluminium, but this wasn’t enough to subdue it altogether. So Whittingham’s battery remained something of a curio until the following decade, when researchers working in the UK and Japan finally cracked the code.

The key figure here is an extraordinary man called John B. Goodenough, an American physicist who, as it happens, was born in Jena, the German city where Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss first perfected technical glassmaking. After studying at Yale, Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Goodenough eventually found himself in charge of the inorganic chemistry lab at the University of Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he played the pivotal role in the battery breakthrough. Among his team’s achievements — commemorated today in a blue plaque on the outside of the lab — was the discovery of the optimal recipe for the cathode (that apartment skyscraper) in a lithium-ion battery. The material in question was lithium cobalt oxide, a compound that improved the safety and the capacity of these batteries, providing them with a stable cathode matrix in which the lithium ions could nest. It wasn’t that battery explosions could be ruled out, but at least they were no longer inevitable.

The final intellectual leaps occurred a few years later in Japan, where a researcher called Akira Yoshino perfected the other ingredients. He paired Goodenough’s lithium cobalt oxide cathode with an anode made from a particular type of graphite — that very variety they still make from the needle coke produced at the Humber Refinery — and the combination worked brilliantly. Lithium ions shuttled safely and smoothly from one side to another as he charged and discharged the battery. He also worked out the best way to fit these two electrodes together: by pasting the materials on to paper-thin sheets and coiling them together in a metal canister, separated by a thin membrane. This final masterstroke — which meant that if the battery began to overheat the separator would melt, helping to prevent any explosion — also evoked those first cells created in France by Gaston Planté. The rechargeable battery began life as a spiral of metal compressed into a canister; after more than a century of experimentation and a complete transformation of materials, it came of age in more or less the same form.

But it would take another few years for these batteries to find their way into consumers’ hands, and it would happen a long way from either Esso’s laboratories or Oxford’s chemistry labs. Japanese electronics firm Sony had been on the lookout for a better battery to power its camcorders, and came across the blueprints drawn up by Goodenough and adjusted by Yoshino. Adapting these plans and adding its own flourishes, in 1992 it created the first production lithium-ion battery: an optional power pack for some of their Handycam models. These packs were a third smaller and lighter than the standard nickel–metal hydride batteries, yet they carried even more capacity. In the following years, lithium-ion batteries gradually proliferated into all sorts of devices, but it wasn’t until the advent of the smartphone that they found their first true calling. These devices, with their circuitry, their semiconductors, their modem chips and bright displays, are incredibly power hungry, demanding the most powerful of all batteries. Today, almost all smartphones run on batteries derived from the discoveries of Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino. The trio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.

That this invention — first prototyped in America and then mostly developed in England — only came to be mass produced in Japan is one of those topics that still causes frustration in the Anglophone world. Why, when so many of the intellectual advances in battery design happened in Europe and the Americas, was production always dominated by Asia? The short answer was that Japan had a burgeoning market for the manufacture of the very electronic goods — initially video cameras and Walkmans — that needed higher-density batteries.

As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, lithium-ion batteries became an essential component of the electronic world, in laptops, smartphones and, eventually, electric cars. Smartphones could not have happened without the extraordinary silicon chips inside, powering the circuitry, housing the processing units and bestowing memory storage, not to mention providing optical sensors for the camera. But none of these appliances would have been practical without light, powerful batteries of far greater energy density than their predecessors.

All of which is why demand for lithium has begun to outstrip our ability to extract it from the earth. And unlike copper or iron, which we have many centuries’ experience producing, the lithium industry remains in its infancy. Up until recently there were few mines and the pools in the Salar de Atacama were still relatively small. Today they are big enough to be easily visible from space, a gigantic pastel paint palette smack bang in the middle of the desert.

GM has issued a stop-sale order for the Chevy Blazer EV just weeks after its release following reports of software problems that made the vehicle undrivable. Edmunds, which received confirmation on Friday night that the company is halting deliveries, previously documented 23 issues during tests of the SUV, including the infotainment system repeatedly crashing and displaying a multitude of error messages. Inside EVs writer Kevin Williams also tested the Blazer EV and not only encountered similar problems with the display, but was left stranded after the car broke down while charging.

In a statement to Edmunds, Chevrolet said, “We are aware that a limited number of Blazer EV owners have experienced some software quality issues. To ensure our customers have a great experience with their vehicle, we are temporarily pausing sales of Blazer EVs.” All new deliveries are on pause, VP Scott Bell said.

The Chevrolet Blazer EV is powered by GM’s Ultium battery system, which is being used in a slew of other vehicles including the GMC Hummer EV and the Cadillac Lyriq. Those, too, have been the subject of plenty of complaints, as Inside EVs reported. A spokesperson for GM told TechCrunch the Blazer’s problems are “not safety related nor related to Ultium or Google Built-In.”

Bluesky, the invite-only decentralized social network, is taking baby steps towards opening up to the public. CEO Jay Graber announced this week that Bluesky posts are now viewable whether a person is logged in or not, meaning you can directly share content with your friends who don’t have Bluesky accounts. While Bluesky has about 2.6 million users so far, that pool is still relatively small as it remains closed off to wider public signups.

The new public web interface, which the company teased last month, will make Bluesky posts accessible to a bigger audience. To mark the shift, Bluesky has also adopted a blue butterfly as its new logo — gone is the stock photo-style cloudy sky. “Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we are starting to open up,” Graber wrote in a blog post about the changes. Graber also notes that many Bluesky users were already using the butterfly emoji as a symbol for the social network. “We loved it,” Graber wrote, “and adopted it as it spread.”

It's Christmas Eve Eve, so I've phoned in this week's TMA and shouted "Lost In Space!" to myself. What a time to be alive. I'm also stoking the flames of the console wars in 2023. Yes, Sony announced its sold 50 million PS5 consoles so far. Xbox doesn't offer its own official figures (because of this eventuality?) but analysts say, during this year, Sony outsold Microsoft consoles three to one. 

There's also an outright ban on Apple Watches — at least the two newest models — over patent issues. Apple needs President Biden himself to turn the ban around, but it doesn't look like he will before the ruling come into power. 

This week:

⌚️⛔️ The Apple Watch ban is here

🤳🧑🏽‍🔧 Samsung adds foldables to its self-repair program for the first time

🎮🕹️ Sony has sold 50 million PS5 consoles over three years

And read this these:

We're wrapping up our year with a barrage of features and editorials on the year that was 2023. Want to know how X declined and declined and declined? How about the sudden pause on autonomous taxis and the many disasters in the last 12 months? Or how about a year of layoffs and acquisitions across a lot of gaming industry? There are more stories, of course, but you'll have to wait for next week to read those.

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Apple has been noticeably missing in the list of companies with their own generative AI product, but based on a new report by The New York Times, it's looking to change that real soon. In recent weeks, Apple has reportedly started negotiating with major publishers and news organizations to ask for permission to use their content to train the generative AI system it's developing. The company doesn't expect to get its hands on their content for free, though, and The Times says it's offering them multi-year deals worth at least $50 million for access to their news archives.

Apparently, some of the publishers it approached are concerned about the repercussions of letting Apple use their news articles throughout the years. They think a broad licensing deal for their archives could lead to legal issues along the way. The publishers are also concerned about the potential competition that may arise from Apple’s efforts.

That said, the iPhone-maker also reportedly built goodwill simply by asking them for permission and showing willingness to pay. The Times says the company’s higher-ups have been in discussion over where to get data for generative AI development for years now. Due to its commitment to privacy, they’ve been hesitating to use information collected from the internet.

Other companies with generative AIs of their own had been accused of stealing content and using it to train their products without express consent from creators and rights holders. OpenAI, for instance, is contending with several lawsuits that accuse it of using other people’s intellectual properties. One of those lawsuits was filed by novelists that include George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, while another was filed by nonfiction authors who said OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business “valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission.”

The Humane AI Pin is expected to start shipping in March. On Friday, the company posted on X (Twitter) that “those who placed priority orders will receive their Ai Pins first when we begin shipping in March.” The company had previously given an “early 2024” estimate for the screen-less wearable device designed to replace a smartphone.

Humane, founded by former Apple employees Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, views the smartphone (still their ex-employer’s bread and butter) as on its last legs. “The last era has plateaued,” TechCrunch reported Chaudhri as saying in a November press briefing. He views the AI-powered wearable product as “a new way of thinking, a new sense of opportunity.”

The $699 Humane AI Pin doesn’t have a screen; instead, it relies on voice cues and a projector that beams relevant info onto the user’s hand. The founders flaunt the device’s privacy focus combined with contextual intelligence, promising it “quickly understands what you need, connecting you to the right AI experience or service instantly.” Partnerships with OpenAI, Microsoft and Tidal provide what the company calls “access to some of the world’s most powerful AI models and platforms.”

The pin runs on a quad-core Snapdragon processor with a dedicated Qualcomm AI Engine powering its Cosmos OS software. It ships in three color options, two of which add an extra $100 to its price. Buyers must pay $24 monthly to access the pin’s cellular data, built as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) on top of T-Mobile’s network.

In addition to providing the March shipping date, Humane says the remaining orders will continue to roll out in the order they were received. Engadget emailed the company to ask when it expects current orders to go out, and we’ll update this article if it responds.

The Humane AI Pin is available to pre-order now from Humane’s website. The Eclipse (matte black on black) costs $699, while Lunar (polished chrome on white) and Equinox (polished chrome on black) colorways will set you back $799.