My blog is rich in book readers, and every year before Christmas, it’s become my custom to share the holiday books I mean to read.

I still love reading hardcover books. I still love buying them.

I’ve embraced new technology for years.

It has been a part of my life for 40 years when I wrote for Wired Magazine and Rolling Stone and was dazed by the potential of the Internet. That was when I started writing all of my books on IMacs.I love my Iphone; I love its camera. I have no respect for nostalgia; I don’t miss the old days or glorify them.

I do a lot of business via text.

But I have never been able to let go of paper (hardcover) books that I can hold in my hand. I pore over the reviews, follow the critics, read mysteries, novels (mostly by women), non-fiction books that inform me.

I guess I will be reading them through to the end. I love the way they feel, smell, and speak for themselves.

I have a good long list today of the books I’ve been reading, I read all year when I can, but I really obsess on books during the holidays. Something about the holidays makes me want to read.

There are many nights I plan on sitting down with a book, but I usually end up blogging. This time of year, I actually sit up half the night reading. I used to write books, but now I love to write on my blog, and my blog loves me in ways that even my books couldn’t.

Finally, and at long last, I end up doing what I should be doing, for the smart and fractious and curious people I write for. I love writing about books on my blog.

This holiday, I’ve put eight or nine books aside to read.  I’ve been gathering them for a couple of months but got distracted by our never-ending election and my political writing.

I don’t care if Donald Trump invades China this week; I’m not getting on the Trump Crazy Train before Christmas.

My sister started to tell me how nasty politics is these days, and I cut her off. And I hate watching someone as they disintegrate.

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said, cutting her off.  “I’ve given enough to Donald Trump this year. He’s reduced himself to being one of Isaac Bashevis Dinger’s demonic dybbuks.

He isn’t real. If you ignore him, he will shrivel up and blow away.

Donald Trump is not crawling into my head until 2021. And even then, not for long.

I’m clearing my head for my books. I may not get to all of them by New Year’s, but it’s no disaster if it takes me longer. I’m committed to all of them. This is the most compelling and varied batch I’ve chosen in a long time.

I’m excited. I plan to review some in brief form.

The first book – I’m finishing it up now is Uncanny Valley,  A Memoir by Anna Weiner, high up my list of best books of the year. In her mid-twenties, Weiner is a refugee from the stuffy, underpaid, and Dickensian world of New York publishing.

She’s made it in Silicon Valley, not as the rich software engineer she tried to be, but as a contributing writer for the New Yorker; her first book is about her Wonderland journey through Tech Nation. How ironic she ended up writing for that glorious symbol of another age.

Tired of choking on an uninspired entry-level job in a small publishing house that she knows goes nowhere in a city she can’t afford, she takes a chance and bolts for entry-level jobs in Silicon Vally at the height of its tech-revolution idealism.

She sails up the customer service and data ladder and makes $90,000 a year in no time, taking on-site massages and eating the hip snacks that fill up the kitchens of every start-up.

She wants to hop on board the new digital economy in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco. She is horrified to see all the color and individuality of that storied city crushed by an avalanche of arrogant tech millionaires. And a flood of money beyond comprehension.

She lands a big data-sharing startup at the height of the Silicon Vally Golden Bubble.

Winner beautifully and skillfully describes a world of unimaginable waste and extravagance, dubious success, unconscious immortality, and whitebread child entrepreneurs obsessed with domination, glory, money, and progress.

This is the most convincing case I’ve read for the fact that the Internet and its digital offspring just maybe destroying our country.

The book is a searing, brilliant recounting of a massive cultural shift, the rise of the tech economy that threatens and sometimes dwarfs Wall Street, the corruption of money, the Millenials’ confusion, the perversion of education and creativity.

It’s an insider’s addictive portrayal of an industry at its zenith, of a morally confused generation, of a city with its souls cut out, and an insider tour through ambition, hope, and dread. Everything we ever thought about Silicon  Valley and the tech revolution turns out to be true.

Winer is as unsparing about her own corrupted search for a moral compass as she is of the billionnaire twenty-somethings who find themselves as the crossroads of American history.  One used to have to work hard to get rich; it’s very different out there. You need to be.

It’s a world full of perks and snacks and yoga mats but void of morality or invention.

Be careful what you wish for, she learns; it might not really exist in America, the land of pointless apps,  any longer. I recommend it highly.

I’m also reading Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, a wonderful novel about our sometimes racist cultural imagination and the struggle for humanity against the stereotyping and dehumanization of Chinese-Americans.

Yu is a satirist and a story-teller with the heart; I will never see Chinese restaurants, in the same way, I will see the long lines of men and women in line for the communal shower on each floor of their tenements.

The book (I’m almost done) is a fascinating and innovative novel, set mostly in New York’s Chinatown, told in different voices and scripts. It pokes how Hollywood looks at immigrants (and everybody else).

Wu uses the framework of the Hollywood action movie to tell the funny, poignant, and wrenching story of people in one crowded Chinatown apartment, everyone trying to work their way through the American dream., the man all hoping to be the Kung Fu Asian man, the most successful of all.

It turns out this country is not what they expected.

Through most of it, I never knew whether to laugh or cry, but I did a lot of both. It’s a terrific book.

My spiritual book of the season is James Allen’s As A Man Thinketh. It makes me “thinketh.” We are who we think is Allen’s theme. This is considered one of the best spiritual books of all time. It was written in 1914, it was hailed as a revolutionary book about the power of thought.

Instead of finding ourselves victims of the world, there exists within each of us the ability to shape and define our own destinies. I like that.

Bryan Washington’s short story collection Lot was hailed by critics as an instant classic when it first came out a few years ago. The book is set in Houston, a fascinating backdrop for young Washington and an unexplored city for most of us.  I can’t remember reading a novel set there.

His characters return throughout the book. He uses Houston – the most diverse city in America – to write about people’s longing for home and community.

I haven’t read more than a few pages yet, so I can’t describe it in detail; it feels at first glance like a great debut from a new and young writer. I’m hooked.

On my book pile is  The Glass Room by Anne Cleaves, the fourth in her Vera mystery series, one of my favorite series.

I’m going to start it this weekend. Vera Stanhope is a wonderful hero for a murder mystery. I consider this one of the best mystery series going; Vera is the iconoclastic, idiosyncratic hero who would never make it past an American movie producer.

She isn’t glamorous enough; she’s overweight, drunk,  sloppy, and grumpy. She lives alone and wears huge sandals that show off her big and dirty feel.

She has an almost psychic gift for spotting a killer. She is feared and disliked by almost everybody around her, excepting her loyal Sergeant, the very loyal Joe Hawthorne.

These two squabble like an old married couple but make a wonderful team.

Vera is the best murder investigator I have ever followed. And she does, of course, have a great big heart underneath all the gruffness. The British invented the mystery; they know how to do it.

On the pile is also War, How Conflicts Shaped Us, by Margaret Macmillian.

She is a respected historian writing about how war shapes our society in many more ways than we imagine. War is not something most of us think about most of the time, but its impact on our lives is everywhere, writes Macmillan.

Fire In Paradise, An American Tragedy by Alistair Gee and Dani Anguiano, is the story of the Paradise wildfire in California in 2018.  It’s an extraordinary tragedy, and a must read for anyone who cares about what is happening to our earth.

I’ve read a couple of chapters of this book, it is one of those I had real trouble putting down. This is climate change right between the eyes.

I also bought A Knock At Midnight by Brittany K. Barnett, a story of hope, justice, the law, and freedom. She is the lawyer African-Americans call when the police mistakenly break their doors down at 5 a.m.

The second mystery I plan to read is Michael Connelly’s The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, another in the Harry Bosch series, another of my favorites. Harry’s growing older, but he’s still defying the odds and taking on the impossible. A good role model.

I doubt I have much chance of reading all of these books over the next week or so, but I’m excited and determined to make more time to read them.

Paper book publishing is supposed to be on the rocks, but there are as many good books as ever, maybe more.

Through all the challenges of the technical revolution, books have kept their magic for me. I guess that’s why I wrote them for 40 years.