Wants to read Ode to the Half-Broken
book
Wants to read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Finished reading Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation
Rated Ancillary Justice 8/10
<div>I really liked this and will probably read the second one at some point, but I hope I don't have to read about anyone's lips having "quirked" again. </div>
Rated Rivers of London 8/10
Vivid voice, fun and dark and original.<br/><br/>I wasn't sure what I was getting in to reading Rivers of London (recommended multiple times on socials), especially as I kept finding the teens/young adult book cover for it (reminding me of the multiple covers the Harry Potter books had) - but I decided to jump in.<br/><br/>I quickly got sucked into the book and the narrative style that Aaronovitch used. For some reason I had Millie Bobby Brown as the voice which caused me a little confusion when I learn that the protagonist and narrator is called Peter Grant (I really didn't read the blurb) - but decided that she could still run the inner monologue.<br/><br/>The Rivers of London is a very London and British book (which I always especially enjoy because I can vividly see the places, hear the accents and usually feel the weather) that's a mix of modern copper plod story with fantastical (and certainly for me: original) characters from gods to vampires to ghosts and wizards.<br/><br/>There's a good balance of funny and witting against the (some times) gruesome and frankly pretty terribly bad things that make for the primary investigation for the protagonist, Grant, to work through.<br/><br/>Really fun stuff - I can definitely see myself returning for more in this series.
Rated Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI 8/10
I'd recommend anyone who wants to understand the emergence of AI and OpenAI in particular to read this book.<br/><br/>I do struggle reading non-fiction, and this book was no different. It took me nearly 2 months to finish reading (in my evening snippets) - but it was definitely worthwhile. It was [this 90 minute interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8enXRDlWguU) by Novara Media with Karen Hao that made me immediately purchase the book.<br/><br/>I don't think I can fully review this book and do it justice, but I can share what I learnt from the book where my original assumptions were wrong about AI and AI companies.<br/><br/>The book is focused primarily around OpenAI and Sam Altman, and in [particular how his ousting in November 2023](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67458603) came to be, through hundreds of interviews and documents, and paints a very insightful picture of the messiah complex (though not in her words) that Altman has.<br/><br/>Here's a short summary of things I didn't know but learnt through reading this:<br/><br/>1. Altman and friends started conversations (and business, albeit initially as a non-profit, though that didn't last) in 2015 because they were *going* to build AGI and that it was inevitable.<br/>2. The company was formed with scientific researchers originally, again as an open company with the intent of sharing, though spoiler alert: this all changed<br/>3. I had always assumed it was cowboy bro developers working on the code, but it was, originally, academic based engineering<br/>4. AI safety was constantly there and initially significant - but as we all know now, eventually lost a battle to make an impact, left "hobbled" and thrown rather to the wayside.<br/>5. The training data was, after GPT-2, ingested wholesale and attempt to clean/sanitise would happen on the results coming from prompts - i.e. the inputs were not cleaned, which means applying dizzying array of filters to catch on the output and edge cases.<br/>6. Common Crawl was introduced at GPT-3 - which is also where the input filtering stopped happening<br/>7. AI, or Western AI companies including OpenAI (but also Google and Microsoft) put their data centres in the Global South, additionally sourcing their data annotators from the poorest countries allowing them to pay (via third parties) literal pennies per hour for the work (which could also come with terrible mental health side effects as the worker would read and view the generative content that AI could come up with based on the unfiltered dark corners of the web)<br/>8. Sam Altman lies. Little lies, but from a great deal of documentation, _a lot_ and often to tell people what they want to hear whilst (we guess?!) having some ulterior motive<br/>9. The path that OpenAI decided to take to head towards what they believe will be AGI, effectively requires unlimited compute power, when in reality, there are lots of different applications of AI that don't need that level of power, Stable Diffusion being one such example trained using 256 GPUs (still not a desktop computer, but not hundreds of thousand GPUs either)<br/>10. OpenAI's approach, to close off it's scientific findings, close it's source and refusing to share methods means that there's no way to verify any of their progress, but more importantly is stripping the academic scientific community of it's researchers (as someone who has visited CERN on two occassions, seeing science being shared is incredible and incredible for society)<br/><br/>My only complaint about the book (and it's likely to be my own fault) is I had trouble with the jumping backwards and forwards in time - I'd often be unsure where we were in the timeline.<br/><br/>If you work in tech, I'd absolutely recommend this book. If it's not possible, then definitely the interview I linked above.
Reviewed Fundamentally
Loved it. Intelligent and genuinely made me laugh.<br/><br/>This book was recommended in our work Slack, and _just_ pull quote for the book description, I found myself instantly buying it:<br/><br/>> By normal, you mean like you? A slag with a saviour complex?<br/><br/>The story follows Nadia, an academic who is pulled into a job with the UN to apply her proposal to rehabilitate ISIS brides so they can leave the camps and return home.<br/><br/>What I really enjoyed about this book was the exposure to completely different backgrounds to my own. So for an example, Nadia is Muslim. She has turned her back on her faith. She's gone into academia, and she's now offered a job in the UN to help these ISIS brides.<br/><br/>Most of the characters are completely different to the people in my real life, but the writing is steeped in reality (the author's note at the end explains that she, Younis, was a humanitarian worker known for her expertise on contemporary Iraq, and that though fictionalised, there's a lot of real experience in the story).<br/><br/>Nadia's character is witty, flawed, pissed off, broken and I found myself actually laughing out loud at some of the lines from the book. The book's blurb includes the following line, which I absolutely felt was accurate:<br/><br/>> A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion, radicalism[…]<br/><br/>I really enjoyed the book, and found it hard to put down - as seen in my 10 day read of what normally takes me a month.<br/><br/>For a first novel, from someone that on paper is very academic and doing _very_ serious work, this is A*. Love it.
Rated The Wasp Factory 8/10
Unique. <br/><i></i><br/>The protagonist, Frank, is most definitely a psychopath and yet one that I could almost understand their weird justifications - and that's credit to Banks, otherwise this could easily have been a story of a complete whack job.<br/><br/>The book is described (possibly by the publishers) as a gothic horror - it's certainly dark, but not sure it fits into horror.<br/><br/>It's definitely a mind fudge, and one that had me wanting to read more to try to understand if Frank understood what he was or not.<br/><br/>Definitely interesting, probably would have had a big impact if I'd read this in my teens (and not a 40 year old), still enjoyable in a challenging kind of way.
Rated When the Cranes Fly South 8/10
Took me a minute to get into, but then…I cried. The good kind.<br/><br/>It took me until around 20% of the book to get on with it properly. I was struggling to even want to pick up the book. It's well written, but the subject, _end of life_, was so unappealing that I found myself wanting to avoid reading the book.<br/><br/>At some point around 1/5 of the way in, this feeling settled and I was swept along by the narrative that the main character, Bo, gives us.<br/><br/>I think reading this there's going to be different aspects that hit different people hardest. I'm not a dog person, so the thread about Sixten, his dog, though sad (the dog doesn't die!) it didn't gut punch me.<br/><br/>I did however relate hard to the inner monologue not linking up to what's actually said. Something I suspect most people can relate to - which I suspect is the reason this book is well recommended.<br/><br/>The book is told almost exclusively from the thoughts of Bo, the elderly 89 year old man (which took me quite a few pages to actually work out). From his thoughts we travel back and forth in his memory which worked really well. I didn't feel lost at all, maybe because Bo's memories felt like they flowed naturally back and forth.<br/><br/>The story really does feel like it's being faithful to the human flaws many of us share.<br/><br/>It also, for me, did an excellent job of building up my relationship with Bo and gently brought me to tears right at the end in a way that made me message my kids to tell them I love them.
Rated Close to Home 8/10
Solid reading, what I've come to expect from Hunter.<br/><i></i><br/>Having now read three of the Adam Fawley books, albeit in reverse order, I've come to expect a certain level of story telling from Cara Hunter and this as the first book does not disappoint.<br/><br/>Having recently read the 2nd book (though the order isn't crucial) the twist device was a little familiar but it didn't distract from the story, nor did I predict any part of the story.<br/><br/>Enjoyable as a British based modern investigation story that leans more on (what I imagine is) police work rather than glamorous whodunit style reveals.<br/><br/>Looking forward to reading the fourth installment.
Rated Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story 6/10
"Our diverse literary heritage reveals that we do not _need_ a single national story"<br/><br/>I bought and read this book after seeing Caroline Lucas speaking with Zack Polanski during a live session of Bold Politics. It's a book that tries to reclaim "Englishness" from the weaponising that the Far Right have been using it for.<br/><br/>Overall, it's an interesting read, lots of history, both good and bad, lots of literature and how stories and poetry has been used over the centuries to act as a force for political change for good.<br/><br/>Solidarity and standing up for what's right is the theme the ran through for me.<br/><br/>From a technical perspective, I didn't enjoy that nearly every single page also came with a long paragraph of footnotes - which normally I skip (because it goes off to the end of the book and back, but these were inline on the same page), and completely broke the flow of what I was reading. I wish that these had simply been part of the written content rather than regular sidebars.<br/><br/>Then as I read, I felt like perhaps I wasn't quite the audience to fully appreciate the book. There's certainly a good chunk that is accessible, but it often felt like if I worked in politics this content would make more sense.<br/><br/>---<br/><br/>I did come away with 23 highlights and wanted to highlight more, partly to remember what I had read, partly as a "wow, I did not know".<br/><br/>I think if you enjoy your history and commentary _and_ literature, then you'll enjoy this book. I struggle to read non-fiction in any reasonable amount of time, so I often find by the time I get to the end of a book, I forget the important things from the start!<br/>
Rated A Very Merry Murder 6/10
Fine. Easy read. Guessed the murdered though 🤷<br/><br/>Grabbed it for the Christmas period (slightly annoyed I finished it on Jan 2nd). It's decently written, apparently part of a series (this being book 6) but stands fine on it's own. There's a few references to something that happened before, but doesn't affect the story.<br/><br/>It does read like a Columbo or Murder She Wrote, where there's people killing other people like it's just another Wednesday. All ends are fully tied up without anything left to the reader by the end.<br/><br/>I did figure out the killer around 1/3rd of the way in - or at least I keep asking the protagonist "What about X?!".<br/><br/>Not terribly Christmasy, but the very last chapter was very sweet.
Rated In Bloom 8/10
No quite the same murderfest from Sweetpea 1, but still enjoyably angry at the world.<br/><br/>I think I expected the same kind of murder spree from the first book, and it's not that at all (although Rhiannon, the protagonist, desperately wants that). It's actually written on the tin, In Bloom is Rhiannon's experience of being pregnant - which, for a change, rolls up all the shitty experiences into one.<br/><br/>I enjoyed, and laughed at, the cutting turn of phrases - the kind of brutal honesty that you might reserve for the closest of friends knowing that it's for the "inside voice".<br/><br/>I can see myself reading the next instalment in the book (though perhaps not so soon) and I'm not entirely sure where the character can go given the way the book ends, so that's definitely intriguing.<br/><br/>But just for the the record (my record!), Rhiannon is a terrible person!
Rated Yellowface 8/10
Brilliantly written, almost car-crash like reading.<br/><br/>The story is very much set in the publishing world, which isn't something I know very well or is directly relatable, but I was still brilliantly drawn in by Kuang's characters.<br/><br/>It took me a while to fully realise that the protagonist, Juniper Song, is white (even if it says it right there in the blurb!), which, when it was written down in text made a lot of story even more cringe.<br/><br/>It's an interesting view into an individual being cancelled, then un-cancelled, then…somehow digging a deeper hole. I really couldn't find myself feeling any sympathy with the Juniper character and found myself often saying (albeit in my head): just walk away, start a-new, the damage is done.<br/><br/>Along side the cancel story, Kuang lets me, as a white reader, look in on a world where I don't really have any experience: Asian American culture in literature (and work), and how race is always in play for better or worse.<br/><br/>A great, intelligent read. Even if it keep making me think of the Batman slap meme...
Rated Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow 10/10
Favourite book of my year: wonderful. <br/><br/>I loved the characters. I've loved the story telling. I loved the passion around work. I loved the love between the characters. <br/><br/>Crossing multiple decades but the crux takes place during the height of 1990s PC gaming. i.e. shortly after Doom - and our characters are games makers. <br/><br/>Though the weaving part is their company that makes games, I wouldn't call this a "gamer's book". I'm certainly not a gamer by their measure, but the story put into their game design and the love they have is infectious.<br/><br/>The book left me genuinely inspired. The character _Marx_ makes me want to be more like him. He has purpose in helping others without being a martyr.<br/><br/>What's more, the book left me wanting to **make**. I love that hungry creative feeling (even if it's slightly dampened by having _too_ many projects!).<br/><br/>Loved it. Strong recommend.