book

Rated Alice, het wolvenmeisje 4/10

Rated The Junction 10/10

Wants to read Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis

Finished reading Winds of Change: a revolution of dandelions and democracy

Wants to read The Correspondent

Finished reading Objectivity

Finished reading Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir

Finished reading Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

Rated The Woman in Cabin 10 8/10

Finished reading Mind: A Brief Introduction

Finished reading De onzichtbaren

Rated Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder 6/10

Finished reading Neuromancer

Finished reading When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times

Reading Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Wants to read I Have Some Questions for You

Wants to read Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse?

Rated Circe 9/10

Wants to read The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan

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.

Rated The Air Raid Book Club 6/10

Quick easy read. Little repetitive, but shines a nice light.<br/><br/>The story starts in 1938 and we follow Gertie as she plans to retire as a widow having run a bookshop and successful book clubs for many years.<br/><br/>That's put on hold when she agrees to take in a child from the Kindertransport - which I'd know about but hadn't read a great deal of detail. <br/><br/>As a parent myself, this is the first part that breaks my brain a little, and indeed this part is entirely based in history. An amazing effort and so terrible too. <br/><br/>The story then follows Gertie as she takes care of Hedy, a 15 year old German Jew who also longs to be reunited with her family.<br/><br/>The story takes us through The Blitz, the air raid shelters, rolling blackouts and rationing that took place over the years as Hitler and the Nazis spread through Europe.<br/><br/>I've not read any wartime books, so this was an experience. Obviously: harrowing. The story does also do a good job of making me believe the life that tries to march on.

Rated Reasons to Be Cheerful 6/10

Honestly not sure what I thought of the book…<br/><br/>I'm unsure how I got this on my to-read list. I think I was looking for funny books from the last few years. I didn't laugh once reading this book though. It was a sweet story, set in the 80s, but I'm not sure where the arc was.<br/><br/>The story is told from the perspective of Lizzie, an 18 year old young woman who moves out of home to work as an assistant to a dentist. The dentist himself is fairly sexist and xenophobic. The mother (of the protagonist) is … hard to describe. In short, she's a pain in Lizzie's arse - though she definitely loves her.<br/><br/>I think there's some part of flying the nest and finding your own feet, but Lizzie somehow ends up in a very similar place by the end of the book. There's times I was reading and thinking surely she's going to realise that she herself is actually a good dentist and will take that path, but nope, she ends up as a clothes store assistant, so … I don't know.<br/><br/>It was cute to have 80s nostalgia peppered throughout the book, the highlight being the salad spinner (which my own mother still owns and I definitely remember spinning it for fun).<br/><br/>I guess I was left with the sense of _why did I read what I read_?

Rated Tokyo Express 6/10

Lovely old time detective story.<br/><br/>I do love an old book. Written in 1958, post war in Japan, mostly a story about...sort of...trains. <br/><br/>I knew Japan was big on trains (similarly to the UK, it's our mode of transport), but reading about how they would plan their journey often sleeping overnight, upright, on the train to get from one place to another.<br/><br/>The crime is linked to trains and journeys and planning. <br/><br/>It's a nice, short enough, straightforward detective story that cross from one generation of detective (old, slow, "classic"), to young(er) and determined.<br/><br/>There are parts where I'm wondering what _real_ evidence they have to follow up or chase down particular individuals, but it gets a pass being nearly 70 years old.

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.