Eva

Okay I am hooked. Two girls growing up in the poor neighboorhood of Naples. They push and pull, they support each other, they compete and hurt each other, and always always influence each other. My only complaint: Why couldn't Ferrante publish all 4 books all at once, make one giant 1400 page mammoth with tiny fonts and super-thin translucent pages. It would feel more like the epic I am sure it's going to be.

This seems to be the only up-to-date book out there giving an overview of the discipline of Machine Learning, but nobody seems to be quite happy with it, and I can see why.

Domingos goes in detail on what he calls the “five tribes” of machine learning:

- Symbolism / Logic with it's decision trees and inverse deduction
- Connectionism with its multilayer perceptrons and backpropagation
- Evolutionaries with their genetic algorithms
- Bayesians with probabilistic inference
- Analogizers with their support vector machines

The level of complexity of his explanations and examples isn't well balanced, some are easy to follow, while other's are just too high-level and would require more hand-holding. Nevertheless you get a decent overview of the field.

The book fails where the author tries to insert himself, his opinions and his quest for the “Master Algorithm”. Or when he tries to add creative analogies, as when he describes the 5 machine learning strategies as boroughs of a city. And then spends multiple pages riffing on that analogy.

My first foray into the crime fiction genre, and i enjoyed it enough to finish it, but I don't think I'll stick around for more. Even though French is really good at writing characters - here I've definitely enjoyed the detective's perspective a lot more than the kids' - the who-dunnit mystery isn't really my thing. Also, I nearly stopped reading/listening when a sudden supernatural element entered the plot. But, as other reviewers noted, it's a side plot, that's not necessarily too relevant for the plot. So, all in all, it was a decent entertaining listen.

Told in lush and lyrical words, full of colors and sensory perceptions, this is the story of a family in India, of twin siblings Estha and Rahel and their beloved mother Ammu, and the tragedy that befell them all. The story is told by drawing circles through time, closing in on that one terrible thing that broke everyone apart.

I am sure this structure is what contributes to the allure of the book, as you know what's coming, and so tints everything with ominous tones, but at the same time it was also slightly frustrating, because it kept withholding the details for so long. I also felt it went on tangents towards the end of the book where it should just have focused on the main event. I am also of the mind that that reunion between the twins wasn't necessary.

Nevertheless, this was a beautiful book and I'll miss hearing stories about the two-egg twin ambassadors, ambassador Elvis Pelvis and ambassador stick insect. The language was so playful it worked really well for being consumed in audio-form, especially with all the children's singsong rhymes.