Eva
Very much enjoying these journalistic graphic novels D&Q is publishing. But with this one, i was a bit torn between the knowledge that it is a true story and therefore important and a slight disappointment that it wasn't as interesting as other solitary confinement experiences I have read about elsewhere.
Turns out the google searchbar is the only place where we don't lie to ourselves or others. That's where we reveal our strangest fears, hidden prejudices and kinkiest wishes. Data scientist can wrangle that data to learn how racist we truly are, how sexist we raise our children and how much sex we're truly having. The book contains a lot of examples demonstrating how big data and data analysis methods now enable us to see connections and correlations where previously we were just blind guessing. It helps to pick the winning racehorse, reveals that good students have promising futures no matter which school they attend, and shows that violent movies help lower the crime rates on opening weekends.
So, all in all lots of interesting anecdotes, a lot of them on the juicy side, mixed with occasionally slightly inappropriate jokes. The book could have used a little less of the author trying to insert himself. Also, some of his analogies were just wrong (no, the grandma is not big-data).
3.5
Part true story, part invention Alias Grace is the tale of enigmatic Grace Marks, who's convicted for murder in the 19th century. Grace is gentle, self-controlled and sometimes mad, she's a puzzle, and spellbinds a variety of surroundings characters who try to get her released from prison. We hear her tell the story in her own words to a young physician who tries to analyse her mind, interlaced with fragments of other people's reports and also Grace's own contradicting confessions from the past.
Atwood's narration is beautiful, gripping, sometimes sensual, sometimes haunting, and her Grace is fascinating especially as she always remains slightly out of grasp. The mystery of the murder and Grace's innocence and guilt is built around a portrait of 19th century culture, in which women are always at the mercy of men, the weaker gender, exploited. The ending with Grace stitching together a quilt containing symbols for herself, Mary and Nancy, was such a subtle yet powerful end commentary.
4.5
A young girl who's obsessed with monsters and wants to be one herself, digs into her neighbor's mysterious death, uncovering family secrets on the way. Against a backdrop of Chicaco in the 60ies, the murder of MLK, school bullies, seedy neighborhood characters, a loving yet chaotic family...
Definitely a stand-out graphic novel, with a unique visual style as well. And with 400+ pages it's quite substantial. Only part 1 of 3 as I now learn.
J'ai le lu dans le cadre de mon petit-dejeuner exercice de lecture. Habituellement il prend plus que 3 moins pour finir un livre de presque 700 pages, mais j'ai l'avantage ici de deja etre amoureuse avec les caracteres. Plus, de connaitre la plupart de l'action. Evidemment grace a etre une fan de la version televisee.
I read this in 2 sittings, and it's been a while since I was this eager to run home to dive back into a book (last was probably Ferrante's [b:The Neapolitan Novels 26828169 The Neapolitan Novels Elena Ferrante https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443412457s/26828169.jpg 46858867]). Turtle is 14 and she could be a heroine in a postapocalyptic future, but she lives in the here and now. Emotionally isolated from society she grows up with her survivalist misogynist abusive father, who teaches her how to handle shotguns and the wild nature of the Californian coast. Then a window opens up in the form of a friendship with same-aged teenage boys, and Turtle needs to learn how to detach from her father while trying to make sense of all the horrible things she's learned to endure. Trigger warnings, this is a dark haunting tale, but it's so absorbing and Turtle is magnificent, and all the side characters are memorable, and you'll be on the edge of your seat. Plus the writing is fantastic.
Our everyday lives are more and more steered and regulated by technologies that are ultimately driven by a desire for profit, control and power. Greenfield's book stresses the need for a better understanding and more critical thought on these technologies surrounding us. He chooses today's most pervasive and innovative fields (smartphone, internet of things, augmented reality, digital fabrication, cryptocurrency, blockchain, automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence) and dedicates a chapter to each, analysing their impact on society. He extrapolates their trajectories into the future and picks apart how even the most idealistic designs would end up in thrall to political power-dynamics. His outlooks are mostly (but not exclusively) pessimistic, which makes sense considering the whole book is meant to be a big warning sign.
Basically - no technology will provide us a magic solution for creating a fair, nondiscriminatory, clean, conflict-free future, and we should all learn to be more critical when new tech innovations appear promising us these utopian futures.
Definitely an important and smart book. 4.5
Ross was advisor for Innovation for Clinton while she was Secretary of State. He does a tour through today's hottest topics of innovation (genomics, big data, robotics, cryptocurrencies, etc) and focuses in on their economical and geopolitical impact. He projects a future in which economies are driven based on if the countries adopt an “open” or “closed” strategy to data (in contrast to the capitalism/communism dichotomy from before).
I definitely took advantage of the audiobook-feature of not always having to pay attention too closely, but all in all this was a good listen. I especially enjoyed his first-hand insights on different economies and case studies from across the globe.
3.5
A story told from the perspective of 4 teenagers living in the slums in Mauritius, surrounded by drugs, street gangs, prostitution and abuse. Everything is tinged with sadness and despair. The poetic prose is taking it a bit too far for my taste, and if you strip it of the poesy, the narrative feels a bit slim. Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood for a story that's so full of violence against women.
While Eve and Saad fit in organically, I felt Savita would have either needed more segments or could have been cut entirely, while Clelio felt a bit apart from the main story and harder to connect to. Definitely a short read.
This was a bit of a disappointment, as it is less a love-letter to books but more a memoir of a person who happens to also love books. The problem being that her life isn't that interesting. Partially there was too much over-sharing on her personal life (about exes, about her father's death) and there was also something slightly off-putting in the tone she described some of her adventures, as if she's waiting to hear praise/appreciation. Some of the chapters are also just muddled, like when she talks about the rise of terrorist attacks in Paris and then swerves to talk about what Victor Hugo had to say about a transforming Paris back in the day. Ending that chapter with a short anecdote about a Les Miserables actor reaching out via Twitter and taking her and her daughter backstage after a production of the play. I'll rather recommend Anne Fadiman's [b:Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader 46890 Ex Libris Confessions of a Common Reader Anne Fadiman https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1435782351s/46890.jpg 1468318] which is a charming collection of essays on bibliophilia.
A personal narrative told by a young Irish man who joins the US Army mid 19th century, and lives through the war on Indians and the American Civil War. There's adventures, acts of immense cruelty, grappling with consequences and authority, yet foremost there's a lot of heart, friendship and loyalty.
The writing style is unique, it's conversational, as spoken out loud without proper grammar, and it's lyrical and simple. Somehow the style made me drift off often, and then when I went, more attentively, to reread passages I had missed, I often discovered the beauty in the detail. There's something in the simplicity of the words and expressions used, that puts more weight on the sentiments the narrator communicates.
I was very moved by the bond between the main characters and their little make-shift family, and definitely would have liked to spend more time with them.
Excellent review of a lot of cases where big data is failing us right now. O'Neil terms them Weapons of Math Destruction, they are the algorithms and filters and data crunching methods that help people make decisions on who to hire, who to fire, who to give a loan to and how much to charge you. They are oversimplified, non-transparent and static, and they usually end up being feedback engines that help the rich get richer and discriminate against the poor. Not that humans before them weren't terribly biased and greedy in their decision making process, but now it happens on a larger scale without us necessarily noticing, because everyone trusts algorithms, because algorithms are fair, right?
Any decisions outsourced to big data will never be completely fair, the same way humans can never be completely fair. But raising awareness and having these discussions now is super important, so we learn how to finetune these tools so they'll be as fair and transparent as they can be.
O'Neil's chapter on micro-targeting of citizens with political ads on facebook is very on-point for these days.
I am very happy I read this, but phew am I also happy to be done with it. Because this book is heavy, because it took me about an hour to read only 30 pages and because Tolstoy needed to tell us a lot about his thoughts on history and historians.
But, there is so much good too :)
Tolstoy's descriptions of characters, how he goes so seamlessly into their heads and shows us what drives them to their sometimes heroic sometimes cowardice actions, is grand. Nikolai's reverie at seeing the tsar and pretty much falling in love with him and going into battle for him, was such a vivid and slightly scary description of extreme patriotism, and it stuck with me.
There's a lot of talk of the many many characters in W&P, but it wasn't as confusing as I feared it would be. After a while you figure out the central ones and realise it's not that important to keep track of all the generals and side characters. Also, a warning, it's not particularly easy to like the characters, with Prince Andrei being the only exception for me. Pierre with his ignorant naivete, getting pulled into the freemasonry, or Natasha the charming yet spoiled adolescent with her exuberance, are hard to root for. My compassion was more with the quiet women side characters, poor forgotten Sonya, and passive yet intelligent Marya.
The main narrative follows a group of connected characters and families through the years 1805-1812, from the high society events in Moscow and Petersburg to the battlefields in Europe, up until after Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The book is also interspersed with Tolstoy's musing on history. Which at the beginning are quite interesting in relation to his characters, as he sees humans as just cogs in the machine of history. From the smallest foot soldier to the highest generals - none of them truly in control of how a war is fought and won and lost. Even though historians assign the outcome of wars to the genius of the men in power, Tolstoy multiple times makes a point of highlighting how Napoleon's or Kutuzov's commands have little impact on outcomes. As fights are won and lost due to circumstances that have been in motion for a long while already. If only he wouldn't have quadrupled these thoughts on history towards the end of the book. It just made it a bit of an uphill battle to finish the book. (and I absolutely skipped the second epilogue)
Nice surprise: Tolstoy's funny. Occasionally the text has a very sharp and dry humour. Plus, I also enjoyed the bilingual nature of the book, with Russian high society conversing in French.
Even though this partially gave off a slight how-to-get-rich-by-picking-the-right-idea vibe, it was full of interesting examples and studies. How hard it is to pick your idea, persuade others to join your cause, to go against the grain. There's not much original content in the book itself, but a lot of interesting titbits that are worth repeating.
We build systems (software, legal frameworks, etc) and we keep adding features and exceptions to them, each addition triggering an exponential increase of interactions between individual parts. And that's when we lose the ability to understand or anticipate all possible pathways through the system. Our systems and technologies become black boxes.
Once our technological creations reach such high complexities that we don't understand them anymore, we either resort to fear or awe (the modern day sublime). Plus unexpected behaviour and/or bugs creep in and we simply can't make sense of them anymore. Arbesam makes the point that we need to find ways of keeping up with our creations, by becoming T-shaped people (specialist with generalist knowledge) and by designing more transparent, more easily-readable systems (see “explainable A.I.”)
This is a pretty fascinating topic. The book could have maybe used some harsh editing and could have worked better as an elongated essay, but all in all he's collecting interesting points.
This story has a haunting quality, as it slowly unfolds backwards (and forward) in front of your inner eyes. It's very visceral and poetic in it's descriptions of solitude, nature, and animals. The dirt of the Australia outback, the constantly buzzing flies, the fear, the running from a past, the darkness full of monsters, the depictions of violence/assault, and the unwillingness yet necessity to let people into your life. When you reach the end, and uncovered all the threads of the tapestry of Jake's life, it's less like finishing a puzzle, but more like having all elements of her story keep buzzing inside your head. Good stuff. Read it over the last 2-3 days.
Pleasant surprise to discover that the 2nd half of the audiobook is actually the book narration in Italian. So I was done earlier than expected.
In Other Words is Lahiri's exploration into what it takes for a writer to learn a new language during adulthood, and to use that language for her creative writing. Lahiri grew up speaking Bengali, but English is the only language she ever learned to read and write. She falls in love with the Italian language, and then makes it her goal to learn it properly, even moves to Rome for it.
Even though parts of her linguistic journey resonated with me, I was slightly put off by the tone she used. She made it sound as if her endeavour was her own personal hill to climb, and that is was a struggle, somehow disregarding how it is a reality for millions of people out there every day. Who - given, are not authors like her - but also have to or want to acquire new languages late in life. Plus she has way too many examples of feeling offended by having people misunderstand her, or mistake her for a non-Italian speaker. She also doesn't seem to take any pleasure from being multilingual, but rather drops one language for the other. I guess this is about the deeper-than-usual entanglement of a writer to her writing-language of choice.
2.5
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.
A short in-between book while I am reading W&P, so that I feel I am actually progressing :)
A chemistry Phd student's inner thoughts while she goes through a life crisis questioning her devotion to the discipline, the relationship she's in and her upbringing with her Chinese immigrant parents. The narration is sparse and charming in it's wry, science-witty and introspective way.
3.5
13 stories with overlapping characters, and shuffled in time, that circle around characters that are in or adjacent to the music scene. At the beginning I was quite engaged, as the writing is good, but with every chapter/story it started to feel more like a short-story collection and my interest in the characters started to dwindle. The same structure worked well for me in [b:Homegoing 27071490 Homegoing Yaa Gyasi https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448108591s/27071490.jpg 47113792]. Which must have been the exception to the/my rule.
A sparse and elegant novella that plays well as a horror story, as we experience small ominous weirdnesses in a young family's vacation in the countryside through the husbands diary entries. Kehlmann could have kept the line between madness and true-horror more ambiguous, but now that I think about it, maybe he did. I enjoyed the unfinished sentences.
3.5