What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

[macdoc]

Not reading enough
This is fantastic ....tho I knew the story from the movie the details of her life over a century is astounding.

[Brian Peacock]

Hard scifi at it's best ..author is insanely productive .....and good.

I tore through that. Have just finished his Children of Strife - which is also spectacular imo.

By the same author.
The Expert Systems Brother and The Expert Systems Champion. The first is a set-up novella to the second novel, which takes place 10 years later.

Feel like the publisher is pulling a fast one here. This could easily have had a Part I and Part II structure in a 300 pager - and then they could have done away with all the over-explaining the first one in the second one, and not charged me twice!

That aside, a very interesting premise that's used to address big questions about intelligence, ecology, technology and what makes us human.

Five stars, of course.


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On a side note. Noticed someone on Amazon is self publishing kindle books under the name Adrion Tchaikovsky, with titles that are very close to his, obvious AI covers 'in the style of', and fake recommendations from Stephen King. Hope the publisher's legal dept crack down on that - but if they're spoofing one author they'll be doing others. Beware.

[laklak]

I'm into the third book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Anybody else read it?

[Tero]

A book on Germany for 500 years

In his scholarship on National Socialism, David Blackbourn characterizes the relationship between the German public and Adolf Hitler not as one of passive brainwashing or predetermined destiny, but as a complex mutual entanglement. He argues that ordinary Germans actively participated in the regime because it co-opted provincial values and offered avenues for social mobility, while framing its actions through a perverse sense of modernity and global historical precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blackbourn

[Tero]

Well, it's a bit wordy. I was going to quickly read the 1950-2000 part, as I have other books for the 1800s.

[Tero]

There was a chapter of German speakers being deported by all the neighboring countries.

I read a book by a Finnish lady emigrating to Australia 1950s by ship. It was mainly Germans.

[Tero]

The Germany book I'm wrapping up with 1960, will go to book pile to sell. Moving on to reread a short one volume Russian history. I'm reading that only for the 1800s and up to 1920. just not up to Stalin era books. In fact I only read Russian history for WWII. It is getting harder to find the light weight books on the war, only the most technical books are on the shelf in the local bookstores. I don't need the diagrams of submarines etc, just the big picture.

[Tero]

The book is well enough written, but I probably will never read all of the Third Reich. It's goin g to occupy a plastic box for a year, as I did not read the 1800s yet.David Blackbourn. A book on Germans as big influence.

[Tero]

Trying to finish Russian history book to Lenin's death.

But I now gave two eBooks of fiction. One is Stanislaw Lem, short stories.

[Tero]

Good thing I took the eBook, it's simple enough to read and will just sit on the reader. I think Lem wrote this in the 1940s. The space ship has a rudder.

[Tero]

AI is reading Walter Mitty for me now:

Thurber utilizes a distinct comic irony, heavily leaning on malapropisms and pseudo-technical jargon to show that Mitty’s fantasies are entirely constructed from cheap pulp fiction and movies.
• He invents medical conditions like "obstosis of the ductal tract tertiary".
• He crafts a heart machine that makes a comical, repetitive "pocket-pocket-pocket" noise.
This linguistic playfulness highlights the tragicomic nature of Mitty's mind: he is desperate to be a genius, but his imagination can only piece together clichés.

4. The Ending: Tragedy or Triumph?

The final sequence is perhaps the most heavily analyzed part of the text. Standing against a wall in the rain while his wife is in a drugstore, Mitty imagines himself facing a firing squad.
Thurber concludes with the striking line: "...Walter Mitty the undefeated, inscrutable to the last."
This leaves the reader with a double-edged sword:
1. The Tragic Reading: Mitty is utterly defeated by reality. The firing squad symbolizes his subconscious recognition that his real life is a slow execution of his spirit, and he has completely surrendered to absolute withdrawal.
2. The Triumphant Reading: By facing the firing squad with "disdain," Mitty achieves a strange moral victory. He refuses to let the mundane world crush his inner creative spark. His mind remains an unassailable fortress that his wife, society, and reality can never truly conquer.

Maybe I'll go to the library after all, tomorrow.

It was not at our branch so I gave up. I should check out their ebooks though. Book is coming from my non-amazon store.

[Tero]

Mitty came up in a Christopher Summerfield book I am rereading. Large language models lack first hand experience of the world, he says. Back to the parrot thing.