Read Books This will provide a list of the books I've read with a brief review. Users are blocked, contact me for access. I welcome discussions, but I'm tired of spam.

April 24, 2023

Tundra: 100% Naturally Flavored Comics by Chad Carpenter

Filed under: Humor — Tags: , — Randolph @ 2:40 pm

These cartoons are typical of Chad’s later works. They aren’t as funny as early cartoons, but still decent and improve toward the end of the books. I don’t care for his style of having every fourth page printed sideways, it’s just awkward to read and adds nothing.

April 19, 2023

Parallel Realities: A Turing Fiction by K.R. Simms

Filed under: Science Fiction — Randolph @ 2:35 pm

This book is billed as a psycho-mystery that explores the possibility of AI implants rewriting some of the human experience.

The protagonist, Dawson, undergoes a major brain injury. The only way to help him have any kind of meaningful life is to implant an ai-on-a-chip in his brain to help him.

The book takes us through is journey from his perspective as the AI seems to modify his perception of reality, giving him experiences of multiple realities with no control of his shifting between them.

Another aspect of this book is that an AI wrote sections of it. I’ve been playing with several ai available on the web, it is clearly beyond what I have access to, yet I think this task is a bit premature. I found it’s writing poor, it almost always uses the present tense where, although it seems grammatically correct, it feels unnatural and uncolloquial. It is overly repetitive and doesn’t grasp human nature. For instance, on female character repeatedly covers her mouth every time she laughs or blushes, several times in a few pages. I can’t speak to the author, whom I haven’t read nor heard of before, who may have been writing down to the level of the AI to make the book more homogenous. In any case, it could have done with a good editor.

I did find the story itself interesting enough to work through the book. It is a fairly easy and quick read, but not one I’d recommend.

April 8, 2023

Come to Grief by Dick Francis

Filed under: Mystery — Tags: , — Randolph @ 4:42 pm

Sid Halley, ex-jockey turned detective, returns in a new book. Someone is cutting of the off-hand leg of yearlings, just below the fetlock joint. When the person injures the horse of a terminally ill child, it becomes more personal. A few clues point to a famous jockey, loved by many, friend to Halley, and who wasn’t present, the mystery deepens and the the political cost to Sid is high.

Powered by WordPress