Klara and the Sun

A very readable journey into a possible future. A very interesting narrator, an artificially intelligent humanoid with good observational abilities but limited reasoning, which ultimately allows her to draw some curious and false conclusions.

Minor things about the proposed future slightly irk, for example we seem to have autonomous artificial friends, but driving is still something done by humans. Walking around is likely more difficult to automate than driving around, though companionship does not appear to be as difficult as we might have thought/hoped. That said, the future inhabitants all have something called an 'oblong', which seems to be roughly a futuristic smart phone. Do we then really need the artificial friends to be humanoid in look? Why can the artificial friend not simply be interfaced with through the oblong? Lastly, it seems that the artificial friends can perform chores if asked, why then does the main family still have a housekeeper? Why does not everyone have a robotic maid?

Still these are just nitpicks about the possible future, the main throw of the work, and the pleasure of reading it, is not significantly affected. At times, the book may seem to belabor about the point a bit. Perhaps some scenes could have been cut, or perhaps I am just missing their significance.

• I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
• I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
• The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
• I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
• Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
• In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
• many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
• I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though I do think it should be followed with journaling or a book discussion. I would be curious how this book could be used to engage youth about AI ethics.

This is one of those very rare books that reminds me of what books are at some level all about. That makes me want to go about and knock about two stars off of 99% of my prior book ratings, to make room to properly differentiate this one.

It's hard to say too much that's concrete, without giving it away. I was closer to tears at the end of this than I can remember with any book for a long time. Not easy maudlin tears, but deep oh-my-god tears about what a universe this is.

The people are very fully people; the viewpoint character is not a person, but ... well, that would be a spoiler also. But the viewpoint it gives her allows Ishiguro to say some amazing and touching and true and thought-provoking things without coming out and saying them (because nothing he could come out and say would say them so well).

Language cannot express truth, I often say; but what I mean is that it can't explicitly express literal truth. Language, when it's used with this much expertise, can and does express deep and breathtaking truth.

I need to go spend a few weeks processing this now, I think..

If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend that you should,

This is a story about and told by a human-formed "artificial friend" (AF) of a disabled teenager in a future world somewhat reminiscant of Gattaca (film). The genius is that it's told from the very limited perspective of the AF, Klara, so you only really get to understand things as she understands them.

There's a fascinating observation of humans' direction of travel being away from mystery and having a machine-like understanding of themselves, yet Klara is moving into mystery, and has some insightful perspectives.

It also nods to how artificial intellegence learns and furthers human bias (a massive and frightening contemporary issue); it seems that the main characters are white such that Klara has to note when people are "black skinned" even though it's not relevant to the story - a common white-person microaggression that perpetuates racist other-ing and normalising of whiteness.

The world described sounds terrifying (racism, class, power and innequality have been exacerbated by progress) but everything is normalised because it's the only world Klara has known, so it's not presented or experienced as such from her limited view.

There's a lot of tension, and a lot to scare you, but it's also so gentle.

I would love to discuss the ending but haven't figured out how bookwyrm works for discussions yet.