Reviews and Comments

AI is being increasingly pushed as inevitable everywhere, but this book provides hope and recommendations for how to see through that hype. I had a slightly different perspective than most of the audience of this book, as a developer who has worked for years in language technology, but for the most part, the technical details matched my experience. I definitely recommend this book for anyone wanting to push back on the attempts by businesses and government agencies to automate away our jobs, knowledge, and vital services, which has become even more important in the last few months.

It's not serious literature, but it's a fun ride. I think I liked the Thursday Murder Club books better, but Osman certainly has a way of making you get engrossed in the characters. All of his heroes are as charming as he is, which makes it believable when almost everybody seems to want to help them out in some way.

I've followed @JuliusGoat@mastodon.social for a while now, so I knew I had to pick up his book. It has all the trademark wit and moral clarity I've come to expect from him, but coming in, I had the thought that the people who most need this book wouldn't actually be the ones reading it. In the course of the book, I realized I was one of the people who most need this book. If you think you're an ally, this is a call to action you can't ignore. I recommend this book for anyone and everyone.

This book has a lot of lovely descriptions of the landscape of New Mexico, some very interesting characterizations, and a lot of nice turns of phrase. But as @gwenprime@bookwyrm.social noted, it's very much a book of its time. In particular, the fact that Kit Carson is featured as a (mostly) sympathetic character feels very inappropriate from a modern perspective. I believe that in the 1920s, its sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans and the Long Walk of the Navajo was pretty progressive, but a lot of it now seems rather paternalistic. Worth reading as long as you can keep all that in mind.

It was somewhat surreal to read a science fiction book set in the "future", and see a journal entry dated with today's date. The world of Parable of the Sower is in many ways worse than our current world, but there are also a lot of uncomfortable similarities. Ultimately, the book ends with a hopeful tone, but it makes it clear that a lot of hard work is required to get to the hopeful place.