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For the record, my 3-star review of the first volume only, posted some months back (oh, was I wrong), and now deleted:

I read the first book, The Other Name, comprising the first 2 parts, in the Swedish translation. I don't think I'll read the rest.

The book is an unbroken stream of consciousness, mostly following the mind of the protagonist Asle, an older, sufficiently successful local painter. Interestingly, occasionally it seems like the stream of consciousness expands to what goes on in the mind of Asle's friend, and sort of double, who is also a painter, also called Asle, but with a much more troubled present.

There is very little plot, as we inhabit the mind of Asle, with his (very) repetitive everyday thought patterns, memories, troubles dealing with grief, as well as few reflections on God and art. There are several repetitive and very inane conversations, especially with his neighbour. Added to the repetition of everyday thoughts, it often feels like reading never-ending small talk.

The repetition occasionally succeeds at creating a sort of hypnotic atmosphere, but that gets tiring quickly. Moreover, Asle's thoughts on religion and art struck me as rather uninteresting, and sort of naive/cliché.

A few nice scenes here and there, and some occasional success at building an engaging atmosphere, but not much else that might make me want to read the other parts.

I originally reviewed only the first volume, The Other Name, read in the Swedish translation. I was of two minds about it, bothered by the repetition and often inane thoughts and conversations. But contrary to my initial intentions, I felt drawn to try and read the rest of the Septology.

It was a good thing to do, as the rhythm and atmosphere created by the prose finally got ahold of me, and the actions and memories of the narrator became more interesting and poignant. Having now read the whole book, I came to think it's brilliant.

It's very intimate, as we end up inhabiting the mind of the narrator to the point where it feels like home. There is a humanity to the protagonist, and to a lesser degree to the minds he also comes to inhabit throughout the book, that feels deeply authentic. (The repeating speculations about religion left me cold, though).

It takes a while to get into the book (in my case, it took me the whole first volume), but it is great once one's inside.

The book is a 100-page tirade against Sweden by a fictional self-exiled Swedish writer in response to a request to contribute to a brochure about Sweden by a German editor. It is occasionally funny, but is mostly focused on rather uninteresting and repetitive criticism of trifling questions such as the quality of literary criticism in Sweden and how it wrongly downplayed the writer's works. Otherwise they are criticisms that could be directed to pretty much any country, and perhaps more justifiably so than to Sweden. The tirade is itself testament to the possibility that the critics were right, given how repetitive and boring it is. There are references to events that I'm not familiar with, so I probably missed quite a bit of what would likely have been clear to Swedes reading it in the late '90s, when the book was published. I ended up skimming through long stretches, as the interest that was there in the first 15-20 pages quickly evaporated as it became clear that the following 80 pages were just more of the same.

Mitchell, a computer scientist, has written an engaging book about AI, including both its opportunities and problems. She comes down as more skeptical (or at least restrained) than AI enthusiasts, although she clearly sees benefits to the technology. More than any other book I have read, Mitchell skillfully walks non-technological people (like this reader) through technological explanations of what AI is doing. There are plenty of great visual examples in the book, demonstrating how AI can make elementary mistakes (identifying images of random dots as different animals, for instance).

More than anything else, reading this book gave me tremendous respect for what the human mind can accomplish. We use words like "intelligence" to describe what machines are doing, but nothing comes close to what the human mind can do easily.

Near the end of the book, Mitchell quotes the economist Sendhil Mullainathan: "We should be afraid. Not of intelligent machines. But of machines making decisions that they do not have the intelligence to make. I am far more afraid of machine stupidity than machine intelligence. … Machines can make many many good decisions and then one day fail spectacularly on a tail event that did not appear in their training data." (page 279) The unrestrained hype surrounding AI may have the unfortunate effect of making us too trusting, and thereby blind to Mullainathan's advice.