Eclectic reader: philosophy and AI for work, pretty much any other genre for leisure. I mostly read on my Kobo, in a variety of European languages.
On Mastodon as @dcm@social.sunet.se
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Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign …
Great book that covers many of the topics that Dan Dennett has worked on, such as cognition, mind, and consciousness, in an accessible and at the same time careful and engaging way. Provides a nice synthesis of his core ideas and contributions to research on those topics.
Sono passati ormai sessant'anni dagli avvenimenti raccontati da Ludovico Ariosto nell'Orlando furioso: la guerra contro …
La premessa è interessantissima, ossia scrivere il seguito all'Orlando Furioso di Ariosto, e il tutto viene fatto in modo magistrale, un racconto fantastico coinvolgente, con tanti temi interessanti, e molto spesso anche divertentissimo.
Every day, Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same cafe. And every day she …
Great book about passion, falling in love, love itself, loss and second chances. All this with an extremely beautiful and elegant prose, well-built, deep characters, and a surprising plot.
Con la sua inconfondibile voce, Pif esordisce nel romanzo con un’opera divertentissima che costringe il …
Libricino leggero, con una storia che vuole essere una critica frizzantina alle ipocrisie del cattolicesimo italiano, ma sebbene non sia male, non fa ridere più di tanto, e lo scopo critico prende il sopravvento a scapito della trama e del divertimento.
Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, …
This is a very nice book that starts from the brilliant idea of describing and naming complex feelings and emotions for which there is no word in English (and I would guess, most other languages). The descriptions are somewhat hit-and-miss. Some are extremely poignant, others end up in the cheesy end of the spectrum. A book not to be read cover-to-cover, but to consult serendipitously every now and then.
The man he knew as “Control” is dead, and the young Turks who forced him …
This is a great spy thriller, unconventional in many ways. The world-building is extremely convincing, so much so that some of the invented slang for spycraft seeped into the actual world. The writing is engaging and elegant, and, as befits a thriller, once started it's tricky to stop!
Slaughterhouse-Five, also known as The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is a science fiction infused anti-war novel by Kurt …
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
There are some nice ideas in this sci-fi book. However, the narrative is quite clunky, characterisation of the protagonists tends to be uninteresting and/or cliché-filled, there is quite a lot of exposition of context that feels unnatural and clearly reader-directed rather than being organic to the plot.
A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory …