book
Finished reading March: Book One
Wants to read One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wants to read Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
Rated Lost Lambs 8/10
Enjoyable, well drawn characters, a pleasure to read. <br/><br/>I really enjoyed reading this book. The story floats like a butterfly from one character to the next and it works without losing the reader. <br/><br/>The story, I think, follows the Flynn family and though they're painted as somewhat dysfunctional, they're all spirited in their own journey. <br/><br/>There's a line towards the end that reflects on the mother's character not having *given up* on her art career, but having chosen to be a mother. The book definitely left me with this sense: that we're okay.<br/><br/>There is a strong religious thread in the book (not being religious myself) but it wasn't an agenda being pushed, but rather something for some of the characters to hang on to.<br/><br/>Easily enjoyable. I loved the characters and would definitely recommend.
Reviewed Fundamentally
Loved it. Intelligent and genuinely made me laugh.<br/><br/>This book was recommended in our work Slack, and _just_ pull quote for the book description, I found myself instantly buying it:<br/><br/>> By normal, you mean like you? A slag with a saviour complex?<br/><br/>The story follows Nadia, an academic who is pulled into a job with the UN to apply her proposal to rehabilitate ISIS brides so they can leave the camps and return home.<br/><br/>What I really enjoyed about this book was the exposure to completely different backgrounds to my own. So for an example, Nadia is Muslim. She has turned her back on her faith. She's gone into academia, and she's now offered a job in the UN to help these ISIS brides.<br/><br/>Most of the characters are completely different to the people in my real life, but the writing is steeped in reality (the author's note at the end explains that she, Younis, was a humanitarian worker known for her expertise on contemporary Iraq, and that though fictionalised, there's a lot of real experience in the story).<br/><br/>Nadia's character is witty, flawed, pissed off, broken and I found myself actually laughing out loud at some of the lines from the book. The book's blurb includes the following line, which I absolutely felt was accurate:<br/><br/>> A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion, radicalism[…]<br/><br/>I really enjoyed the book, and found it hard to put down - as seen in my 10 day read of what normally takes me a month.<br/><br/>For a first novel, from someone that on paper is very academic and doing _very_ serious work, this is A*. Love it.
Rated Platform Decay 6/10
Solid entry into the series. <br/><br/>I've read all the previous Murderbot books, but since the last, I also watched the TV series - which I equally enjoyed, but…or put a weird spin on reading this latest book.<br/><br/>I'd entirely forgotten the "diary" part, and because of the TV series, I had the external perspective and wondered why this book was both being told from Murderbot's internal monologue, but also why there was so much…noise, I guess the word would be. <br/><br/>Once I'd finally remembered that this was the actual format of the book I settled into it, reminding myself there wouldn't be huge character developments (because the diaries tend to last for one mission/episode).<br/><br/>Still, the Murderbot character is in fact growing and evolving and that's fun to read.<br/><br/>The story pulled me along pretty well. Not quite the rip roaring page turner, but a solid entry all the same.<br/><br/>I'm not 100% sure you could just pick this book up without having read at least a few previous books, which is why I hadn't rated it higher (the very first novellas are absolutely excellent).<br/><br/>Enjoyable, even if it took me a minute to remember the specific Murderbot format.
Rated Spike Milligan: Man of Letters 6/10
A book of letters…kinda made me want to write letters…<br/><br/>I picked this up based on "funny books" though I'm really not sure how I landed on this book. I know, sort of, Spike Milligan's work, but only from TV. I didn't know he was an author, particularly from funny war stories so I missing considerable context. Arguably I'm not sure why I read this book.<br/><br/>The back cover quotes appeared almost immediately at the start of the book and it was pretty clear that this read like a bottom-of-the-barrel book, just printing every letter that could be found. There was the odd occasion that the correspondence was funny, but unfortunately not laugh-out-loud-funny, just a bit of a snicker.<br/><br/>In the last part of the book (part 4: words of support), the letters are about mental health (dating back to the late-60s), which was interesting to read as it feels like in the real world we've only started to talk openly about mental health in the last decade or so. Milligan would write letters offering support to others, and would often talk about how the NHS support was missing the love and understanding and rather delivered pills (which he says helps, but only as a band-aid).<br/><br/>It was these last group of letters, mostly about sending out love and positivity to the world that brought this up from 2 stars to 3. It definitely made me want to actually _write_ words down to people rather than the usual email, and it was nice to see some silly humour throughout his decades.
Rated Bear Head 8/10
Really enjoyed this follow up to Dogs of War.<br/><br/>I _accidentally_ read [Dogs of War](https://remysharp.com/books/2018/dogs-of-war) in 2018 - I never went looking for it and loved it. Equally, I can't remember when I found out about Bear Head but I knew I wanted to read it if it existed in the same universe. So finally I get around to it.<br/><br/>Overall well written, well drawn characters with distinctive voices in a universe that's really not that hard to conceive. I've read a few of Tchaikovsky's books now and as much as I enjoy them, for some reason it does take me quite a stretch to read the books (this one being just ~315 pages and took me a month) - not sure what's up with that.<br/><br/>The story is told from three protagonist's perspective: Honey, the bear from Dogs of War - once soldier, now an academic arguing for rights for others. Jimmy, the "grunt worker" placed on Mars to prepare it for the colonies that plan to settle and Carole (Springer…I want to say), the PA and "collared" assistant to the antagonist Warner S. Thompson.<br/><br/>Similarly with Dogs of War, Bear Head discusses self and identity (can a person be entirely digital?), freedom and slavery, and the untouchable super rich and their power.<br/><br/>There's some pretty horrible scenes around human slavery where people are compelled to perform, both involuntary physically but also compelled to _think_ in certain ways (i.e. being submissive by design).<br/><br/>With a lot of what I'm reading lately, I can't help but associate it with today's real life events (in 2025-2026), and thinking of the corruption throughout politics we're seeing today - though I can see how this book being published in 2021 aligns fairly well with Trump's first regime from '17-21. Perhaps it's that backdrop that makes me a slow reader!
Rated Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI 8/10
I'd recommend anyone who wants to understand the emergence of AI and OpenAI in particular to read this book.<br/><br/>I do struggle reading non-fiction, and this book was no different. It took me nearly 2 months to finish reading (in my evening snippets) - but it was definitely worthwhile. It was [this 90 minute interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8enXRDlWguU) by Novara Media with Karen Hao that made me immediately purchase the book.<br/><br/>I don't think I can fully review this book and do it justice, but I can share what I learnt from the book where my original assumptions were wrong about AI and AI companies.<br/><br/>The book is focused primarily around OpenAI and Sam Altman, and in [particular how his ousting in November 2023](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67458603) came to be, through hundreds of interviews and documents, and paints a very insightful picture of the messiah complex (though not in her words) that Altman has.<br/><br/>Here's a short summary of things I didn't know but learnt through reading this:<br/><br/>1. Altman and friends started conversations (and business, albeit initially as a non-profit, though that didn't last) in 2015 because they were *going* to build AGI and that it was inevitable.<br/>2. The company was formed with scientific researchers originally, again as an open company with the intent of sharing, though spoiler alert: this all changed<br/>3. I had always assumed it was cowboy bro developers working on the code, but it was, originally, academic based engineering<br/>4. AI safety was constantly there and initially significant - but as we all know now, eventually lost a battle to make an impact, left "hobbled" and thrown rather to the wayside.<br/>5. The training data was, after GPT-2, ingested wholesale and attempt to clean/sanitise would happen on the results coming from prompts - i.e. the inputs were not cleaned, which means applying dizzying array of filters to catch on the output and edge cases.<br/>6. Common Crawl was introduced at GPT-3 - which is also where the input filtering stopped happening<br/>7. AI, or Western AI companies including OpenAI (but also Google and Microsoft) put their data centres in the Global South, additionally sourcing their data annotators from the poorest countries allowing them to pay (via third parties) literal pennies per hour for the work (which could also come with terrible mental health side effects as the worker would read and view the generative content that AI could come up with based on the unfiltered dark corners of the web)<br/>8. Sam Altman lies. Little lies, but from a great deal of documentation, _a lot_ and often to tell people what they want to hear whilst (we guess?!) having some ulterior motive<br/>9. The path that OpenAI decided to take to head towards what they believe will be AGI, effectively requires unlimited compute power, when in reality, there are lots of different applications of AI that don't need that level of power, Stable Diffusion being one such example trained using 256 GPUs (still not a desktop computer, but not hundreds of thousand GPUs either)<br/>10. OpenAI's approach, to close off it's scientific findings, close it's source and refusing to share methods means that there's no way to verify any of their progress, but more importantly is stripping the academic scientific community of it's researchers (as someone who has visited CERN on two occassions, seeing science being shared is incredible and incredible for society)<br/><br/>My only complaint about the book (and it's likely to be my own fault) is I had trouble with the jumping backwards and forwards in time - I'd often be unsure where we were in the timeline.<br/><br/>If you work in tech, I'd absolutely recommend this book. If it's not possible, then definitely the interview I linked above.
Wants to read The Origins of Totalitarianism
Rated Rivers of London 8/10
Vivid voice, fun and dark and original.<br/><br/>I wasn't sure what I was getting in to reading Rivers of London (recommended multiple times on socials), especially as I kept finding the teens/young adult book cover for it (reminding me of the multiple covers the Harry Potter books had) - but I decided to jump in.<br/><br/>I quickly got sucked into the book and the narrative style that Aaronovitch used. For some reason I had Millie Bobby Brown as the voice which caused me a little confusion when I learn that the protagonist and narrator is called Peter Grant (I really didn't read the blurb) - but decided that she could still run the inner monologue.<br/><br/>The Rivers of London is a very London and British book (which I always especially enjoy because I can vividly see the places, hear the accents and usually feel the weather) that's a mix of modern copper plod story with fantastical (and certainly for me: original) characters from gods to vampires to ghosts and wizards.<br/><br/>There's a good balance of funny and witting against the (some times) gruesome and frankly pretty terribly bad things that make for the primary investigation for the protagonist, Grant, to work through.<br/><br/>Really fun stuff - I can definitely see myself returning for more in this series.
Rated The Satsuma Complex 6/10
Light on the brain.<br/><br/>Just the kind of read I wanted after a few longer books. Not 100% even throughout the book - but I'll come to that.<br/><br/>The squirrel from the cover features a nice silly-ish part of the story where the main character will often run into a local squirrel and add his own voice in a back and forth between him and the squirrel. The sort of thing I'd expect from a Bob Mortimer book.<br/><br/>I'm not 100% sure where the book's tone is supposed to sit. Some parts are particularly dark - police corruption, police harassment and modern day slavery. Juxtaposed next to funny little things like socks, squeaky shoes, a cranky neighbour and dog who's constantly disappointed with our main character.<br/><br/>The pages did turn quickly though, and it was easy reading. Nothing particularly to shout about, but not bad either.
Rated In Bloom 8/10
No quite the same murderfest from Sweetpea 1, but still enjoyably angry at the world.<br/><br/>I think I expected the same kind of murder spree from the first book, and it's not that at all (although Rhiannon, the protagonist, desperately wants that). It's actually written on the tin, In Bloom is Rhiannon's experience of being pregnant - which, for a change, rolls up all the shitty experiences into one.<br/><br/>I enjoyed, and laughed at, the cutting turn of phrases - the kind of brutal honesty that you might reserve for the closest of friends knowing that it's for the "inside voice".<br/><br/>I can see myself reading the next instalment in the book (though perhaps not so soon) and I'm not entirely sure where the character can go given the way the book ends, so that's definitely intriguing.<br/><br/>But just for the the record (my record!), Rhiannon is a terrible person!
Rated The Man Who Died Twice 8/10
Wreaks of "cosy crime" - and that's good.<br/><br/>There's a reason that Richard Osman's series has been a runaway success for many people (or at least I can believe it) - the story is well written, the characters are extremely well drawn and the pages are a pleasure to digest.<br/><br/>I keep thinking I'm further along in the series than I actually am because the characters have quickly become a staple of crime fiction in my head.<br/><br/>Although I did find I was a little suprised at the some of the more grusome passages (realising that doesn't really fit the "cosy crime" sub-genre). Those parts did take me out of the story a little. Again, I feel like I've had more of these characters than I actually have (this is the second Thursday book I've read), so there's no reason why a few hard edges wouldn't be part of the story.<br/><br/>I did, however, have one complaint. I was quickly getting annoyed with the diary that Joyce would write in. For some reason I was having a hard time believing that Joyce was writing diary entries in such a conversational style as a pen and paper job, especially when the style of her writing/thoughts read as if she would be telling her husband… who's already shuffled off. I'm not 100% sure why I found it distracting, but I suspect that's not going to reduce any amount in the next Thursday books, so I'll probably need to find a way around it.<br/><br/>Otherwise, a lovely read. Definitely feels as if I'm visiting these characters, and it's always a pleasure sharing a bit of time with them all.
Rated Reasons to Be Cheerful 6/10
Honestly not sure what I thought of the book…<br/><br/>I'm unsure how I got this on my to-read list. I think I was looking for funny books from the last few years. I didn't laugh once reading this book though. It was a sweet story, set in the 80s, but I'm not sure where the arc was.<br/><br/>The story is told from the perspective of Lizzie, an 18 year old young woman who moves out of home to work as an assistant to a dentist. The dentist himself is fairly sexist and xenophobic. The mother (of the protagonist) is … hard to describe. In short, she's a pain in Lizzie's arse - though she definitely loves her.<br/><br/>I think there's some part of flying the nest and finding your own feet, but Lizzie somehow ends up in a very similar place by the end of the book. There's times I was reading and thinking surely she's going to realise that she herself is actually a good dentist and will take that path, but nope, she ends up as a clothes store assistant, so … I don't know.<br/><br/>It was cute to have 80s nostalgia peppered throughout the book, the highlight being the salad spinner (which my own mother still owns and I definitely remember spinning it for fun).<br/><br/>I guess I was left with the sense of _why did I read what I read_?