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Makes it seem so easy, to dismantle the monopolistic habits of digital technologies multinational corporations with just a few simple steps like antitrust legislation, right-to-repair and unionization. Hopeful that places like the European Union (any day now for Canada to become an associate member!) and Japan (where I plan to flee to someday). As @GreatDismal claims, the latter is our default setting for the future.

Strange how much the story changes when a leading character finally gets a name, and Komako earns her agency when her name appears in print. She is a mountain geisha, probably not by choice, but nevertheless confident that her skills are being put to good use. Shimamura, the Tokyo waif named on page one, continues to be a passive observer piecing out the details of life in this still unnamed mountain hot spring town.

In what feels like the longest chapter ever read in my life, Doctorow explains the symptoms of the twenty-first century sickness best summed up with the repeated phrase “there is app for that” that normalizes greed and injustice. Even for the multinational corporations that claim to value privacy and do their darnest not to “be evil” it always ends with a scam benefitting the few. Yet will the cure be worse?

The extended flashback of Shimamura’s first springtime encounter with the yet-unnamed bathhouse geisha blends past and present, purposefully so, as the winter vacationer seem out place whatever the setting might be. And yet he notes her habit of note-taking on novels - take notice Goodreads enthusiasts - as a waste of effort, even as the rest of this book seems to be begging scrutiny by his unfavourable assessment.

With OpenAI’s ascent into the world as a success story for the ages, Hao turns her journalistic attention to the harm this emerging empire has caused to coworkers, rival companies and the world’s ecology. Most damaging to Sam Altman’s fragile leadership are stories of abuse and family abandonment of sister Annie. Get yer shots in during this brief AI boom as the bubble will burst and be forgot any day from now.

The cheekiness continues, beyond the bathroom humour of the main premise, by presenting his data as if it were a medical procedure: first observe a patient’s symptoms and then determine the causes. Except this semi-scientific methodology relies on Doctorow’s experienced diagnostisms, not even testing this hypothesis out with other authors but boldly stating in footnotes how his claims are true because he says so.

A journey by train seems like a romantic start to the story, and already has a mysterious woman reflected in the passenger car’s window to suggest more to come for Shimamura. His behaviour at the hot spring, both arriving in December and flashing back to his earlier initial visit, shows that this married man is far from the yearning protagonist such books might portray. Instead he is a bit of an unreliable tourist.

Everyone is in on the joke, how a once popular and useful digital platform has gone downhill, only to discover it was at its lowest point from the very start. Doctorow chooses four of the worst offenders to run case studies yet admits there is still the strong pull to stay put using these services since it costs more for the social network users have surrounded themselves with. Even on this platform I never was free.

Things almost immediately start to unravel before ChatGPT hits the mainstream and everyone is still waiting to see what benefits the still-unsounded clipper has to offer. Google was on high alert, OpenAI’s own safety team jumped ship to form rival Anthropic and even Microsoft’s loyalty to their own big purchase seems dead in the water. Surprisingly more rodents like Scale and Sama were boarding this sinking ship.

For most of the book, the Philosopher seems to have the upper hand, coolly dispensing educational cold water to hot-headed Youth based on Adler’s ideas. While it takes the young teacher almost the entire length to learn something that he can take into the classroom, the big reveal is that these lessons had little to do with pedagogy in its competency-based form but rather learning to be self-reliant and loving all.

The Youth has determined that he cannot love his students, which is perhaps the least troublesome stance for a guy to make with his students, and the Philosopher then takes a new tact: can’t we be friends? The suggestion is more outrageous than “Love thy neighbour” as the full Bible passage includes the qualifying “as thyself” to challenge the loveless teacher to be more in a giving attitude to be given to.

Hao happens to be extremely fortunate (or the opposite) to be at the right place in time to witness the making of OpenAI and undoing of the free world. Showing how the big-name tech bros rose to power in the early 2010s, she caps off the decade with full access to the San Francisco startup. All is not as it seems, however, with the company’s name Open betrays their altruism just like how Karen’s name betrays her.

Historical precedent aside, with a giant hand wave to all the interesting bits so far in this book, there is a lot of worry on both sides for a thing that has not happened yet: educated humanists see the end of the world on the one hand, and other has elite opportunists worrying that they are not making enough money off the AI shill. Vallor’s mainly focuses on Aristotelean virtues that necessitates meeting middles.

An intriguing spin on the alarming, urgent story that has developed over the past couple of years and already seems like old news by now: AI is coming to get you and is being run by fascist billionaires. The spin that Vallor puts on the depressing details is connecting our current quandary with the wise words of poets like Ovid and Plath and philosophy. No doubt the mirror metaphor gets tedious as it did with Klein.

The Philosopher breaks down into five stages of a vicious cycle of disobedience that begins, usually, with a teacher praising students for proper behaviour and making them reliant on reward rather than oneself. The Youth questions and doubts each step as they are explained, revealing the violence inherent in the educational system as happens with some teachers finding out behaviourism was the wrong path for a career.

Ahh yeah, they got me! In both complimentary senses of the phrase: first, catching me by surprise with an in-depth discussion of psychological insight; second by presenting these insights as a dialogue between two educated but ideologically opposite voices. While only short phrases and summaries of Adler’s concepts are revealed as the Youth challenges the Philosopher, there is enough to build a case for true depth.

This present edition starts to sound a bit like a coda, not just for Nick as he reacts to the Believer being bought (or won in a card game as he claims) by a Las Vegas outfit, but also a cautionary tale of remaining literate in a world that seems to care less and less. Most books he reviews are notable, some even get mentioned again in a later column, but two unfinished books are just the tip of an apathetic iceberg.

There is a certain type of book that captures Hornby’s attention as the months pile on: tales that are either fiction or memoirs about down-on-their-luck celebrities who are adulterers or substance abusers (bonus points if these are musicians) whose sad lives makes him burn through pages. Meanwhile a book on quantum physics seems to throw him off his game yet he finds his footing writing about the titular Rosamond.

Feels strange to start reading this book about reading books from an author’s perspective, especially this author who was so inspiring in the early part of my hopeful career as an author. Nick Hornby remains witty and welcoming as a role model, yet now I have pushed aside that aspiration that began by reading High Fidelity and Fever Pitch in quick succession just before my Goodreads reviews began.

I lost count of the many instances of the same bit throughout these essays, where Atwood claims she was just goofing around with a new genre and accidentally wrote The Handmaid’s Tale yet less to her bemusement each time her Land of Gilead becomes more alarmingly like the United States slipping into the same sort of theocracy she anticipated. Other dystopia get glanced at, such as Zamyatin’s We.

Somber and more urgent the essays and introductions become, insisting that the audience gets the point that tyranny and ecological ruin can be avoided, but it seems from the current re-revival that her words fell onto deaf ears. Or maybe that was her Mashupzyxtian-Prospero plan all along to lull us into a false sense of security before enacting her Jacobean revenge plot through “a word after a word after a word.”

Sooooo, let’s see if any of the many dangling threads can be tied together into something like a narrative. Marley goes to space and sees where the box came from, Bobby and Turner meet, something about Jammer surviving, Conroy being next on the hit list and Virek already dead before the sort-of climax. And Angie gets to be a voodoo god and also a scandal-prone celebrity; who was Tally Isham again? Does not compute.

Taking her sweet time bouncing between immanent distress and the previous decade leading up to the plague-ridden panic, O’Farrell lets her authorial concerns over Covid-19 colour each section. So plenty of time to trace Judith’s infection back to its Mediterranean origin, yet still little regard for “the husband”who got packed off to London. Has he even ever been properly named? So far It’s all about Agnes.

The prophetizing of a less humane age and the honouring of authors who might soon see their books banned, start to ramp up the closer each essay gets to the fateful date in 2016. Atwood’s hope that most of the modern world would wake up and do something to save what is left, whether it was a clever series of books, including her own greatest hits, makes it harder to see what might have been if key players listened.

Elements from the book’s beginning, a talking cat named Toro for instance, start to reappear in the final chapters but don’t be fooled by a sense of narrative cohesion. Most of the important parts of this story cannot be expressed in words, a tenet repeated a few times by the conclusion, otherwise they don’t have the meaning of the experiences each character has going forward as the entrance stone closes again.

Forget everything you think you know about William Shakespeare and his wife Anne. Instead live the virtual life of a force of nature named Agnes and the Latin tutor who knocked her up. The story starts with the final days of the eponymous boy who so far barely matters in the story of pestilence descending upon the gruff old glover’s home with intermittent glimpses of when Agnes was wooed away from her native woods.

After a few mild attempts to make art from various walking methods, Shimomura’s chapter displays finessed writing with authenticity. She starts with an issue to resolve. finds inspiration from artists as well as her own personal acts, and ends the initial problem taken care of by the scholar taking care of herself. If I ever get a chance to teach a/r/tography, this chapter is a stunning sample for required reading.

Nearing the end of his life of psychological investigation but far from writing the last word on alchemy, this treatise about the enigmatic figure of Mercurius goes into great depth. One could imagine one of Jung’s contemporaries scoff, just as many do now at this effort and in the same breath claim the stock market is more a substantial field of study even though it is as artificial a theory as this mythical lore.

I think I got this figured our, not the plot or characters’ motivations or anything that would make sense in a narrative but I am beginnng to sense what Gibson was trying to accomplish with this second novel, mainly not falling into the trap of “more of the same” for his break-out Neuromancer, and a giant swing in the direction of not being much of a novel. Waiting to see how the final fourth pays off.

The closer the reader gets to storylines converging, the wilder things become. Kafka is stowed safe in the isolated cabin yet still able to sexually assault Sakura in her dreams, chopping up his family tree. Nakata fulfills his novel-long quest to a dull climax, finding out he wasn’t the only familiar face to have turned over the entrance stone. So if Nakata did Kafka’s patricide, was it also him raping remotely?