Someone should write a book about the ethics of statistics. I'd read that - preferably fiction.

Got any reccomendations?

>>7859

The only thing I can think of that's written for a general audience is Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust. It's non-fiction, but very readable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

If you're looking for a deeper dive, I'd suggest reading up on Ronald Fisher, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. They were all hugely influential statisticians (Fisher is often referred to as the "father of statistics") and ardent eugenicists. Gemini Deep Research can probably write you a very good book-length summary, if the idea of using a massive statistical model to write you a book about the ethics of statistics doesn't send you into an existential panic.

I read a book recently
It's called 'The Donkey Dogshit Brigade'
It's about an army of robots that have giant inflatable penises that they use as floats to cross rivers
This all takes place in Roman Tunisia
The difficulties and nuances of a changing culture, once Carthaginian, then shifting to Roman, and how this transformation affects the personal lives of the citizens is really portrayed with a great deal of depth, and it makes you understand historic events in a new way
The robots have hands that are attached in reverse so they pick things up with the back side of their hands
50 whole pages of the book are just high quality photos of ants

>>7861

>>7862
Are you threatening me?

This was a really satisfying read is the best way I can put it. The narration through a series of notes captures the internal monologue of a solitary man scurrying about in a seemingly enormous and decorated mansion surrounded by ocean.

>>7864
I thought it fell apart a bit once the 'plot' started to kick in, but beyond that all the allusions to Borges and Narnia were nicely done.

This was crap.

>>7865
Yeah I couldn't be arsed with the murder-mystery stuff and the ending seemed completely contrived. I just want that 500 million year button but made into a full length story to explore living in such a world.

I enjoy Philippa Perry's agony aunt column in the Guardian so I thought I'd try this.

This is a very empathetic book, concerned with emotional and mental wellbeing rather than the hands-on practicalities of parenting. The main message of the book is: this is someone you'll want to have a positive relationship throughout the rest of your life, so treat them like an individual from the start rather than another household chore to deal with. Listen to them, communicate with them, soothe them when they are distressed and create a safe environment in which they can thrive and grow as a person. If your children are causing certain reactions within you reflect on what is causing this, which may be from your own childhood, and take steps to counter this if it's a negative reaction.

The only parts I didn't necessarily agree with where when it seemed to deviate from professional to personal opinions. I guess it's a bit easy to be preachy when you've had quite the privileged life and only had to bring up the one child.

I preferred this to Dawn but it fell into a similar trap as the final third, which was mostly building towards a sequel, wasn't as good as the rest of the book.

This was the least gripping book in the trilogy but it also felt the most rounded.

I've failed to get into Octavia Butler. Possibly a case of what was new and inventive at the time no longer being so, so I find them a bit uninspired. Not a fair way to judge them but I can't change my context.

I'm making an effort to get into Salman Rushdie. Struggled with The Satanic Verses years ago so thought I'd start at the beginning with Grimus. Good prose and characterisation but hard to give a fuck about what's actually going on with these people. I know what the Simurg is but possibly a deeper appreciation of less mainstream myth and religion is necessary to get the most out of it. I'll give Midnight's Children a go anyway.

Picked up Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum it's (non-fiction) depressing but engrossing.

>>7870
I don't know if the Exogenesis series was meant to be new and inventive, other than it being sci-fi written by a black female author and mainly featuring black characters.

The subtext is clearly colonialism and I'm not sure if rape is the right word to use but I can't think of a more apt one off the top of my head, so rape.

Diet, Drugs and Dopamine is a pretty comprehensive account of the modern science of obesity. In a way it feels like 3 books:

1. Something akin to Easy Way to Stop Smoking where he goes into the science of addiction and how to look after yourself from a more holistic perspective with correct diets that have real evidence behind them. He suffers from periodic bouts of obesity himself so he talks a lot from his own experiance of his weight and how he reaches for the fridge as a coping mechanism when he was doing stuff like leading the US covid taskforce because he needed to keep himself going.
2. A kind of policy how-to guide for the new weight loss drugs that sees them as an amazing tool for dealing with disability but won't ever solve the obesity epidemic as to stay thin using them alone you will have to take them forever and their regulation and use is a wild west. Also you're not likely to see them ever become affordable sorry.
3. The modern nutrition debate around processed foods, formulation and the corrupt ecosystem around today's food that is literally killing people and bombards us all constantly with messages to trigger addiction. He's not out to make any friends with this and points out that things like traffic lights are bullshit but also seems quite humane with how he looks at obesity itself and the implosion of the fat positivity movement in the wake of the new drugs.

It can at times become dense and academic, particular once he gets into the history of obesity medicine but I've lost weight while reading it and he's convinced me to look into getting a blood glucose monitor even though I'm not diabetic because of how useful it is to see how my body reacts to the foods I eat.

>>7870
>Picked up Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum it's (non-fiction) depressing but engrossing.

It's a good book that explains why people across the third world are the way they are online but it's begging for her to do a sequel called Democracy, Inc which covers the nature of the free world as a corporation - things like the financiers, consultants and even international law being ostensibly written and shaped to secure western outcomes to advance the corporate body.

I imagine there's enough of a book you could write from broken officials in the World Bank and UN to point out how it's all bullshit. Tie it all into Autocracy Inc. with shell companies and tax islands and you have a cohesive whole of investigative journalism that runs from boardrooms in the corporate America to state industry boardrooms in Beijing.

>>7873
Thanks for the writeup. I heard today that Mounjaro and other weight loss jabs may be assosiated with Pancreatitis. I'll probably buy this to read with my sister, who recently started buying from an 'online pharmacy'.

>>7874

The data we've got so far suggests that GLP-1RAs increase the risk of developing pancreatitis from 0.1% to 0.2% per year. That data is taken from patients with Type 2 diabetes, who are already at elevated risk of pancreatitis; the risk in non-diabetic patients with no history of pancreatitis is likely to be lower. I would advise caution for anyone with a history of gallstones or autoimmune disorder, although the benefits are still very clearly greater than the risks for anyone with a BMI over 30.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11818918/

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/conditions/pancreatitis.html

This was a fun bit of light reading.

>>7876
I'd forgotten I read it earlier this year and even looking at the cover now I'm struggling to remember anything about it. Sexy not-Spaniards with magic bird tattoos? A rosy palm tattoo? That's about it.

Corps Commander is a pretty good read. It's certainly a very easy one because it's fairly light on detail, but obviously that's a problem as well. Brian Horrocks, who commanded XXX Corps in North West Europe, doesn't even explain what the injuries were that would occasionally render him feverishly unwell and all but bed ridden. Nevertheless, it's a solid, brief history of what the 21st Army Group got up to (many parts not directly related to XXX Corps are written by Eversley Belfield), and a good insight into the personality of Brian Horrocks himself, even when it doesn't mean to be. The primary caveat being that he is writing about himself and his forces, and as such he shouldn't be taken as the final word on any of it, no matter how gregarious and level-headed "Jorrocks", as Montgomery called him, appears.

Also, the version pictured probably has the thickest paper I've handled in a book. I was halfway through before I stopped trying to tease apart multiple pages, that were in reality just one board-like sheet.

I didn't enjoy this as much as The Blacktongue Thief.

Widely hailed as one of the funniest novels ever written, A Confederacy of Dunces is indeed quite funny. But in my experience, books are never all that funny, compared to other media. And many other funny books I've read had much more of a story than this did. The author, John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide in 1969 after failing to get it published, and his mother took over and successfully got it published in 1980 as the ultimate tribute to her son's memory. I must say, the grammar is terrible and there are multiple spelling mistakes, plus the aforementioned extremely threadbare plot, and the fact that every character is so revoltingly unsympathetic, are all downsides that allow me to understand why a lot of publishers turned this down.

However, one thing that really impressed me was how incredibly prophetic it has turned out to be. The book is over 50 years old, and the "self-important hikikomori is forced to find a job" tale might have been fairly outlandish in the 1960s. But now, the infuriating and offensive adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly are extremely resonant with anyone who spends a lot of time online. He's 30 years old, morbidly obese, and he thinks he's too good for those around him (and to be fair, they're all ghastly too), and in many ways he is a proto-netizen, reminding modern readers of the sort of friendless deadbeat weirdos that fill any online community now. He embraces extreme political viewpoints and is often powered entirely by hate, like many of the alt-right but predating them multiple decades. Ignatius Reilly is a misogynist, a racist, and a homophobe, but he also rails against degeneracy and even has a fascination with Ancient Roman philosophers. There's no denying he would have a YouTube channel today, lamenting the fall of the West to immigrant invasions and leftist cuckoldry, even though in the book he is actually meant to be objectionably left-wing rather than right-wing.

As an exciting story with likable people, A Confederacy of Dunces leaves a lot to be desired. As a hilarious farce, it's certainly up there. As a prophecy of current society, like a 20th-century Book of Revelation, it can't be beat.

>>7880
I think you have read too much into it with a modern culture war lens. Which a lot of people struggle with these days because you can easily label Ignatius as an chronic masturbator and discard him. It's clearly someone's first novel I'll agree but it's just not the kind of book that you think it is and John Kennedy Toole wasn't writing in or about 2025. I'd also add that unless you have a bad print it's not written with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors unless you're confusing the adoption of dead vernaculars like Jive talk as errors.

Ignatius follows a classic lovable dunce trope like Don Quixote only instead of reading about chivalry in the 1600s he read Boethius in 1960s New Orleans. It's a picaresque novel, Ignatius is disgusting but he's a relatable Homer Simpson-esque failure who has adopted the wheel of fortuna as his perception of life and goes on whimsical adventures that are based on New Orleans culture of the time with some of elements of John Kennedy Toole's own life. Yes everyone around him is a dumb idiot and they tire the protagonist with their grasping ways like some kind of Confederacy of Dunces, but they're just fuck-ups rather than outright evil like any good slice of Americana. Ignatius isn't really evil either even if he is a pompous child, I mean he was perfectly happy to try to bring about world peace in the most unorthodox way possible wasn't he and when confronted with objective reality he just doesn't give a fuck.

>in the book he is actually meant to be objectionably left-wing rather than right-wing

No he's a medievalist, he might spark rebellions but he does it for attention and to be contrarian. I don't know why you would try to project modern left/right political divide from the enlightenment on a man who explicitly rejects the enlightenment as a core philosophy.

I'd recommend rereading it another time when your life isn't working out. Preferably with a bottle of coke with some peanuts dropped in for the closest approximation to Dr Nut. It's escapism.

It's seven or eight years since I read it, but didn't he have a wank while thinking about his dog? All I can really remember other than that is him using his soiled sheets as a banner and calling other people degenerates.

>>7882
He does indeed do that, but only in passing. And he really loved that dog, as explained near the end. Clearly >>7881 and I have different attitudes to it, but the visit from Mr Levy at the end (where the neighbour tells him about the family) does work quite well because he is arguably the most normal person in the book, offering the only objective perspective on all the grisly lives the reader had been learning about.

This was alright, I guess.

This was interesting.

The new book in the Dogs of War series isn't great. I feels like it lacked the ideas of the earlier books that made them interesting, especially Bear Head where you can tell a lot of it came to Tchaikovsky in a dream between using sweets to bribe bears, renting your brain out and giant babies. Instead it feels like a generic post-apocalyptic sci-fi without much to go off other than a cool scene about what happened in the bunker, sentience in a cold-blooding animal and probably something about gods and reverence.

Anyway I recently learnt about the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA (genetic engineering) where scientist scientists agreed to voluntarily pause their own research to convene and establish a framework for its safe and ethical continuation. This was in 1975 and I'm still jarred by it because I didn't think we were capable of closing pandoras box like that but I guess we still are controlling genetic research and collectively recognise a common good. Obviously we're not getting that for AI and it reminded me of this book series as a way of seeing a road we collectively didn't travel down. Also despite all the work, GMOs are now present in nature due to outcrossing and a growing problem.

You've probably heard this a lot before but a lot of people are comparing the 1970s to today and it keeps happening. We're faced again with the end of a dominant global economic theory and the global ecology moment is trying to come to terms with the world we're living in but the current international system seems much less able to cope.

Tomorrow I'll tell you what I'm reading now that's actually great.

>>7887
I never deliver on time.

I'm reading Braiding Sweetgrass which is written by a Potawatomi professor (who specialises in moss ecology) to explain her culture's and her own view of the world using analogy from old stories. It's a kind of guided instruction to view the world differently outside of our own reference - starting with the differences in creation mythos with Christianity approaching man vs nature from the start as a struggle and how pecan trees work in unison for the greater good. It reminded me a lot of the storytelling in China in Ten Words in how it weaves a narrative to put you into someone's world and I think it might be a bit of a lost art in our world of direct and to the point communication.

I finished reading one of the most culturally significant novels of the 20th century about an hour ago. George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which I love to smugly point out is all spelt in letters in the title but which I will nevertheless call 1984 from now on, is so famous that there's actually very little to say about it that anyone doesn't know. Allegedly, it is the book that most people claim to have read without actually having read it, according to some survey that was done a few years ago. But I have now actually read it!

It is actually really, really good. It's a brilliant book in every conceivable way, and I was pleasantly impressed at how effortlessly it exceeded my expectations. And the number of correct predictions about the future are truly astonishing, unless the late 1940s, when it was written, were a lot more recent than I thought. However, it suffered from being so famous that I knew the ending in advance ("Do it to Julia!" contains so much context that really nothing happens that is even remotely surprising, once you know that quote), and also it is burdened with a ridiculously long and self-indulgent chapter. Much like how Atlas Shrugged has "This Is John Galt", in which one character goes on a 150-page speech that summarises the rest of the book while also ostentatiously laying out all the themes and subtext, in a desperate attempt by the author to explain her terrible novel, 1984 also has an utterly bullshit chapter (only 40 pages out of 330, this time, but still a proportionately similar fraction of the book) where Winston Smith finds a book all about politics, and reads the entire thing in a clunky explanation of the themes for any teenager who needs to write an essay on what they've been reading. I was wondering up that point whether 1984 might become one of my favourite books of all time, but "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" really took the wind out of its sails, and I never enjoyed it as much after that. Partly because it also gets grim and horrible shortly after, to be fair.

Oh, and in my copy, the Penguin Modern Classics version, there is an afterword written by Thomas Pynchon which is thoroughly exceptional. So if you also want to read the book that, statistically, you have lied about already having read, try to get the same edition that I have. It's not the one in this picture; sorry.

>>7889

I think it's certainly a book fewer people genuinely understand than they think.

Personally I feel it would utterly fall flat without the bit where he gets to read The Forbidden Book though, that's central to the plot, it's central to the audience's understanding of the absolute duality between the truth of things as they are and the self-deception they are intended to carry on. I don't think it went on for too long, it's only a handful of pages. Maybe there would have been a subtler way to do it, not just dumping exposition like that; but at the same time I found it really quite post-modern and meta. It's like a fourth wall break or something, I dunno, if you think about it you didn't see that sort of "plot within a plot" meta-narrative stuff too often prior to the 60s or 70s so it can be seen as quite innovative for the time.

I do think the rest of the book would have fallen flat without that bit, it's the bit that gives the rest of it substance. Without that you'd just have (admittedly an early and quite solid example of) a generic kind of dystopia, something more like the film Equilibrium or Minority Report. Without the depth of genuine geopolitical and sociological insight behind it, it'd just be "gosh it'd be really shit if the government watched you all the time wouldn't it".

But, for my part, I have always seen 1984 as one of those books which is important not because of having good writing or good characters or any of that in its own right, much like Lord of the Rings, it's an exercise in world building and linguistic theory crafting, with a story tacked on as a rough vehicle to carry it. Tolkein just wanted to write Elvish songs and shit, and came up with this daft idea about a hobbit carrying a ring to Mordor to justify it, all the real meat of it was in the lore.

Similarly with 1984, Orwell wanted to expound at length about the dangerous linguistic euphemisms and collective charades he saw wielded as a tool to consolidate power by Stalinists (and Marxist Lenninist types of socialist generally). That was where he really got it right, because how much of our modern media and political landscape looks exactly like that? The 1940s in Britain were nothing like the book, but Stalin's regime in Russia was a lot like it; we've just drifted towards it over time.

It's not about left or right, it's about power. That's why I always bring up that O'Brien quote about power being an end in itself when I'm arguing with wokelad.

>>7890
>Orwell wanted to expound at length about the dangerous linguistic euphemisms and collective charades he saw wielded as a tool to consolidate power by Stalinists (and Marxist Lenninist types of socialist generally). That was where he really got it right, because how much of our modern media and political landscape looks exactly like that? The 1940s in Britain were nothing like the book, but Stalin's regime in Russia was a lot like it; we've just drifted towards it over time.

Have you read Asimov's critique of 1984? He makes Orwell sound like the equivalent of a Blairite pun intended so bitter after Corbyn won the leadership contest that he's going to spend the rest of his career writing about the dangers of Corbynism.

https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

>>7891
He sounds bitter himself. Bitter, ignorant and American. No surprise he has no conception of a Benthamite Panopticon's functioning.

My favourite (favorite?) bit is seeing Asimov, of all people, criticising the shallow depth of a female character.

>>7891

I have not read it, and I'll put it on the top of the list for this evening's teatime perusal.

But from what I have read of him, Asimov was an intensely idealistic type; were he alive today to see so many of the real life parallels with '84, I suspect he would have been far less critical, but at the time I can see how it might have clashed with his worldview.

>>7891
>The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the
television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and
see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and
are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom.
Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'.
This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
>One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and
can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to
wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers
for every person watched. And then, of course, the watchers must themselves
be watched since no one in the Orwellian world is suspicion-free.
Consequently, the system of oppression by two-way television simply will not
work.

I'm tempted to stop reading here, because the book makes it very clear that you never know when you are or are not being watched, but the knowledge that the Party could choose to watch you at any time is enough to keep you on your toes. Isaac Asimov seems to have missed that.

>>7894
It gets quite funny as it goes on.
>He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences.
"This fable is bad because it didn't have imaginary drugs in it"

>Orwell lacks the capacity to see (or invent) small changes. His hero finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes and electric razors.
"This fable is bad because it doesn't have cool hoverboards"

>To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Never mind the arguments whether the issue is Stalinism, Communism, authoritarianism, police states, surveillance states or whatever - I don't know if there's any particular reason to believe Orwell ever thought he was actually predicting the future, on a specific timeline or not, rather than writing/warning about hypothetical situations. But Asimov clearly believes writing SF is about "forecasting", so we should criticise him for writing about fully autonomous AI robots being invented in the 1980s. It's 2025 and the US does not have robots mining for boron in asteroid belts.

I genuinely think this entire critique is Asimov being envious none of his stories are as famous as 1984.

Well, I have read it now, and I dareay

>>7895
>I genuinely think this entire critique is Asimov being envious none of his stories are as famous as 1984.

has hit the nail squarely on the head.

I like a lot of Asimov's stories, he wrote very good traditional sci-fi, but for better as much as for worse, that's exactly what they are. They are 1950s beep boop robots and space men in dome helmets. His work was pioneering and brilliant in its own way, but in terms of holding up to the test of time, and lasting social relevance, it's absolutely no contest.

>>7895
>>7896
It does seem like Asimov is making an assumption that because the work is set in the future that it must necessarily be some form of SF. Orwell was writing in 1948, and simply flipped the last two digits in order to establish a setting that's now known as "twenty minutes into the future". He's not a SF writer, he's a political writer. Nineteen Eighty-Four is ultimately a critique of Stalinism, and the purpose of the framing is not necessarily "here is a world decades into the future", but rather "this is what decades of totalitarianism does". It's also only an assumption that it's 1984. The constant rewriting of history and the propaganda and lies means that's just Winston's best guess at what year it is.

This was enjoyable in parts but it felt like there were quite a few flaws to it. This is possibly because it was published 15 years after Shades of Grey, as it did feel a bit disjointed.

Any recommended authors on The Crusades?

This was terrible.

>>7900
Ë isn't a letter in Swedish ffs

>>7901
I'll give you a couple of excerpts from the same page or so.

>Finally the hammering stopped, leaving only a great silence. Amy was completely immobilized in a wooden box roughly fix feet long, twenty inches wide, so shallow that her face touched the lid. It had the dimensions of a coffin, but she knew right away that it was a Liripip, one of the most popular sellers in Wardrobes.

>That's when she felt the water. At first she thought it was sweat - but it was too cold and there was too much of it. A chilly hand wrapped itself around her right thigh. It was so frigid her feet began to shake in her Chuck Taylors, and if there had been any light she would've been able to see her own breath.

The entire book is like this, every single page. I'd say I need a break from immature American brilliance but I'm now reading Starter Villain by John Scalzi.

This was actually pretty entertaining.

Once you've read more than 30 or 40 of Stephen King's books, you pretty much understand that they're all the same. So you know what to expect from Under the Dome. However...

-It's really, unrelentingly grim. It's just horrible shit after horrible shit. I was reminded most of all of the third series of Twin Peaks, where everyone is 25 years older, poorer, addicted to opiates, and it just wasn't nice to watch. Under the Dome has the same problem. Maybe you don't want your horror books to be comfy, but I certainly enjoyed it less than I otherwise would have done.

-Everywhere I look, people make a big deal out of how long this book is, but it's hardly unmanageable. My copy is 880 pages; my copy of It is over 1100 pages and my copy of The Stand is over 1400. Under the Dome does not belong with those. Using my new NEET powers of infinite free time, I finished it in a little under a week.

-You know how it's now a running joke that Quentin Tarantino has a foot fetish? People like to imply Stephen King is a paedo because of that one scene in It, and because he doesn't like Donald Trump, but I don't think that's accurate and I'll tell you why. In the first 150 pages of Under the Dome, there are four different instances of people pissing or shitting themselves. In the entire book, I think I counted nine in total. He loves piss and shit; he can't get enough of it. That's his real secret kink, and it's a pretty obvious secret.

-Yes, this is another one that's overloaded with his usual folksy, down-home, salt-of-the-earth hillbilly redneck tone. It really starts to grate after about 40 books, but I'm in too deep to stop now. I've lost count, but I've definitely read over 50, and I think I might even currently have resumed reading them faster than he's writing them. I have definitely reached the point where there are a couple where I don't know if I've read them or not. Some of Stephen King's more recent books are a lot better, so I can't even ask him to stop writing in case he has another good one coming.

>>7904

>Once you've read more than 30 or 40 of Stephen King's books, you pretty much understand that they're all the same.

I've never even read one and I knew that.

I guess this is another of those books that was groundbreaking when it came out but no longer feels remarkable.

The premise was interesting, but the 'banter' between the characters grew tedious quickly and parts of it felt like they were written by an immature edgelord who's just discovered swearwords. There was even a 'cockwomble' in there. Several characters, primarily female ones, seemed to have no personality beyond 'being a badass'. This was also the case in Starter Villain, and the way the antagonists scheming unravelled in The Collapsing Empire felt quite similar to how they happened in that story, too.

Maybe I need to stop reading anything even remotely sci-fi written in recent years by Americans, as it felt like the target audience for this was Redditors/those obsessed with nerd pop culture.

Someone here mentioned this book 3-4 months ago, and I replied to say they'd persuaded me to buy it, and that I would come back and complain if it turned out to be shit. Weirdly, I can now find absolutely no trace of that post (it was in the gaming thread), nor my reply to it.

The recommender must have got ashamed, and also have moderator powers to let him delete posts, because it is indeed shit. The book is narrated by the cat, which is something I always like, and the cat is a witty and charming character in an extremely short and easy-to-read airport book. So that's good. But it's twee, it's overly sentimental, almost nothing happens, and it feels targeted towards the sort of book-loving woman who will read anything completely indiscriminately.

Perhaps I should compare it to other airport books I have read: The Travelling Cat Chronicles is markedly better than The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which I read last year and was clearly made for book clubs and was unmitigated wank. However, it doesn't come close to the majesty of Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which I read about 15 years ago and genuinely enjoyed.

This is set in an alternative timeline where a Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event around 55 years ago means there are now over one million intelligent human-sized rabbits in the country.

The books is part an allegory about dolphin rape and part fetish material. The prime minister is Nigel Farage Smethwick, the leader of UKARP (the United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party) who has ambitions to limit the rights of the rabbits further and relocate them all into a new purpose-built mega warren, dubbed Rabxit. There is talk about how the rabbits are going to outbreed humans and how their culture is incompatible with ours. It's very on the nose.

The book is witty and well written but there was something definitely off about using rabbits as a stand-in for brown people to tell a whimsical story about dolphin rape when there's plenty of real-world dolphin rape out there. Ultimately, this book is meant to be used as a mirror for the reader to hold up against themselves and ask whether they're doing enough to challenge dolphin rape and prejudice when they encounter it or whether they're happy just to tut, wring their hands, moan and do nothing meaningful while things progressively get worse.

Re-reading this, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe. It really is excellent. Half-excellent, anyway. The actual content of any given story in it doesn't interest me much, it's often fairly generic or not deeply inspired SF stuff going on under the surface but the way in which the stories are told, that is excellent. It's always wonderfully ambiguous what's going on. The narrators aren't exactly unreliable, but they're realistically ignorant and don't uncharacteristically go out of their way to drop hints for the reader to get. You're spoon-fed nothing and if you don't give the story any thought, then it's easy to come out the other side wondering what the fuck you just read - but confident it is in fact coherent, there was something there - it just went over your head.

The only one of the fourteen I'm not particularly enamoured with is The Eyeflash Miracles, seems to be some sort of Wizard of Oz thing that went on far too long and failed to grab me.