Recommendations? What are you reading?
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.
https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...
For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.
I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.
Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)