I’ve read more than a thousand books since I started this book blog back in 2011. By now, I’ve forgotten what I wrote in most of the reviews and am left only with an residual emotional memory of the books, like cooking smells clinging to my clothes after a meal. So, I’ve decided to do a little time travelling by book blog and re-read some of the reviews I’ve posted.
This month, I’m travelling back nine years to December 2016. I’m a little surprised at how long ago this feels. The world, not just my personal world but the Western world, has changed so much since then. This feels like BEFORE and I’m now in the AFTER. It was before Brexit became real, before Climate Change became an everyday weather occurrence, before COVID killed so many of us, before I retired and returned to the UK.
So, what was I doing in December 2016? I was running workshops in Berlin on the future of AI. Click on the post below to read about what it was like to take my team for dinner at the Reichstag.
Given that I was living and breathing AI in 2016, it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of my best reads of the year was Liz Moore’s remarkable ‘The Unseen World’, My other picks are an anthology of Christmas-themed werewolf stories, and a French novel (translated into English) kicking off a series of vampire novels.
I’ve shared my impressions of them below. If you’d like to time travel with me, follow the links to the original reviews.
BOSTON, 1980
Ada Sibelius is twelve years old and home-schooled. Her days are spent in a lab with her father David, a computer science professor, and the brilliant minds of his colleagues.
David is widely regarded as one of best in his field. That is, until he starts to forget things.
When David is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Ada’s world falls apart. But when he leaves a floppy disk for his beloved daughter, she has no idea that the coding within it holds the key to a past that her father refused to talk about. Navigating her teenage years without his guidance, will Ada be able to piece together the father she lost?
This review really does feel like time travel. I read the review, and I thought, “Did I really write that?” Here are the three paragraphs that most made me feel that they’d been written by someone else:
“At the start of the book, I thought that the unseen world of the title was the one being laid out in David’s lab; the links between language and meaning and knowledge. It seemed as though what was unseen were the ontologies that allow the machine to classify information and structure relationships in a way that creates knowledge.
By the end of the book, I felt that the primacy of determining meaning by using ontology and epistemology was being challenged.and that the unseen world was fundamentally phenomenological, consisting of the emotional connections between people and how their emotions shape their actions.
Over time, Ada seems to come to believe that we are not defined by what we know but by who we love, who we hate, who we betray and what we do when we fail ourselves and others. She sees ontology as the way in which a machine might learn about the world but sees phenomenology as the way humans learn about the world.”
I’ve lost a lot of my fluency with that language in the past nine years. I still know what it means, but no longer ask myself questions about the primacy of phenomenology over ontology (although anyone working with AI should have a view on that, especially the snake oil salesmen pushing interaction with AI as a valuable therapeutic tool).
You don’t have to know about any of this stuff to read and enjoy ‘The Unseen World’. Liz Moore’s technology stands up, but her focus is on exploring, through the development of one bright orphaned girl, the relationship between identity, language, memory and emotion.
To read my 2016 review, click on the link below.
Edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner, this hair-raising holiday collection includes fifteen original tales–including an original Sookie Stackhouse story.
The holidays can bring out the beast in anyone–particularly lycanthropes. Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner have harvested the scariest, funniest, saddest werewolf tales by an outstanding pack of authors including Patricia Briggs, Keri Arthur, Karen Chance, Simon R. Green, and more…
This was a re-read for me in 2016, which is a recommendation in itself. I don’t often re-read short story collections. This one is exceptional. It’s filled with stories from just about every writer I’d expect to write werewolf stories, and a few that I wouldn’t
I particularly enjoyed the stories by Patricia Briggs, Carrie Vaughn, and Charlaine Harris. I was also impressed by the stories from two unexpected sources: Dana Stabenow and Donna Andrews.
To read my 2016 review, click on the link below.
Young librarian Samantha Watkins has always been perfectly content with her humdrum existence. Never easily fitting in with anyone anywhere, she feels most at ease in silence, among stacks of books. Sam believes in leaving fantasy and drama to the characters in her beloved novels. But one night when she leaves work late, she finds herself center stage in a tale of vengeance and terror.
Samantha is rescued from a gang of vampires by Phoenix, a mysterious and otherworldly man. Suddenly her paranormal adventures take a far more extraordinary turn than any story she’s ever read. Phoenix, her savior, is actually a vampire as well, tasked with stopping his peers from killing. With no possibility of returning to her former life, Sam becomes his assistant. Together they investigate a series of mysterious disappearances and attempt to save the human race from a horrible fate. Battling vampires thrills and empowers Sam, but where does she stand with supernatural Phoenix? Could Phoenix, through their work together, become a different man?
This was a strange little book that won me over by carrying me along with the strength of its own enthusiasm, energy, and irrepressible quirkiness, and because Amy McFadden injected such a sense of fun into her narration of the audiobook.
I was hoping that, by now, the other three books in the series might have been translated into English, but they remain available only in French and German.
Back in 2016, when I was searching for more Samantha Watkins books and finding only foreign language copies, I became aware of how different the covers were from country to country. I checked out three other Urban Fantasy writers and found the same diversity. Click on the link below to see examples of the differences.
To read my 2016 review, click on the link below.
Mike Finn's Fiction 