Book Reviews

2025

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Although it was published in 2006, Blindsight thoroughly investigates a philosophical question even more relevant in the generative AI bubble of 2025: what does it mean to be highly intelligent and solve problems as an entity with no sense of self or others? Peter Watts doesn’t coddle the reader in any respect on this exploration of the nature of sentience. The setting is bleak and distant, the characters are all deeply dislikable and suspicious of each other, and the descriptions of technology and neurobiology are presented with the expectation that you will do your research along the way. At the end the reader is rewarded by an extensive appendix explaining the known and invented science in the book backed up by 154 footnoted academic citations. If you genuinely wished that Andy Weir's The Martian was three times as long, four times as much science, and that Mark Watney was a half-machine sociopath, this is a book for you.

Watts has released this book under a Creative Commons license and it can be found in full text including Ellen Herzfeld's e-pub edition on Echopraxia, the author's personal web site. You can also buy a copy through Bookshop.org.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama

This is just a fantastic book where everyone winds up happy and fulfilled by a book and some sage advice from a librarian. The book is set in Tokyo, originally written in Japanese, and translated into English. I didn't recognize any of the titles of books mentioned in the story but I found out in the end that they are all real, just not familiar to me. The book titles and a few distinctly foreign attitudes on work (and work contracts) are the only thing that could pull an American reader like me out of being able to imagine all of this is happening in their own quaint little neighborhood.

I learned about this book from a Slack channel at work, recommended by a co-worker and the first thing I wrote to her when I finished the first two chapters was “It was the cozy curl-up book I needed this weekend.” Later after posting about finishing the book I told someone who found their book at the library and planned on reading it that weekend to “Get a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea” before reading and I stand by it. You should find it in your local library like me or go to What You Are Looking for Is in the Library on bookshop.org.

Teacher Misery by Jane Morris

Had I had known we were allowed to take 240 pages of narrative shitposting about teenagers and subtweeted emails from your day job, mash them between two covers and sell it, I would have published an book decades ago.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of both modes of communication as a form of satire. Those aspects of the book alone I didn’t have any problem with. The pseudonymous author sees herself as the protagonist and it’s hard to argue that she isn’t, given the certain heroism that every public high school teacher is credited with. At the same time, she also wants to be the long suffering straight man, besieged by a constant stream of indignities and absurdities. It doesn’t mesh.

Where I felt strangest reading was realizing the book was positioning itself as a comedy and then committing a cardinal sin of comedy: punching down. Taking a population of thousands of teenagers you’ve taught and then writing about the twenty most disturbed, entitled, coddled, and dramatic isn’t difficult or honestly very fair. Even the antagonist parents are one dimensional, fleeting irritants that disappear the next year when they get their way with unjust demands for their children.

I read this on a book club recommendation but wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. Jane Morris has a web site for people who feel the way she does about teaching and students.