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Satire on the modernisation of Turkey (and, really, any changing society) that's often amusing, and delivers a few good jabs, but also never really hard to swallow and frequently just blathers.

There were places in America before Johnson's Great Society that had fallen off the map. It was beyond mere lawlessness; it was a bizarre landscape.

All of Tom Waits' albums, but especially Swordfishtrombones by virtue of being such a wild departure from what he'd done before, are set to some extent in what Greil Marcus called the Invisible Republic, the Old Weird America. A world of people and places left behind or stepped off. None of it remotely real, but all the more real because of it. That's why you can't trust anything Tom Waits will tell you, and also why the real actual facts around his life aren't nearly as interesting as the stories he tells. It's like the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays; Shakespeare is the guy who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

What I love about Smay's books is that he never tries to explain the songs, or tell The Truth about Waits. Well, almost never. As heartwarming a story as it is, and as respectful he is, his interest in Waits & Brennan's marriage occasionally gets slightly too far into tabloid rock journalism. But for the most part he uses those weird, noisy, somehow ever-ancient songs as springboards to discuss Waits' entire career, his influences, his fellow travellers, and his methods, all the while acknowledging that he's working with a story that's a Story. In the end, all I know for sure is that Tom Waits was born in 1653 and that I need to go listen go Swordfishtrombones again.

Fun idea that raises more than one chuckle, but the joke wears very thin over ~200 pages and some of the entries feel like obvious filler. Might have been more fun if Ball had gone all-out What if? and actually applied more hard science to answering the questions. Then again, not everyone can be Randall Munroe, I guess. Ain't that a shame?

"Philosophy with a deadline", he quotes one of his physicist friends. I'm torn about this (see Manny's review). While especially the early chapters are a great read if you can live with Tegmark's relentlessly pop-science-y prose, and his discussions on goal orientation and definition are intriguing as well, he gets lost in a) an optimism that doesn't seem to arise from what he's written before, and b) extremely far-into-the-future speculations that would make Hari Seldon go "Dude..." It's got entire chapters about what might happens millions of years into the future, and about three sentences on what, practically, to do now (and maybe one on what the actual short-term benefit of the damn things might be). And his dissertations on Free Will and Conscience make it obvious that, well, he's a very clever physicist but still a physicist.

I'm glad there are nerds thinking about these questions, and seducing similarly nerdy people with deep pockets into thinking about them too. I'm glad they don't claim to have any pre-packaged answers. But damnit, I end the book knowing both more and so much less, and rather relieved that climate change will hopefully finish us off before this even becomes an issue.

https://futureoflife.org/ai-principles/

Having watched and been ambivalent about the movie, I've been meaning to get to this for some time, and can't not compare them a bit in my head. The graphic novel wins on emotion and graphics; obviously less sensationalist, but Maroh's art is stunning, could almost tell the story and deliver all the emotional impact without text. The way she uses colour, the way she mixes closeups with crowd scenes and the odd splash page for dramatic effect... Fantastic. The plot isn't quite as convincing, that's where the movie made some good decisions; apart from the obvious and overly gothic-romantic spoiler you get on the first three pages, Maroh also throws in a huge time skip that doesn't help matters. But still, a beautiful, tragic, honest story.

...there was relayed back to Earth a low-definition picture of the vessel which orbited silently and, some thought, implacably, like some tremendous battleship cruising off the coast of a tiny, backwards island. (...) two small, sophisticated, dugout canoes were hastily modified and readied for launching.

An intriguing and clever hard-sci-fi take on the first-contact story. A giant interstellar spaceship appears outside Mars, NASA dispatches two three-person crews to intercept it and, if possible, make contact. White averts the idea of god-like aliens very nicely, lets political considerations play out on several levels, and even if he's a bit overly fond of pop psychology his character work is nice too. The only problem is that his prose simply doesn't live up to it. There's never any time for the story to breathe, never any pauses or intense passages, just one long march of details across the page.

4-/5. Biography of rockstar chef told by (probably) unreliable narrator, that seems at once to invite interpretation and throw author-is-dead-ian scoff at it. NDiaye writes beautifully, and it leaves me hungry for every single dish in it, I'm just not entirely sure what to make of it.

Svensk järnålder-/vendel-/vikingatidshistoria utifrån 30 föremål i museisamlingar, som lyfter fram en helt annan bild än den inskränkta "bra sås reder sig själv"-synen på svensk förhistoria. Ger mersmak men känns också nästan lite väl grund ibland - hade velat se lite mer vardagsföremål, lite mer tydliga tidsangivelser, lite kartor...

There are bits of this that haven't aged too well (especially the treatment of the female characters - in sum total, 3: the quickly damseled love interest, a rape victim, and a hysterical farmer's wife). Others still work really nicely, though: it basically feels like a potboiler rewrite of Arrival with a pandemic added on top, and with some nice 20-minutes-into-the-future touches (Pakistani UN soldiers snarking at NYC cops that they wouldn't find their way around in Karachi either). Great read for when you're sufferieng from a really bad cold, too.

Nowhere near as fun as Max Brooks' take on the zombie survival guide, but probably more useful - not to mention more hopeful - in real life. Where Brooks spends chapters talking about firearms, Geijer's first advice is "get to know your neighbours, take lots of nature walks and learn to find your way, learn how to grow potatoes, and take a rope-making class." Both nerd manifesto and low-intensity prepper's manual, which can't hurt having on your shelf these days...