Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

I also dislike that particular contortional style of certain biographers, Lily Dale. I've even found myself reading fewer biographies as a result!

Those two quotes would make me want to throw the book across the room, shouting imprecations.

Currently reading the new Gary Shteyngart (fun), and the Brothers Karamozov for the first time. Other than that, here's what I read this year, a lot of escapism but definitely some good & enjoyable stuff in there:

Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Barrett Edward Swanson - Lost in Summerland (Essays)
Lorrie Moore - Bark
Patricia Lockwood - Nobody Is Talking About This
Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench
John le Carre - Little Drummer Girl
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Meghan O’Gieblyn - God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Robin Kelley - Thelonious Monk: The Life & Times of an American Original*
Lauren Groff - Matrix
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Claire Vaye Watkins - I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
Ayad Akhtar - American Dervish

Do we have a thread for 2021's reading lists yet? I still need to transfer from my planner to a document on the computer. I know it's longer than it's ever been, I think.

Do we have a thread for 2021's reading lists yet?

We do now. What did you read in 2021?

Thank you, Aimless!

eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think?

Aren't the current wave of machine learning AIs typically considered as black boxes because the link between input and output is by its very nature entirely opaque? And maybe hyperdimensionality refers to the fact they process hundreds of billions of parameters? Haven't read the book so feel free to ignore me.

a friend ran a supercomputer in australia of multiple nodes that was wired up not as a grid, or a cube, but as a hypercube. i can imagine a neural net similary connected, or moreso.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDycRoR9VY

_eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think?_

Aren't the current wave of machine learning AIs typically considered as black boxes because the link between input and output is by its very nature entirely opaque? And maybe hyperdimensionality refers to the fact they process hundreds of billions of parameters? Haven't read the book so feel free to ignore me.

lol what i’m trying to say with a v fuzzy head is that i’m not clear the extent to which they’re using “artistic licence” or not. my first impression was “quite a lot” with a caveat about it how much it mattered. but your comments are making me go back and re-evaluate!

Unintepretability/opacity are not givens in machine learning but they’re pretty common problems that take work to overcome and may be in practice insoluble problems.

Pretty much every interesting model describes data in a space with more than three dimensions, ie is “hyperdimensional”.

Whether those observations of facts support the (metaphorical?) deployment of those terms in criticism I don’t know. Hyperdimensionality is extremely mundane in the technical sense, so I’m very skeptical about that being a load bearing term in critical theoretical discussions.

<Whooshing sound from previous posts>

I started to read Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them. It's set in the 14th century, in a remote Norfolkian nunnery; I got about 30 pages in and a derelict, posing as a priest, was hallucinating as he died of the black death and I thought 'do I need this?' and decided no I don't.

Huh, now I want to read it.

She's fantastic and I will go back to it, it just felt a bit on the nose as it were.

Yeah, I think I just have a thing for books set in religious, cloistered communities.

Have you read Frost in May by Antonia White? That's a stunning little book.

Nope! Another added to the Abe list.

The corner that held them is great. Wonderful bunch of women to spend a half century with. Highly recommended.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s quite similar to matrix by Lauren groff, which I’m half way through right now, but the corner that held them’s focus is more prosaic/domestic, eg how will they fix the roof, etc.

ooh, and that's what i like best— the stuff about hay and rooftops and long hard winters

This tweet is how it ended up on my reading list

I'm reading the book, “The Corner that Held Them,” which is about a bunch of nuns at an abby over decades during the plague in the 14th century, and it's just a lot of little episodes, so I've started to treat it like Twitter and think “time to check in on my nuns.”

— Paul Ford (@ftrain) April 19, 2020

Oh I've got to read that!

Unintepretability/opacity are not givens in machine learning but they’re pretty common problems that take work to overcome and may be in practice insoluble problems.

Pretty much every interesting model describes data in a space with more than three dimensions, ie is “hyperdimensional”.

Whether those observations of facts support the (metaphorical?) deployment of those terms in criticism I don’t know. Hyperdimensionality is extremely mundane in the technical sense, so I’m very skeptical about that being a load bearing term in critical theoretical discussions.

The one time I abandon a book and now I can *feel* those nuns lining up to be all like 'so you don't care about our roof eh?'.

Got another 2 added to the about to read list since my Xmas present arrived from my brother.
THe iNconvenient Indian by Thomas King
& Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey ostler.
Both books on the treatment of Native Americans over the 19th & 20th centuries probably a littel more on each end too.

Have had tehm gboth pretty heavily recommended so, great to get them.

I'm thinking of a spectrum from "nuns" to "sexy nuns" with The Corner That Held Them on one end, Benedetta on the other, and Lauren Groff's Matrix right in the center.

If I receive some of the books I'm expecting to receive for the holidays, then I'll be quite busy for a while.

A new comet has been spotted in the skies over ILB, thanks to dow:

Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

that’s interesting table - i found that ‘toxicon…’ transcended its subject matter. i kind of went into it with some trepidation because of the circumstances of its writing, but i found a lot more than that in it. i liked its intensity and knottiness. weirdly i’m less keen on joyelle mcsweeney’s critical work, i like the necropastoral book but i didn’t get much out of her old blog, the gurlesque etc

Lolly Willowes (O052) - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (R)
The Card - Arnold Bennett
Shift - Hugh Howey
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Dark Entries - Robert Aickman (+)
Seeds Of Time - John Wyndham
Slade House - David Mitchell (+)
The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
The Man Who Was Thursday - G K Chesterton
Autumn - Ali Smith
Bleak House - Charles Dickens (R)
Ramble Book - Adam Buxton
XX - Ryan Hughes
The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
Inverted World - Christopher Priest
The Story Of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
One Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes
Amber Fury - Natalie Haynes
Alcestis - Euripides
Agamemnon - Aeschylus
Death’s End - Cixin Liu
Children Of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
Driftglass - Sam Delany
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
24 Jigsaw - Ed McBain
The Monarch Of The Glen - Neil Gaiman
Black Dog - Neil Gaiman
Body In The Library - Agatha Christie
An Event In Autumn - Mankell
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) - Thomas Hardy (+)
The Castle Of Otranto - Horace Walpole
O009 Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
1848 Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler (R) (+)
The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
Anna Of The Five Towns - Arnold Bennett (+)
Slaughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut (R)
Sketches By Boz - Charles Dickens

(R) = reread
(+) = favourites, probably

(that's 40+, helped by skipping the usual long foreign novel in spring and reading a bunch of sub-200 page things in october)

wrong thread, dipshit

dogs, yeah, I guess that I was unmoved by the knottiness of Toxicon— it felt forced and unsurprising, plodding.