Comorbidities #1
AI, Abandoned Books, and Beautiful Covers
Welcome to Comorbidities, a bonus monthly space for all the bookish detours, side notes, and stray thoughts that didn’t quite fit into a review. These will (ideally) be shorter than the usual reviews and comprised of, well, whatever odds and ends happen to be taking up room in my cluttered brain that month.
Onward!
Bits O’ Lit
I’ve been listening to Simon Prebble’s audiobook narration of 1984 by George Orwell, because when life hands you a dystopia, why not double down? I probably won’t review it on TPS because it’s been written about with much more thought, detail, perspective, and gravitas by many, many better thinkers than I. Short review: It’s amazing and prescient and more relevant than ever.
Here’s one thing you may not see in other reviews though; did you know Orwell predicted AIs like ChatGPT in 1984? He called it the “Versificator”, and here’s the description as it reads in the novel:
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the distance, a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Sound familiar? Ol’ George was off by 40 years and a tiered subscription program, but otherwise…whew.
Covering Covers
I keep debating writing a bit about cover art in each review but subsequently delete the bits because they just don’t feel right. I can’t explain it. But anyway, here’s a few of my favorite cover arts lately of books I’ve either read, plan to read, or just came across. Let me know which is your favorite, or if I missed any, in the comments!
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
The Cate Kay Problem
I have started and stopped The Three Lives of Cate Kay not once. Not twice. Thrice. Even the title mocks me.
The writing is really good, the story seems intriguing, the characters are interesting…so why can’t I finish this damn book? I just can’t seem to cross the finish line.
But you know what? That’s ok. Unless you’re in school, you don’t have to finish any book. Life is short, your time and energy are limited and valuable. If you need it, you have my blessing to put down anything you don’t want to read, and you don’t need a cogent reason to do so. So let it be written, so let it be (not) done.
What’s your favorite book cover? What book have you not finished? How close are we to 1984? Drop a comment or hit reply. It’s lonely here on this side of the keyboard.