Books finished in October:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) (2013) by Ann Leckie. Winner of several of the big science fiction prizes in 2014. The protagonist is an ancillary, a human body inhabited by an AI, named Greq. The AI used to be in control of a full starship including all the ancillaries onboard, but Greq is the only survivor after the starship disappeared for mysterious reasons. We follow Greq on her/his(/its?) quest for revenge. I really liked the idea of an AI in a human body as the main character.

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It (2014) by Ian Leslie. Some good anecdotes and references, like one study from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Maryland, in which “[t]he researchers measured the propensity of 374 five-month-old babies to crawl and probe and fiddle, and then tracked their progress over the following fourteen years. They found that the ones doing best at school aged fourteen were the ones who had been the most energetically exploratory babies.” Claiming that curiosity is the key here is of course jumping to conclusions, but I have always found early (baby-level) markers that predict subsequent behavior very interesting. Many places in the book it is annoying how selection issues are often ignored, Leslie writes uncritically about the “effect” of reading to children, watching television, etc., when it is just run-of-the-mill correlations. In chapter 3 too he starts off unthinkingly critical of the internet, although more nuanced as the chapter went on. An ok book.

A busy month again, although at least I managed one up from the previous month.

Ratings and old books are in the library.