Vivid voice, fun and dark and original.

I wasn't sure what I was getting in to reading Rivers of London (recommended multiple times on socials), especially as I kept finding the teens/young adult book cover for it (reminding me of the multiple covers the Harry Potter books had) - but I decided to jump in.

I quickly got sucked into the book and the narrative style that Aaronovitch used. For some reason I had Millie Bobby Brown as the voice which caused me a little confusion when I learn that the protagonist and narrator is called Peter Grant (I really didn't read the blurb) - but decided that she could still run the inner monologue.

The Rivers of London is a very London and British book (which I always especially enjoy because I can vividly see the places, hear the accents and usually feel the weather) that's a mix of modern copper plod story with fantastical (and certainly for me: original) characters from gods to vampires to ghosts and wizards.

There's a good balance of funny and witting against the (some times) gruesome and frankly pretty terribly bad things that make for the primary investigation for the protagonist, Grant, to work through.

Really fun stuff - I can definitely see myself returning for more in this series.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Really enjoyed this follow up to Dogs of War.

I accidentally read Dogs of War in 2018 - I never went looking for it and loved it. Equally, I can't remember when I found out about Bear Head but I knew I wanted to read it if it existed in the same universe. So finally I get around to it.

Overall well written, well drawn characters with distinctive voices in a universe that's really not that hard to conceive. I've read a few of Tchaikovsky's books now and as much as I enjoy them, for some reason it does take me quite a stretch to read the books (this one being just ~315 pages and took me a month) - not sure what's up with that.

The story is told from three protagonist's perspective: Honey, the bear from Dogs of War - once soldier, now an academic arguing for rights for others. Jimmy, the "grunt worker" placed on Mars to prepare it for the colonies that plan to settle and Carole (Springer…I want to say), the PA and "collared" assistant to the antagonist Warner S. Thompson.

Similarly with Dogs of War, Bear Head discusses self and identity (can a person be entirely digital?), freedom and slavery, and the untouchable super rich and their power.

There's some pretty horrible scenes around human slavery where people are compelled to perform, both involuntary physically but also compelled to think in certain ways (i.e. being submissive by design).

With a lot of what I'm reading lately, I can't help but associate it with today's real life events (in 2025-2026), and thinking of the corruption throughout politics we're seeing today - though I can see how this book being published in 2021 aligns fairly well with Trump's first regime from '17-21. Perhaps it's that backdrop that makes me a slow reader!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Fine. Easy read. Guessed the murdered though 🤷

Grabbed it for the Christmas period (slightly annoyed I finished it on Jan 2nd). It's decently written, apparently part of a series (this being book 6) but stands fine on it's own. There's a few references to something that happened before, but doesn't affect the story.

It does read like a Columbo or Murder She Wrote, where there's people killing other people like it's just another Wednesday. All ends are fully tied up without anything left to the reader by the end.

I did figure out the killer around 1/3rd of the way in - or at least I keep asking the protagonist "What about X?!".

Not terribly Christmasy, but the very last chapter was very sweet.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Light on the brain.

Just the kind of read I wanted after a few longer books. Not 100% even throughout the book - but I'll come to that.

The squirrel from the cover features a nice silly-ish part of the story where the main character will often run into a local squirrel and add his own voice in a back and forth between him and the squirrel. The sort of thing I'd expect from a Bob Mortimer book.

I'm not 100% sure where the book's tone is supposed to sit. Some parts are particularly dark - police corruption, police harassment and modern day slavery. Juxtaposed next to funny little things like socks, squeaky shoes, a cranky neighbour and dog who's constantly disappointed with our main character.

The pages did turn quickly though, and it was easy reading. Nothing particularly to shout about, but not bad either.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Made me hungry and could even smell the foods, but took me a long time to read which made it feel extremely stretched and disconnected.

I really don't know why this book took me nearly 60 days to read, but it did which makes the events at the start of the book feel so utterly far away from the end.

I'm not sure what drew me to the book but I picked it up with zero expectations.

It discusses feminism, the pressure society puts on women to behave and appear certain ways (though this is Japanese culture, I do think a lot of this applies/is experienced by western white women too).

There's a strong feature of food and butter in particular (as you'd expect from the title) - and the author (and translator) does an excellent job of writing in a way that left me reading late at night and really wanting to taste the food (and I'm not a foodie).

There's also a story of friendship and support through those connections. This part of the book was really lovely to read, but seemed to all be crammed in at the end.

The story also includes a very manipulative character, Kajii, and whilst I read I felt sorry (and frustrated) for the protagonist, Rika, that she couldn't see the obvious manipulation (but perhaps that's the point, when we're close up to manipulation, we can't see the wood for the trees).

There really is a lot (of meaty subjects) in this book, and perhaps this contributed to my slow reading but it did leave me struggling to carry all the ideas through to the end of the book.

I've written about urgency in writing, and that's what helps me turn the page. This book doesn't have that, which isn't bad, but doesn't help me.

I suspect I would have enjoyed this more had I been able to digest it a little faster than two months.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I'd recommend anyone who wants to understand the emergence of AI and OpenAI in particular to read this book.

I do struggle reading non-fiction, and this book was no different. It took me nearly 2 months to finish reading (in my evening snippets) - but it was definitely worthwhile. It was this 90 minute interview by Novara Media with Karen Hao that made me immediately purchase the book.

I don't think I can fully review this book and do it justice, but I can share what I learnt from the book where my original assumptions were wrong about AI and AI companies.

The book is focused primarily around OpenAI and Sam Altman, and in particular how his ousting in November 2023 came to be, through hundreds of interviews and documents, and paints a very insightful picture of the messiah complex (though not in her words) that Altman has.

Here's a short summary of things I didn't know but learnt through reading this:

1. Altman and friends started conversations (and business, albeit initially as a non-profit, though that didn't last) in 2015 because they were going to build AGI and that it was inevitable.
2. The company was formed with scientific researchers originally, again as an open company with the intent of sharing, though spoiler alert: this all changed
3. I had always assumed it was cowboy bro developers working on the code, but it was, originally, academic based engineering
4. AI safety was constantly there and initially significant - but as we all know now, eventually lost a battle to make an impact, left "hobbled" and thrown rather to the wayside.
5. The training data was, after GPT-2, ingested wholesale and attempt to clean/sanitise would happen on the results coming from prompts - i.e. the inputs were not cleaned, which means applying dizzying array of filters to catch on the output and edge cases.
6. Common Crawl was introduced at GPT-3 - which is also where the input filtering stopped happening
7. AI, or Western AI companies including OpenAI (but also Google and Microsoft) put their data centres in the Global South, additionally sourcing their data annotators from the poorest countries allowing them to pay (via third parties) literal pennies per hour for the work (which could also come with terrible mental health side effects as the worker would read and view the generative content that AI could come up with based on the unfiltered dark corners of the web)
8. Sam Altman lies. Little lies, but from a great deal of documentation, a lot and often to tell people what they want to hear whilst (we guess?!) having some ulterior motive
9. The path that OpenAI decided to take to head towards what they believe will be AGI, effectively requires unlimited compute power, when in reality, there are lots of different applications of AI that don't need that level of power, Stable Diffusion being one such example trained using 256 GPUs (still not a desktop computer, but not hundreds of thousand GPUs either)
10. OpenAI's approach, to close off it's scientific findings, close it's source and refusing to share methods means that there's no way to verify any of their progress, but more importantly is stripping the academic scientific community of it's researchers (as someone who has visited CERN on two occassions, seeing science being shared is incredible and incredible for society)

My only complaint about the book (and it's likely to be my own fault) is I had trouble with the jumping backwards and forwards in time - I'd often be unsure where we were in the timeline.

If you work in tech, I'd absolutely recommend this book. If it's not possible, then definitely the interview I linked above.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

No quite the same murderfest from Sweetpea 1, but still enjoyably angry at the world.

I think I expected the same kind of murder spree from the first book, and it's not that at all (although Rhiannon, the protagonist, desperately wants that). It's actually written on the tin, In Bloom is Rhiannon's experience of being pregnant - which, for a change, rolls up all the shitty experiences into one.

I enjoyed, and laughed at, the cutting turn of phrases - the kind of brutal honesty that you might reserve for the closest of friends knowing that it's for the "inside voice".

I can see myself reading the next instalment in the book (though perhaps not so soon) and I'm not entirely sure where the character can go given the way the book ends, so that's definitely intriguing.

But just for the the record (my record!), Rhiannon is a terrible person!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Honestly not sure what I thought of the book…

I'm unsure how I got this on my to-read list. I think I was looking for funny books from the last few years. I didn't laugh once reading this book though. It was a sweet story, set in the 80s, but I'm not sure where the arc was.

The story is told from the perspective of Lizzie, an 18 year old young woman who moves out of home to work as an assistant to a dentist. The dentist himself is fairly sexist and xenophobic. The mother (of the protagonist) is … hard to describe. In short, she's a pain in Lizzie's arse - though she definitely loves her.

I think there's some part of flying the nest and finding your own feet, but Lizzie somehow ends up in a very similar place by the end of the book. There's times I was reading and thinking surely she's going to realise that she herself is actually a good dentist and will take that path, but nope, she ends up as a clothes store assistant, so … I don't know.

It was cute to have 80s nostalgia peppered throughout the book, the highlight being the salad spinner (which my own mother still owns and I definitely remember spinning it for fun).

I guess I was left with the sense of why did I read what I read?

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Funny, unwavering and dark.

Rhiannon, Sweetpea, is according to BuzzFeed, a serial killer - and probably a psychopath. For the first half of the book I just read it as she's a bit crazy and has decided to act on her impulses.

Except as I carried on reading, I realised that what she was doing was listing the things that piss her off all the time and just landed at the inevitable conclusion that the only way to get rid of these things is to get rid of these things. Not unlike a lot of us except we don't go all the the way to fully extinguishing someone.

There were some really funny turns of phrases throughout the book and I just wondered how I could possibly end but suspected it would end the way it did which isn't a bad thing. I definitely plan to read a few more of these books in a series.

Graphic, explicit, raw, quite angry (and annoyed), funny. Good stuff!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

An easy read, good for the holiday.

I chomped this down in a matter of days (though it helped being by the pool to spend more time reading). I've read a number of Matt Haig's books and find I prefer his older material over the newer books, and this book fitted nicely into that category.

Without examining the story too carefully (because I think the balance of humour and darkness, in retrospect, is a little off balance and the wheels sort of come off!) - it was a fun read.

Definitely reading the book in 2025 rather than the years which the Twilight stories were at their height probably makes the story a little more refreshing for me (it's about a British vampire family - not a spoiler, you'll get that from the blurb).

The characters were fairly simple to follow and switch between on each (nicely short) chapter. I didn't really feel much sympathy for the parent characters (I'm not sure if I was supposed to, but like I said, it doesn't want too close a look), but there's some fun twists on the vampire genre (or perhaps I'm not that familiar with the genre!).

Some fun gory bits, a decent mini twist here and there, very easy to read - a good choice for the holiday read.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

A book of letters…kinda made me want to write letters…

I picked this up based on "funny books" though I'm really not sure how I landed on this book. I know, sort of, Spike Milligan's work, but only from TV. I didn't know he was an author, particularly from funny war stories so I missing considerable context. Arguably I'm not sure why I read this book.

The back cover quotes appeared almost immediately at the start of the book and it was pretty clear that this read like a bottom-of-the-barrel book, just printing every letter that could be found. There was the odd occasion that the correspondence was funny, but unfortunately not laugh-out-loud-funny, just a bit of a snicker.

In the last part of the book (part 4: words of support), the letters are about mental health (dating back to the late-60s), which was interesting to read as it feels like in the real world we've only started to talk openly about mental health in the last decade or so. Milligan would write letters offering support to others, and would often talk about how the NHS support was missing the love and understanding and rather delivered pills (which he says helps, but only as a band-aid).

It was these last group of letters, mostly about sending out love and positivity to the world that brought this up from 2 stars to 3. It definitely made me want to actually write words down to people rather than the usual email, and it was nice to see some silly humour throughout his decades.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

300 pages but wow it felt 4 times longer...

I found the writings quite difficult to consume. A lot, if not all the names were sounds but without any familiar rhythm, and Le Guin was describing, with I assume great accuracy a world with locations, cities, regions and mountains - but I was struggling to map it all.

Then the story was thread through this detail, which left me struggling to read and struggling to enjoy the book.

It's only when I hit around 60% and the two characters embark on a journey across the ice did I finally manage to engage properly. I really did feel the characters relationship change through their journey and felt their struggle, which I think is what turned this book, for me, from 2 star to 3.

There's a scene towards the end when the protagonist revisits the King of {whatever the name of the city was}, and the protagonist reflects on how the time has passed since his first visit much earlier in the book. I could empathise! It felt like a lifetime!

Probably a great book. Maybe passed me by though.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Maybe you've read this book, and you feel a sense of despair.

I think before read the book I had a sense of despair. This book did an excellent job of articulating my despair. Articulating ideas that I couldn't put words to on my own.

I bought this book on pre-order after seeing Ash Sarkar on Pod Save the UK. An articulate, intelligent individual with strong opinions, and though I always struggle to read non-fiction, I didn't find this book hard in the way I had expected (sure, still took me a month, but that's pretty good for me).

It's hard to write a review without wanting to just repeat the entire book back to you. If you consider yourself a progressive, left or left leaning, I'd recommend this book. It's definitely not cherry, but it's not angry either. It does the work of laying out what we sort of already know. And importantly it's not anecdotes, around 20%+ of the book are external references that are peppered throughout the main text.

I've highlighted a lot of the content and hope that the messages will stay with me as I feel like her book is a useful tool for arming myself for the political battle we face in the age of 2025.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Wanted to like it more, the gimmicks frustrated me.

I've read every DI Fawley book and I've always enjoyed them. I'm starting to think of these books as a bit of guilty pleasure. However, I'm limited to reading on the Kindle which means the medium which I read is rather specific.

Hunter will (as in: has also done in the past books) sandwich in content from different sources to give the story a bit more reach out into the world. I remember the earlier books would have tweets (and I think reddit threads, maybe) which would be between chapters (chapters being dedicated to telling one of the characters story and perspective).

The problem with the inserts is that on a Kindle these are actually images that are embedded, and trying to read the text in them, because the text doesn't scale, means zooming, and attempting to drag the image around, usually to read from one side of a sentence to the other.

This time around I just skipped them entirely - some of these included newspaper articles. I've no idea if they added anything to the story, if they contained plot points, or if they were decoration (more akin to the tweets in the earlier books). It's just too hard to get the text.

And then there's the perspective change with a font change. I use the Open Dyslexia font set at a size that helps me to read. This book then employed a completely different font for when the antagonist shares their story. One that's very, very thin and I noticed I would visibly struggled to read these pages.

All these points have nothing to do with the story, but unfortunately they had an impact on me being able to enjoy the story - because it kept taking me out. I really do wish these gimmicks would be used as an exception, rather than peppered or even core to specific characters talking.

Funnily enough, the book ends (sort of abruptly) and after the closing chapter and the author thanks, there's a mini story at the end. This is told from Adam Fawley's perspective, no gimmicks and it was super - I couldn't put the book down until I had finished this last section. This just reminds me that I really do enjoy Hunter's stories, and the characters and they can definitely stand strong on their own two feet.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Facinating for when it was written, but felt like it was sort of missing a story.

I'm definitely reading these older classics so that I acquaint myself with what I've assumed all my peers read when they were younger, so this eventually made its way into my reading list.

It's an incredible story given when it was written, late 1800s, and I can imagine it blowing minds at the time when it was read. The technicality of the book is interesting too, how there's a story inside of the story whereby the … character we're following (not narrator, but not really the protagonist) is sharing the experience with the reader. In fact, the majority of the book is a straight up monologue. Then to compound this, it's the Time Traveller (I guess the protagonist) in the present, sharing their past experience of living in the futre!

Timey wimey.

But I wasn't really expereiencing the technical feats, more following the story along, and that's where, for me, it was sort of lacking. There wasn't really a story. In the sense that there were cause effect, struggles to overcome and character arcs.

The Time Traveller meets and partners with a woman in the story, but when she's taken by the Morlocks and he just… goes okay "then, I'm off.".

It's likely that I missed something in the story, but it didn't land so well for me. I think it's interesting, but I didn't come away thinking about the content of the story, the questions it could raise.

The very, very end is bold, and I definitely appreciated that, but it really didn't add anything either.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Reeks of "cosy crime" - and that's good.

There's a reason that Richard Osman's series has been a runaway success for many people (or at least I can believe it) - the story is well written, the characters are extremely well drawn and the pages are a pleasure to digest.

I keep thinking I'm further along in the series than I actually am because the characters have quickly become a staple of crime fiction in my head.

Although I did find I was a little suprised at the some of the more grusome passages (realising that doesn't really fit the "cosy crime" sub-genre). Those parts did take me out of the story a little. Again, I feel like I've had more of these characters than I actually have (this is the second Thursday book I've read), so there's no reason why a few hard edges wouldn't be part of the story.

I did, however, have one complaint. I was quickly getting annoyed with the diary that Joyce would write in. For some reason I was having a hard time believing that Joyce was writing diary entries in such a conversational style as a pen and paper job, especially when the style of her writing/thoughts read as if she would be telling her husband… who's already shuffled off. I'm not 100% sure why I found it distracting, but I suspect that's not going to reduce any amount in the next Thursday books, so I'll probably need to find a way around it.

Otherwise, a lovely read. Definitely feels as if I'm visiting these characters, and it's always a pleasure sharing a bit of time with them all.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Could not put the damn book down!

Very easy book to read, and annoyingly difficult to stop reading late at night.

The story is told from Evelyn's perspective, a brilliant scientist working in the field of human cloning.

There's a lot that goes on in the book, both from the story moving forward and driven by plot twists but also from Evelyn's own inner monologue.

The clone aspect of the story presents a, I think, believable take on the sci-fi concept (specifically the purpose clones would serve) and this easily leads to the messy question of what is a person, how we feel towards others, what we're willing to accept.

The book also shows how Evelyn struggles, or rather, maintains her anger and in particular, frustration towards others she feels (quite often) are incompetent, and it's interesting seeing where this comes from for the character, and how she goes on a journey, that can often get pretty dark (I'm not explaining myself well here, but I'm trying to avoid too much of a spoiler).

A very easy read for me. The story absolutely drives forward. There are lots of (I thought) nice turns of phrases throughout the book that didn't feel too forced.

There's really only one (biggish) plot hole based around the amount of time that passes, which the story does attempt to address, but I was so caught up in the page turning that it didn't particularly impair on the enjoyment.

Fun stuff!

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Cats…sentient cats.

A fun, good length book that doesn't take itself too seriously (which, sentient cats is probably the first clue).

On reflection (and since the blurb already gives this away), the "hyperintelligent talking spy cats" are a core mechanic of the story, I do now wonder why they hadn't turned out to be the super villains? I'm pretty sure the first thing smart cats would do is ship humans off to a petting zoo as soon as they had the kind of skills the cats in this book does…

Minor plot hole aside, I enjoyed this story. Very light weight on the brain, pretty silly without being utterly stupid, and manages to end up in a sensible place.

A recommend if you want something to bridge between some heavy reading.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Brief, sadly, on all aspects.

I knew this was a short read, and having come out of Frank Herbert's Dune at almost 900 pages, a nice little chomp down on a Backman book was exactly what I wanted.

Except, frustratingly, I ended up feeling a little cheapened by this book. I've loved Backman's other books (that I've read) and it's the dry humour whilst seeing there's caring a love under every grumpy character that makes their books so appealing to me.

This short story definitely tries to include that aspect, but the book is so short that it feels more like it's been stuffed full of lovely sentiment to the point where it's feels more trite than anything else.

I do think it's simply the format that left this story down for me. The sentiment of the actual story is lovely (I appreciate there's no meat to my review here), but it just was blasted out of a cannon rather too quickly for my liking.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Incredible world building, but I definitely felt the story lost me multiple times.

I've watched Dune 1 and 2 before having read this book, so I had a distinct advantage that Denis Villeneuve's version was already in my head and gave me an (effective) leg up on the visualisation of the world that Herbert was building.

Genunienly I found the world building and detail amazing, and even moreso the idea that this book was written in 1965 and that so many people had already fell in love with the book and world. That speaks, I think to the quality of the writing.

The story (again with the advantage of having watched the films) for the first half was engaging.

But then around the time in the book that wasn't translated to the screen, the scenes in which Jessica is becoming the Grand Mother, and Paul also drinks the Water of Life - he starts to trip out and I honestly lost the entire thread of the book at this point.

I was stuck in a period where I wasn't sure if I was reading a description of a dream or if the book had jumped forward in time. It was also around the middle of the story, so it felt important to know whether it was "reality" or not!

Eventually I just decided that I had misread somewhere along the lines and carried on with the book. I did feel like the 50-80% section of the story sagged quite heaverily and the story really slowed down. Possibly for even more world building, but by that point I was starting to find it hard to muster the motivation to read through a few more pages.

I did enjoy the final section of the book, and the story definitely accellorated, but, just like the movie Dune, Part Two, the book ends like a car running full pelt into a brick wall. The story is moseying along and then it just sort of ends in a way like someone smashed the book out of my hand and told me I can't read any more.

I've had lots of people tell me the sequels are great, and I don't doubt it, but I also like to read a book as a complete unit, and…well, the end, literally the last page definitely did not feel like the end of the book at all.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log