100 books like Curse the Day

I love reading a thriller with a complex plot that has me trying to figure out who did what, where and when, and what or who may be connected in the main or subplot.

This was one of those books I had to read twice, not because I didn’t “get it” but because I admired the way Chandler weaved his characters around, like the actors in a Whitehall farce play. This is a book I kept turning back a few pages to keep up with the who, where, and when. Fantastic read.

This is one book I really could not leave alone. An experienced political journalist loses his sister in a road accident, but the journalist thinks her death has something to do with some government secrets she knew about.

I was drawn into this story from the start. Peston’s style is first person central and it holds the readers attention. He turns what could be a simple plot into a complicated plot with the main protagonist digging out secrets while risking his own life. I loved this one. There are a lot of very realistic passages from a writer well-schooled in the political world.

I do love a chase thriller, especially one that has you scratching your head until the author reveals a clue or adds more calculated confusion or a red herring. This plot starts with a terrorist attack in Europe and involves a clever barrister and an agent trying to solve a mystery that introduces us to a double agent.

I think the plot is a very clever one where no one can be trusted until the mystery is solved. Kent is really good at characterization and some of his descriptive work I found very colorful. A damn good read.

I nearly put this book back on the shelf, but glad I didn’t. This is a brilliant plot about a missing spy and two operatives sent to find a captured colleague in MI6 amidst Chinese and Taiwan tension that might turn to war at any time.

I found it interesting that the author is a BBC Correspondent with bags of experience about eastern politics. His attention to detail is really good, and there is plenty of tension, action, and atmosphere. A good read for those who like plenty of informed detail in a good plot.

Is tech a science? Close enough.

I was on my way home from the grocery store, and I heard Naomi Alderman in an interview about this, her latest book, on NPR’s All Things Considered. It's a good thing I didn’t buy ice cream that day because I sat in the car in the driveway, listening until the end. Hearing her, I knew I had to read the book. And when I did, I couldn’t put it down (the reading equivalent of sitting in the driveway listening to the radio?).

Populated with extraordinary characters, from genuinely good to incredibly greedy, this book both frightened me and gave me hope, but it never let me go until, well, after the last page (yeah, there’s a little bit of a trick at the end).

Hackers is a classic account of the computer revolution, centered on the pioneering tinkerers, gamers, social theorists, entrepreneurs, and other explorers who made military and corporate technology personal. These are not hackers in the criminal sense most people understand the term today, but men (and a few women) like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others far less famous. Their interwoven biographies are brilliantly researched and reported, underpinned by what Levy calls a common “hacker ethic” whose tenets dominate our economy, politics, and culture today.

The year is 2095, and human beings must take performance enhancement pills to compete with automated systems. The future in Machinehood could be ours tomorrow.

Welga and Nithya, the novel’s protagonists, are constantly on the verge of burnout while pushing themselves to perform. A mysterious terrorist organization called the Machinehood turns up to demand equal rights for AI, and that humans put an end to pill manufacturing, triggering events around the world. Parts of the novel are set in Chennai, India, and despite all its futuristic advances, the city retains its present day identity. Machinehood also portrays women in technologically-driven spaces, which is something I'm always rooting for.

With recent advances in large language models such as GPT-4, it is predicted that AI capabilities in terms of general decision making and problem solving may exceed that of humans even in less than a decade. Is this good or bad news?

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand and navigate this difficult topic. Of particular interest are Bostrom’s two groundbreaking observations: the orthogonality thesis (any level of intelligence can be combined with any final goal) and the instrumental convergence thesis (any sufficiently non-trivial final goal will also create instrumental goals of self-preservation, efficiency, creativity, and unbounded resource acquisition).

A top pick for anyone who wants to figure out the prospects for the human civilization in the face of superhuman artificial general intelligence.

I can appreciate an author who can inject humor into a story that is not traditionally a comedy. In Mind Bullet, we follow the life of an assassin who has the ability to kill with his mind and his artificial intelligence sidekick Bubbles (who frequently asks for a name change throughout the book). Make no mistake, there is plenty of fast-paced, action-packed scenes as Jonas tries to stay one step ahead of the ninjas (yes ninjas!) in between the funny appearances of Bubbles. The mixture of danger and humor is all-consuming as you go along for the ride. This story had me laughing while sitting on the edge of my seat. 

Artificial intelligence is, of necessity, an academic pursuit, at least initially. McCorduck’s book is her account of the history and development of AI. She was not a historian coming to events after the fact but a living witness. Her circle of friends included all the key figures, the people those of us who fell into AI later didn’t have the opportunity to know.

This book, personal and human, not technical and heavy, reveals the humanness of the process. Yes, artificial intelligence was the goal, but human intelligence (and frailty) were central to its emergence.