Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

Klara and the Sun  By Kazuo Ishiguro   Rating 5/5  I am enthralled for once to read the positive impact AI could have on the world - because most of the books I read portray them as this formidable "black box" things which are unknown and hence must be feared. But Kazuo Ishiguro writes this brilliant story with a tone of mystery and suspense that he had me hanging onto every word till the end and keep hoping against hope that what comes next wouldn't be something bad. There is a sensory build up of something dangerous/untoward about to happen through out the narrative - but this is actually a story of impossibly hopeless and selflessly unconditional love - between a human girl and her AF - Artificial Friend, an agent of the artificial intelligence (a robot, silly! 🤣🤣) Klara.  Getting into the story a bit. Klara is a version B2 AI model that is put up for sale in a store so that children could choose her and make her their friend/partner. She is not like all the oth...

A Children's Bible  By Lydia Millet  A National Book Award finalist 2020  Genre: Sci-fi, Dystopian Future, Thriller,2021-read, Dark, children-fiction          Rating 3/5 A very average read. This story is a peek into a plausible and possibly realistic future for humanity where global warming and other factors lead to a complete collapse of environmental balance/functioning. It signals an end to the human race/existing species while hoping for the rise of newer populations that could survive the conditions.  A bunch of kids and their parents move to a summer resort for the vacation. The strained quality of relationship between parents and children is evident in the narrator's outright contempt and hatred  towards the parents - they blame the parents for not doing their "part"/"duty" which resulted in the current state of their world - meaning I believe chaos, climate change etc. The parents on their turn are shown to be self indulgent, he...