Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

Old Man's War (2005) By John Scalzi  My Rating: 4/5 🥴🥴🥴 Genre : Space Opera, Science Fiction, Military, War, Future. I liked this book well.   I liked the different variants of alien creatures and their capabilities envisioned by the author. I liked the idea of a continuing consciousness for humans who are old/dead and the ways of using it productively.  I thought the story/plot started on a very promising note and some hilarity even. As the story progressed, I found I could skip over several lines of the text and not miss much. There is a lacking of emotional connection and investment a reader makes as he gets involved in the fate of main character(s). The ruthlessness and the brutality on display as the different species try to win and invade is a bit troubling. What is there to enjoy in endless war,right?  Old people at a future point of time have the capability to reverse their age - in a way. Their consciousness is transferred into young and highly evolv...

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...