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Book Review Directory #4
1754 sats \ 23 comments \ @siggy47 4 Sep BooksAndArticles

Book Review Directory #4Book Review Directory #4

To save space in the newsletter, here is the fourth Book Review Directory. These are in no particular order, though I do tend to group them together by posting stacker. I am still waiting for editable posts so that I can group them by genre without the need to constantly repost.

through 9/4/25

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40 sats \ 20 replies \ @adlai 4 Sep

Please consider grouping them by topic; you probably shouldn't try splitting hairs between different kinds of fiction (unless you really like picking arbitrary opinions and arguing just for the sake of arguing...), although I think the line between fiction and nonfiction is generally indisputable.

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0 sats \ 19 replies \ @siggy47 OP 4 Sep

People have said this in the past too. Of course you're right. I simply haven't had the time. If anyone wants to make one big book review directory, that would be great. They could organize it intelligently and I would zap the hell out of a well thought out post. The problem, though, is that it cannot be updated until we get some sort of perpetual post option on SN.

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36 sats \ 15 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Sep

Would you be interested in an AI generated classification?

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30 sats \ 11 replies \ @siggy47 OP 4 Sep

That would probably make sense. Then I can save the prompts and run them periodically

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36 sats \ 10 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Sep

If you provide me a list of groupings you want them grouped in, I can probably get that done some time in the next few weeks.

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35 sats \ 8 replies \ @siggy47 OP 5 Sep

Here are some I came up with. I'm by no means saying this is definitive. Suggestions, edits, additions?

Bitcoin Economics Philosophy Memoir How To Science Fiction History General Fiction General Non-fiction Children's Books

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36 sats \ 3 replies \ @adlai 6 Sep

As hinted in the sibling comment, some of these "tags" are complementary, and some aren't.

For example, you might find "Bitcoin Fiction" becomes popular in a future where digital currencies have the same infamy as maritime piracy [1].

Specifically, I think "Adult" and "Fiction" are binary labels, opposed to "Children's Books" and "Non-Fiction", respectively[2]; while "Memoir"[3] is frequently valid for all kinds of different works; and this opinion is not invalidated by the existence of "Young Adult"[4] and "Hard Scifi"[5].

  1. Consider this from purely amoral measures... e.g., the question "Do parents prefer their kids watch Bitcon, Money Electric, or Hubble25?" has less to do with cinematic aesthetics and standards of documentary objectivity, and more to do with genre preferences and parental advisories. ↩

  2. Note that all four combinations are possible, although obviously the fictional fantasies are more popular on both halves of the diagram. ↩

  3. The closest label I can think of that is opposite to "Memoir" is "Scientific Correspondence", things like journal articles and (the Bourbaki corpus)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki#Works] that are written in first person plural and don't typically presume to tell a linear narrative (although some sections might be readable that way). Although books are frequentlny printed and bound containing nothing but this kind of writing [e.g. conference proceedings], they aren't usually found in book reviews, and the bulk of this "genre" is ideally retrospectively self-reviewing, through references and bibliographies. ↩

  4. You could argue that "Young Adult" novels are categorisable as "children's books that are about glowing up", although some include adult themes so blatantly that they actually get censored. ↩

  5. "Hard Scifi" is scientifically plausible fiction that takes no liberties with mechanics of how the world works; while there might be significant overlap between the audience of hard scifi and provisional patent applications, even comically unsophisticated perusal of the paragraphs [by neural networks either natural or artifical!] could tell the two apart. ↩

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9 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 OP 6 Sep

This stuff is way out of my league, but I'm interested in knowing how you think some kind of organized directory should be put together. I think you and @SimpleStacker should talk about it, if you like.

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36 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 5 Sep

Hmm, my only concern would be the substantial overlap between bitcoin and economics.

What if bitcoin doesn't have its own genre, but is a tag, so we'd have Economics (Bitcoin-Related), Science Fiction (Bitcoin-Related), etc.

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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 OP 5 Sep

Good idea. I also should include a politics category, or maybe just libertarian, knowing this bunch😀

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 4 Sep

Thanks. I'll work on it.

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30 sats \ 2 replies \ @adlai 4 Sep

Isn't AI the wrong approach for publications that have structured data available from various sources like Wikipedia, Goodreads, publishers, etc?

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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 4 Sep

There's a few reasons why a structured data approach wouldn't work that well. First, it would require the review writers to include the structured data in an easily identifiable and consistently-formatted way. Second, it would require that the categories used by the data providers are the categories we want. However, I'd reckon that here on SN we'd want our own categories, like "Bitcoin-Related Non-Fiction".

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 6 Sep

I think you overestimate how much intelligence is required for extracting structured information from text blobs, provided that the source is of reasonable "quality" -- e.g. major Wikipedia articles, mainstream media obituaries, recipes from professionally published cookbooks...

I'm not saying that you wouldn't need several layers of processing; my point is more, "your use of AI should be limited to vibe coding, and the final pipeline should not include inference"

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36 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 4 Sep

Check out this hack for a perpetual post option on SN:

#1194822

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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @adlai 4 Sep

I don't think it needs to be perpetual; the SN seems to lend itself better to conversations, rather than wikies and stickies.

While SN is relatively small, it's still feasible to find old posts through "related posts"; as it grows, that will become unwieldy, so it's logical to just link to a chain of previous posts, as some other posters are already doing.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 4 Sep

True. I'm not sure if it makes sense in this limited context, though, since each book review stands on its own.

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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @jbschirtzinger 4 Sep

Hey, wasn't this usually a Sunday posting?

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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 4 Sep

This is not the newsletter. I am only making these directories to keep the size of the newsletter manageable. The regular Saturday newsletter will still be posted.

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