August 21, 2025 · 1:09 am

Three Days in June: Smooth and swift

You could read Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June in one sitting. A quick little slip into the world of Gail – socially awkward, a little aloof, a little out of touch even with herself – as she prepares for her daughter’s wedding. Over the three days she is (at first forced) reintroduced to her ex-husband, Max, comes up against the kind of relationship she has with her mother and the kind she wants with her daughter, and also forced to question her career choices to date and to come. It’s a compact and (I think) successful way to show how change – big change – can happen in a few days when the build toward it has been a long time brewing and there’s a big enough event(s) to make the change possible.

Lovely, too, to return to Anne Tyler, who I haven’t read in years and years, but who I used to read Every Single Book she wrote.

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August 19, 2025 · 12:40 pm

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.

I may be a bad feminist, but I found Jeannette Winterson’s 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next far too focused on proving that women can be/have been computer scientists and can be/have been important to understandings of artificial intelligence. Like sure, yes, this is all true. And also so what. Okay, I know that in the case of the essays, the so what is that as we construct new forms of intelligence – or as new kinds of intelligence and beings emerge in the transhumanist future – we ought to learn from the past and create this future in more equitable ways. But it just read to me as… obvious?

Though clearly it is not obvious when it is the tech bros creating and profiting from new forms of AI and new AI products – and as Winterson argues the risk in all of this is that these men – like the industralists before them – will seek to maximize profit at the expense of the labour or women (and children). Though with AI less so the labour and more so the data or the ways in which these systems are designed, optimized (and implicitly, aligned – or not). I’d not call this one deeply researched, but with that it’s also not overly technical – and so if you wanted an accessible (and perhaps a bit surface) exploration of current (well now not so current because of the publication date of 2021 makes this ancient) technology then sure.

So while most of the book I yawned my way though, I did find the last essay (I should mention its a series of – sometime repetitive – essays about AI/technology and the past and future) on a future where a transhumanist self is defined not by intelligence but by love to be compelling. Oh I know it’s the Unitarian in me, and I know its a desire for there to be something that connects us, but that call to love as the ultimate end is well, deeply appealing. Even if Winterson doesn’t attempt to define what love is (or where, how, when it operates – or operates differently from a god BUT WHATEVER).

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August 19, 2025 · 12:19 pm

The Wedding People: What fun.

Alison Espach set my vacation off to the best possible reading start with The Wedding People. Such a good start, in fact, that I found myself unable to really get going with book number two because it wasn’t the same great romp. So promise me if you have a plane ride, a long weekend, a sick-day where you are well enough to read a novel but not nearly well enough to work on a report you’ll grab this one.

Oh sure, it’s not brilliantly written (though it is not at all badly written), and it oozes with privilege (despite the nod to the adjunct salary and the lack of benefits that come with being an adjunct it is still very much a book that derives some of the joy of reading from the opportunity to read about how rich people throw a wedding), but if you can – if you can – park these critiques and settle in for the rom-com ride you shall not be disappointed.

What the book does best – amid the laugh out loud funny moments of dialogue and situational humour – is remind the reader that where happiness and love come from (first and always) is within and not (as so many rom-coms promise) from the perfect other person. It’s not an overly complex idea or nuanced theme, but the book presents it carefully and warmly in ways that let the reader knowingly agree in a way that doesn’t feel like reading a motivational poster in a home decor shop – live! laugh! love! – but instead like several years of therapy: ah, yes, love comes from within. Which is to say, it’s an explicit theme (like I think our protagonist, Phoebe, says it directly at one point lol) but it’s not hammered and, more importantly, we feel like Phoebe earns the revelation through actual character development and introspection.

So enjoy, enjoy.

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August 19, 2025 · 1:27 am

God Human Animal Machine: Again

I read first Megan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine a few years ago, but returned to it this summer for another go. Rare, now, are the books I read twice and I came back to this non-fiction (!) work on the nature of consciousness and the religious dimensions of technology because in the first go-round I wasn’t sure I reached the end sure of what O’Gieblyn is arguing about what makes humans human and AI AI. Second time around and I think it’s just as fuzzy because O’Gieblyn is much more a cartographer of the philosophy of consciousness than she is a polemic writer; the argument – consciousness is something between the subject and the world – slippery for this reader to firmly hold.

What does seem ever more true of this reading in 2025 is the way in which the recent advances in AI force questions on the nature of concisousness, on who and what can claim it – as well as the intersections of technology with these ever-more slippery ideas of soul or life before-after-beyond death.

Should you be a reader wary of a dense book of philosophy: be not afraid. O’Gieblyn writes a charming first person narrative that interweaves her background in fundamentalist Christianity, her journey away from faith, her experience of addiction, and her continued questioning in ways that make the moments of exposition on the philosophy of Descartes read as a charming side quest (rather then, as they are, the heart of understanding the challenge Descartes’ disenchantment of the world has posed).

Of the many fantastic threads in the book – the interconnection of trees/mushrooms/the internet; the sentience of robot dogs; the way a profound question can unsettle our sense of identity as much as any drug – the one I found most lasting was the parallels O’Gieblyn draws between the story of Job and that of the all-knowing algorithm. Though the section is a departure, a bit, from the sections on what it is to know or constitute or explain or recognize a self (I-Thou!) it nevertheless does a spectacular job of demonstrating the rich, varied and embedded ways technology can be read through religious texts and – more importantly – religious questions. What rights do we humans have to question the all-knowing? What audacity do we have to ask ‘why’?

Anyway – it’s prompted a whole series of other readings and re-readings, so enjoy (or don’t) the next reviews on the spirituality of AI.

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