Books
fromIndependent
2 weeks agoSarah Breen: Is 'Hamnet' grief porn or great art? As I sobbed silently in the cinema, I was in no doubt
A remarkable movie can compel people to confront and not look away from real-life tragedies.
Whichbook employs human readers to classify books along dimensions like moods, levels of violence and sexual content, attributes of the main characters, and length. It's a process Van Riel says artificial intelligence can't yet replicate, though it's still quite mathematical in nature, with new hires guided in tuning their scores to the site's standard. Then, Whichbook users can indicate their own current preferences with a set of sliders to find a set of books that match.
"A writer," Saul Bellow once observed, "is a reader moved to emulation." But what if it's also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading-and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.