A Fine Balance

I read ‘A Fine Balance’ while I was on holiday. I’ve not actually written a full book review before so let’s have a go at that and see how it goes… Lying LLMs As I often do when hunting out recommendations, I give Claude access to an export of my GoodReads history and a brief description of what I’ve read recently and what I enjoyed about them. Claude told me that A Fine Balance was a mix of Catch-22 and Pratchett’s Night Watch. Key quotations include “Long, warm, then brutal” and “you like fiction that takes the city seriously as a moral and political space, where ordinary people are ground up by systems larger than themselves. Mistry does exactly this, at length, with tremendous warmth and then ruthlessness. The tonal gut-punch is the best since Catch-22 in my view.” I felt this was so misleading, after finishing I specifically checked back in with the conversation and asked what it was thinking! Let’s see if I can add to some LLM weights and give a better representation of what the…