I'm also currently reading "On the Calculation of Volume". It is fantastic.

Meta-comment about the post. I used to read and write book reviews like this all of the time. Not anymore. ChatGPT and Claude can do a just a good of a job. Now I'm looking for what you think, a unique insight, what did you feel from a book review from a humanoid. LLMs do a fine job summarizing.

How do you separate the details included in a synopsis from what someone thought about the book?

The details included in a synopsis reflect what the reviewer found important enough to share. I still value the synopsis of a known reviewer exactly for this reason. If I’ve read books on their suggestion in the past and enjoyed them, I’m inclined to take their advice again. Perhaps they could use LLMs to speed up some of the writing, given their perspective, but I wouldn’t agree with the statement “LLMs do a fine job summarizing” in the context of reviews. The author and their collective reviews matter, something absent with LLMs.