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by earlyriser 786 days ago
I'm guessing Paul Auster fans will comment here. 20 years ago I read a book that I cannot remember the name and I vaguely remember it was from Auster, but I'm not sure and I have been looking for ages. It was a compilation of short stories with the Noah's Ark somehow in each of them, but the stories were very different besides that part. Does this ring a bell?
3 comments
ianmcgowan 786 days ago
Sounds a little like Julian Barnes "A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 chapters", there are several recurring themes (woodworm, boats) but the Ark recurs in several of the stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_10%C...

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earlyriser 782 days ago
Oh, great, thanks for this.
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be_kind 786 days ago
Possibly History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes? One of my favourites. Noah's Ark isn't in all of the short stories/essays, but does recur.
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earlyriser 782 days ago
Yes, this is the one, thanks! One of your favourites from Barnes or in general? I really enjoyed, so I want to know which are your other favourites.
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benjamoon 786 days ago
GPT:

The book you're thinking of is likely "In the Country of Last Things" by Paul Auster. While not a collection of short stories, this novel often gets mentioned in relation to discussions about Auster's work involving themes of dystopia and allegorical narratives. The reference to Noah's Ark might be metaphorical, reflecting the themes of catastrophe and survival that are common in Auster's work. If you specifically remember a collection of short stories involving Noah's Ark, it could be another author or a less known work of Auster, as his major works don't typically revolve around this theme directly in the form of short stories.

I’m not confident this is correct!

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kristianp 785 days ago
I have tried to use chatgpt to identify novels and songs from descriptions and it is poor at it. This is despite, I assume , ingesting reviews and descriptions of popular novels and even ingesting the novels themselves. Perhaps the training itself isn't enough for the model to be able to identify what work it is being trained on?
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