Neal Stephenson, Reamde

Neal Stephenson, Reamde. Just too much fun. And made me want to play Skyrim or something. It reminded me of Cryptonomicon in its pace and plot and I enjoyed it so much I just re-read Snow Crash.

Technology

So I've been reading on my smartphone, substituting reading free ebooks for my old favorite vices of sudoku and crossword puzzles. I really enjoyed Secret Adversary (by Agatha Christie - a Tommy and Tuppence!) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which I hadn't read in ages and had totally forgotten. But one of my favorite books, Notes from the Underground, was a little frustrating to read on a three-inch screen so I gave up and dug it off my bookshelf to finish. I think that phone reading is better suited for less complex reading or at least shorter sentences, as it's tough to focus when flipping the pages so frequently, something a bigger screen would help. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to read Henry James on a phone - it would take three screens per phrase.

If I could read in the bathtub with one, I might buy an eReader device of some sort (especially for magazines and journal articles - I print out way too many pdfs). But I think I am too attached to paper books to ever really change over. I like to lend books, to give them away, to browse through piles of them, to acquire them on curbs from dejected little heaps. I still remember plunking down my Christmas money to buy my first book on my own. It was a paperback copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I read it 28 times in a row, memorized it, and eventually made a replacement cover for it out of gold foil and candy-wrappers.

William Gibson, Spook Country

William Gibson, Spook Country. This book wasn't really science fiction, more like techno-now fiction; sort of a spy-art-gizmo-post-9-11 hodgepodge. The only hazard of writing in the near-present is that the tech in this 07 book already seems quaint. Interesting plot with (wonder of wonders in this genre!) a moderately interesting grown-up female reporter/ex-musician with an actual personality as narrator. Naturally she gets sucked into a strange and intricate caper involving satellites, dirty money, and shadowy government organizations. My major complaint about William Gibson is that he doesn't really like people, he likes things. All his books are absolute love stories to things and designs (they should come with tiny replicas or glossy catalogs) but the people never really go anywhere or develop - if you expect that than they are a fine entertainment.