Current book recursion nest state

[prog]

I think this is everything but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that I'm leaving something out.

I am a Strange Loop: Borrowed from Zarf. Quite thought-provoking. I find myself reflecting often on the metaphors of mind that Hofstadter presents (and then tells nigh-innumerable parables about). That said, I stopped reading it after I bought...

Spook Country: Purchased at a signing event at the Brattle. I like it, but like all of Gibson's recent stuff it's not very grabby. On my recent train ride to Jersey I re-read the most recent 50 pages or so to re-contextualize since my last stopping point, and I barely remembered any of it. My reading this actually interleaves with...

Imajica: The first of two novels I bought at the Big Chicken Barn while vacationing in Maine last month. Probably I should have read this when I was 16, but some of my friends had been bringing it up in recent conversation, so what the hell. I was all right with it until about halfway through, when it starts to become clear that the only female character (who, because this is a Clive Barker novel, represents all of womanhood) is actually as much of a weak-willed twit as she seems. Seriously, I assumed that she was under a villainous enchantment, until the writing took turns that suggested otherwise. So I hang it up for a while, and that leads to...

Jhereg: The other Chicken Barn book, and another that I should have read as a teenager. I hadn't even heard of Brust until this decade, actually, and I think it was through tahnan or temvald slavering over him at a game night? Does that make sense? Anyway, started this today. Seven pages in. Hooked. We'll see. It's short, so if any other books wanna wedge into this one, they'd better act fast. (I borrowed some crazy Martin Gardner books from dougo the other day but they're just kinda hangin out right now.)

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I just realized that I have another shelf full of recreational-math type books, so you could borrow another Gardner collection or two when you're done with the others. (Also Dewdney, Pickover, et al.)

[jazzfish]

like all of Gibson's recent stuff it's not very grabby

I'm glad it's not just me. I realised a few weeks ago that I have basically no recollection of what happened in _Pattern Recognition_ at all, despite having read it within the last three years.

Jhereg . . . started this today. Seven pages in. Hooked.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Me, I was hooked from the first line, but I'm a sucker for good openings.

Enjoy. You've got quite the ride coming up.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

A philosopher reviewed I Am a Strange Loop as, more or less: naive computer scientist deals with death of a loved one through misunderstanding of the nature of identity. Didn't inspire me to read the book.

Having read Neuromancer back when it was a pulp novel, I still have trouble taking Gibson seriously, and even then found the cyber-punk style precious and affected. And there were a lot more accurate anticipations of a networked world--if memory serves Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise describes a "network search contest" that one of the characters won as a child, where the final question was something like "find the number of home runs scored by the winning team in the Little League championship of the country with the largest rubber exports in the year that Iowa had the least rainfall in July." I think the answer was "Brazil". Although we don't quite have a gameshow based on Google yet that sounds a lot more like the world we live in than anything in Gibson's supposedly prophetic novel.

The Vlad Taltos books go up and down. The first three--up to and including Teckla are very good, especially Teckla itself. I found the series really slowed down after that, although I hear it may be picking up again (haven't read the latest.) Even the weaker books are perfectly readable, just not up to the standard he sets early on.

Also by Brust and very worth reading are Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill, and Freedom and Necessity, an epistolary historical novel written with Emma Bull. Both are really under-rated, especially the former, which is about remaining human in the face of fear. Avoid To Reign in Hell and The Sun, the Moon and the Stars unless you like ponderous metaphysics on the one hand and incomprehensible Eastern European folktales (but I repeat myself) on the other.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I read the first Neuromancer sequel, Count Zero, last year and found it a really engaging adventure story and never mind all the cyber-whatzis. His very recent books, set in the present, feel more like meditations on the information-saturated culture as it actually came to be. They're very well informed and even interesting, but their narrative voice is... sleepy, somehow. It's odd.