Category: Books

This is a reread; one I enjoy but don’t get to very often. Michael Ende has written a beautiful book about adventure and dreams. As a kid I remember empathizing with Bastian, but also feeling somewhat superior– while weak and unathletic, at least I wasn’t fat and hated. Looking at it now, he picked a great constellation of attributes for Sebastian– a few positive and a enough poor that it’s easy to imagine that you (for essentially every value of you) feel that you could do as well. Even his hesitation at coming to Fantastica is something I could “easily beat”.

The first and second halves are fascinating. I’m currently reading a paperback version, which is good, but I miss the red and green text of the hardback. (They make the difference italic versus standard print, which is good, but feels less otherworldly. I suspect House of Leaves is similar; while I read a paperback version with house highlighted blue, I bet the art version would have been fascinating as an object.)

A quick and interesting read, with characters I liked. The situation is set up well… what do Superheroes do without when they’re the only super people in the world?

The ambivalence of everyone toward the heroes (and their struggle for anonymity) is tough. The ending is just as hard as the rest of the book; one hero is dead, another jailed, and their initial high hopes are laid low.

I can’t explain why it didn’t strike a spark with me. I suspect it has to do with the 9/11 twist at the end– it didn’t match my expectation (despite telegraphing).

Infoquake tells the tale of an interesting future. Edelman does a good job of providing a futuristic book that’s heavy on the intrigue and relies heavily on corporate rivalries and political maneuvering for its conflict. That’s cool (low key subtle conflict is hard), but it also feels like warmup. That’s reinforced by the fact that this is book one of a trilogy… but it reads like this is the first third of one large book, without a decisive conclusion at the book’s end.

The novel’s protagonist is Natch, a guy I wouldn’t want to have drinks with. He’s a ruthless, somewhat shallow souled leader of a feifcorp. The secondary characters are good; Jara’s particularly complex, while Horvil is a pretty stock background, self-effacing engineer. The minor characters are typically solid, with enough depth for their role. Several are cloaked in mystery, which helps keep them intriguing.

The worldbuilding is excellent and feels like a valid future; it suffered disasters and has twitches as a result. Government is a quirky evolution from today’s– I suspect the second novel with deal with those interactions more closely. The technology is far enough ahead (and the path twisted enough) that I accepted it with the handwaving the author had done.

A very quick read (about 3 hours), this is one man’s tale of getting buried in the depths of a corporation. The story is funny, often ironic, and moves along quickly. It feels like a book version of Office Space, though with a larger cast of shallow characters. The “lessons learned” bullets at the ends of each chapter fit a pseduo-business book, but they rarely contribute much. The book is strongest as an indictment of corporatism and a personal tale.

I read it indifferently; the book starts off somewhat slow and very stylized, making it hard to really engage. The viewpoint character is decidedly strange and begins with amnesia (so that we can learn the world beside it).

In the end it’s a decent book– easy to set aside, a good intrigue (though hard to follow with the character names/relations so similar), and it has an interesting twist on the population explosion and containment.

I wolfed the book down. It kept me up several nights– I kept thinking just one more page, one more chapter. It was well written, and I really liked the characterization. As Jennifer said when she finished reading it, this book is going on our gift giving list. It has a lot to recommend itself to everyone, adult and teen.