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summer reading

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JD:
The Demonata is a fun series.

Alex C:
I should probably stress that my earlier criticisms mostly apply to Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. As far as protagonists go, I feel like Case did the best job of fitting Gibsons' strengths. He's not a big talker and or even a very engaging character, per se, but that's sort of the point, since he's a guy for whom normal life had lost its flavor.

Buttfranklin:

--- Quote from: Linds on 12 Jun 2010, 20:16 ---It wasn't so much the prose itself or the characters/landscape that bothered me, it was the actual dialogue between characters. And sometimes certain bits of action were underdeveloped, such as Linda Lee's death. Some of the descriptions of Chiba were pretty awesome, but the dialogue brought it down for me. I guess I just don't like cyberpunk lingo.

--- End quote ---
Agreed.  I liked the opening description of the sky being the color of a television turned to a dead channel, but when he had to repeat it three times over the course of how far I got into the book, I thought to myself, "this guy kind of sucks at prose writing."  I found the entire thing pretty boring and uninteresting.  I didn't finish the book so I can't judge the whole thing, but my experience of it was one of mostly disappointment considering how influential the novel was.

You may want to check out Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.  It's pretty crazy and off-beat but in a way I found engaging, not off-putting.  It's like Neuromancer (the good bits), H.P. Lovecraft, the Maltese Falcon and... I don't know, I don't read a lot of surreal stuff, but it reminds me a little bit of Milan Kundera when he got more interested in writing about ideas and character-ideas than he did actual plot or story.

Scandanavian War Machine:
I'm a couple of chapters into Dan Simmons' new one Black Hills and I'm really enjoying it. The style is absolutely nothing like any of Simmons' previous work (that I've read anyway), which is refreshing after the marathon that was Drood (excellent as it may have been, it was nothing short of some sort of literary endurance marathon).

Oddly enough, the book that it reminds me of the most is In The Face of My Enemy, which is an older pulp sci-fi book about an immortal, shape-shifting caveman as he lives through the millenia.
while we're on the subject, you should all try to find a copy of In The Face of My Enemy because you can prolly get it super cheap (it's out of print, but it's not very popular). It's no masterpiece but it's one of my favorite sci-fi books I've ever read.

Buttfranklin:
Speaking of Sci-Fi, any self respecting fan of the genre should read The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.  Love it or hate it, without it there would be no cyberpunk.  I kind of chortled reading Neuromancer, thinking "Wow this guy just wants to be a hip Alfred Bester."

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