50 books in 2006
1. 1/7/06 Victorian People and Ideas by Richard D. Altick
A small book (300 pages) but slow going, at least the first half, which deals with economics and politics, two subjects which hold no interest to me. The last part, focusing on religion, education, working situations and the arts, I found very fascinating. Quite useful for a quick overview of the age.
2. 1/8/06 Falling Angels by Barbara Gowdy
A novel about three sisters growing up with an alcoholic mother and an abusive father in the 60s. This could be a very depressing subject, but the sisters are so interesting, reacting as they do in very different ways to their situation, that it's not what one would think. In the end, there is hope for them, especially for the one who becomes aware of why she reacts in the ways she does.
3. 1/16/06 Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia
I found a lot of this book interesting, although some was quite infuriating.
This woman is so full of herself it's incredible. She mentions at one point how some people have compared her to Ayn Rand, and that she doesn't see it that much, but she did seem pleased. She puts me in mind of Rand, too, and not for good reasons. Like Rand, she thinks she's a genius. Maybe one or both of them are/were, I don't know, but in their own minds they certainly are/were. Like Rand, she thinks little of the mental powers of most other women- Paglia/Rand are the only women who are capable of thinking at the same level as men, although at least Paglia feels the deficit is cultural rather than biological.
At one point, she is criticizing another writer- for a lot of things, some quite well founded, but one thing amused me- in his book, he has an interview with himself: "Since when do scholars publish interviews with themselves?" And yet, there it is- you guessed it- an interview with herself. She has no problem criticizing people for doing the same things she does- but then, she prides herself on breaking the rules.
Another point I found humorous was when, while deriding the followers of Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, she states "They (Americans) have no idea that in French you can form sentances that are virtually content-free, that are merely rhetorical flourishes echoing, reversing or sabotaging prior French sentances". Like English sentances can't do that? She's never heard an American politician talk?!? She gets so into her hatred of the Foucaultians that she uses things agains them that she just doesn' have to.
I think I will read the other book; she's held my interest enough. I agree with her take on the PCing of America. But I really hate that she keeps bringing up the same things over and over again- it's boring. I have a thorough disdain for her insistance on how great she, and she alone, is. And if she brings up again how her being Italian is a lot of the reason for her ability to see through stupid things I'll just scream.
4. 1/19/06 The Earth Path by Starhawk
A blend of ecology and spirituality. I approachec it a bit gingerly, expecting a 'humans are a blight upon the earth" attitude. I was pleasantly surprised that she takes a middle of the road approach, pointing out the bad things that are happening to the earth because of human greed, waste and short sightedness, but also allowing that humans are a part of the earth with a right to a pleasant life. The book is mainly meditations on the various aspects of the earth - water, soil, the animals- aimed at making one more aware of what is around us.
5. 1/30/06 Vamps & Tramps by Camille Paglia
This is a better book that Sex, Art and American Culture. It's less repetitive- although it's certainly that in places- and it has some of her book reviews and essays about works of literature, which is where I feel she shines. There is, however, an annoying amount of self aggrandizement- for instance, in the back of the book (as in S,A & AC) a complete list of every media mention of her since the previous book. Talk about filler! And, once again, she prints interviews with herself, something that she criticizes others for doing. Also once again, she gets onto her theory that women are just lacking what it takes to be great thinkers (and, btw, great rock guitarists), not from a social point of view, but by biological determinism. She, of course, is the exception.
I guess I'm glad I read the book, but I wish I could have figured out which parts I could have skipped without losing anything new. That's hard, since she rarely sticks to any topic for long.
6. 1/31/06 Frankenstein: Book Two: City of Night by Dean Koontz
Book One was involved; Book Two brings more strands into play, making this story much more complex than I'd ever thought a reworking of this classic tale could be. Of course the usual Koontz staples are here: the fearless female lead, the good natured male lead, the innocent child. This Fearless Female, though, rather than being the usual everyday housewife thrown willy-nilly into adventure, is a cop with a love of guns and fast driving, with a lot in common with the currently in vogue kickass female in fantasy. The monsters are taking on lives and personalities of their own, adding their agendas to Frankenstein's plot to- of course- take over the world. Great mind candy.
7. 2/3/06 Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates
Oates is a writer who is all over the map with her subject matter, from boxing to fantasy to political to mainline fiction. In this book, she examines what happens to a thirty something woman when her mother is murdered. And she gets the emotions of mother so spot on it's eerie, at least to me. Now, my mother wasn't murdered, and I wasn't thirtyish when she died, but still, the stages the woman goes through, from the not wanting to touch anything, to hauling back things that were picked out to be thrown away, to the adoption of the mother's habits, recipes and friends, to the way people come forward and start telling the dead woman's secrets to the daughter all perfectly mirror the things I went through. I don't know when- or if- Oates' mother died, but she certainly looks at a mother's loss with crystal clarity. Then there is the contrast with the way the other daughter deals with the death, by not being able to deal with it, even thoug she, the elder, is supposed to be the 'adult' one. I enjoyed watching the woman grow through her loss and emerge on the other side a more complete woman. Which makes me ask why the hell does it take a big loss to make some of us grow up, even though we think we're grown before?!?
8. 2/10/06 The Ivory and The Horn by Charles de Lint
A collection of short stories set in Newford, his fictional Canadian town where urban reality meets fantasy.
I think his Newford stories are my favorite of all his work. The fact that his stories take place in a modern urban setting is much more appealing than other world, sword and sorcery, unicorns and magic kingdoms fantasy. In de Lint's world, you could walk into an alley and there will be fairies in it. That crazy homeless guy could be communicating with the dead. The local drunk could be an avatar. I really like this concept, that you don't have to go to another world to see the fantasic- or even go out into the wilderness- that it exists all around, even in the city. I like that de Lint's protagonists are artists, muscicians, homeless folk, and social workers rather than knights and kings.
9. The Well-Tended Perennial Garden by Tracy diSabato-Aust
This is a great gardening book- one of the few I've read clear through. Many gardening books tell you how to start a garden, and list some plants; this one actually tells you how to treat the plants through out their lives. When to pince, prune, deadhead, who can be divided, staked, cut back. While a good lot of what's in it I've discovered through trial and error, I'd recommend this book to others to save them a lot of time and trouble.
10 Ten Tales Tall & True by Alasdair Gray
Short stories by the author of Poor Things, and not at all what I expected from him. There is a pronounced grimness to all the tales, and despite the fact that one of the terms on the cover is 'science fiction', I didn't detect any. Still I, well, I can't say really enjoyed the stories, but I felt they were quite good, albeit not recommended for one stuck in a depression.
11. Different Kinds of Dead by Ed Gorman
An unusual collection of short stories- some crime, some science fiction, some western- all connected by a sense of weirdness. I never expected weirdness from a western- I never expected to read a western but I was enjoying the other stories so what the hell- but Gorman makes it work flawlessly. It's not all sci-fi weird, a lot of the stories are just human weird, which may be the weirdest weird of all. The writing is edgy, some of it bringing film noir to mind. I picked up this book on a whim- it had 'Dead' in the title- but just may look for more of this author's work.
12. Making Natural Liquid Soaps by Catherine Failor.
Totally different process (hot process rather than cold) from the one the local soapers use, but sounds a lot more foolproof. I *think* I understand enough to not screw it up, and if I do, to fix it. The beauty of this method is that almost everything is fixable, rather than throwing out errors. Dyes stay colored rather than muddy, fragrances stay, well, fragrant. But there is math involved. And chemistry. Makes brain huuurrrrtttt....
13. Mama by Terry McMillan
Apparently this was McMillan's first novel, but if it is, it's very mature writing for a first.
In some ways, the story is very depressing- joblessness, poverty, alcoholism, drugs, violence- but in the end, things look better. Mama wants a better life for her kids than she has had, and it does happen, or, at least, it looks like it will happen for all of them. There is even some hope that, with no one dependant on Mama for the first time since she was 18, she will manage to break out of her rut, too.
14. The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
The novel's action pivots around a Renaissance book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and the unraveling of it's secrets. (I was surprised to find that the book was real, assuming it to be a Necronomicron sort of thing; I checked several sources, not trusting that some weren't internet hoaxes based on Rule of Four) At the same time, it's a coming of age story and a murder mystery.
It's a remarkably mature work for a first novel, although there is some failure to develop characters fully. I didn't notice any holes in the plot (other than that a victim of a massive burn would have been sent to a Burn Center, not left at a collage hospital), the motives hold well, and the characters go on to lives that are consistant with what we know about them. Thankfully, there was no secret society involved! I hope to see the authors write more books. They have a good start.
15. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
Having not enjoyed Count Zero or Neuromancer( although I did recognize them as well written and innovative), I'm not sure why I picked up Pattern Recognition, but it's totally unlike those two books. While it does use cyberspace for part of it's action, it's more of an adventure/spy story set in meat space. The protagonist- a quirky, tough woman- is easy to like, a large change from Neuro or CZ, where there was absolutely no one I'd ever want to meet. I enjoyed the mix of cyber and physical world, and the characters are well done, the puzzle the hero solves fascinating. I found it very compelling, but I wonder if fan's of Gibson's earlier work will consider it a sell out. ?
16. The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
I seem to be having a bit of a run of first novels. (well, excepting Pattern Recognition). This one shows it's firstness quite a bit. It has a sort of unformed style to it, being a pastiche of social satire & coming of age novel with a bit of early feminism thrown in.
I'd read only two of Woolf's other works- Flush, which is told from a dog's point of view, and A Room of One's Own, a feminist bit which was more or less required reading back i nthe 70s-so I really didn't know what to expect from her work. I found it a bit of an odd mix.
I found the satire amusing and infuriating. Amusing that people once acted in these ways, infuriated that there are still a lot of people like that- set into manners without ever questioning them, dividing people by race and class. I found the coming of age part a bit harder to take-Rachel, who evolves into the main character, is to me quite boring. Helen, her aunt, is much more interesting, and an intriguing story could have been made of the young man who obviously has a crush on her. Rachel just kind of exists, taking no real action. Admittedly, with her sheltered upbringing, she is emotionally more 13 than her real 24, but even so, her lack of curiosity is annoying. And the men- I wonder if all the men of Woolf's social set were as bad as she makes out these characters, or if she was being heavy handed to make a point that others weren't making at the time. Her male characters find it perfectly acceptable to tell the women- to their faces- how stupid they are, how they aren't pretty, how they are incapable of thinking like men. One wishes they would all perish in the Amazon. They wouldn't be much missed, given how they don't share emotions or thoughts with the women, who merely exist to serve.
17. The Silence in Heaven by Peter Lord-Wolff
It is, of course, the first of a trilogy, the way all first fantasy novels seem to be. Let us hope he never finishes the other two. It is a truly bad novel. Fallen angels who create vampires by accident, chases by Scotland Yard- a rather strange plot that I could perhaps manage to deal with if the characters weren't so totally one dimensional. I will NOT be looking for the sequels.
18. Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda
A very short book. A true story of a geisha, sold into service by her parents. This is not the elegant world of the Gion, where geisha are appreciated for their artistic accomplishments, but the rural hot springs resort world, where sex with the client- any client, not just the danna- is a given. This woman knows the most incredible poverty and cruelty from the time she is a small child, yet grows up to take on the care of her younger brother and later, children of strangers. Society is nasty to her- almost no work is available to a former geisha as she is not 'suitable' yet prostitution is made illegal. After writing her story (she is barely literate, a client having encouraged her to learn to write), she has to leave the town she lives in because no one wants to have anything to do with her. This really undoes the glamorous world portrayed in Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.
19. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
This book is both informational and entertaining. It covers the origins of the universe, the origins and makeup of the Earth, the origins of life, and the evolution of humans, presenting these things as they were discovered, explaining the beliefs that were held before the discoveries and how the discoveries were accepted (or not). The personalities are as interesting as the science. Funny how so many things were worked out by amateur scientists in the 1800s- sad that the curiosity that was rampant in that era seems to be with us no longer. While the book doesn't go deeply into any subject, it covers them well enough to make a person 'literate' in them. A bibliography in the back provides places to go if one wishes to learn more.
This is the kind of book I would like to see as required reading for all students (and adults- hah!) as it lays the science out so plainly and simply that it would be hard *not* to get it.
20. The Passion Dream Book by Whitney Otto
Moving from the Italian Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, this novel deals with issues of race, feminism, art, and the problem that women artists have had through the ages- of ending up supporting the male artists rather than exploring their own art. The female protagonists of both the ages explored refuse to follow this pattern.
This book is a little gem. Otto mixes real people and events with fiction, making a rich tapestry of artists, ex-pats in Paris, jazz musicians in Harlem, and silent era Hollywood. The characters and settings come vividly alive. While it has nothing to do with the quality of the story, even the cover of the book is precious, copper and blue and starry.
Now if I could just figure out if Apple is supposed to be Zora Neal Hurston....
21. The Fig Eate by Jodie Shields
A detective story set in 1910 (or so) Vienna. I thought this book would be great- loosely based on one of Freud's real patients, an inspector using the early beginnings of modern criminalistics, an amateur detective who is using intuition- it seemed to have a lot going for it. But it fails it's promise. The characters are lifeless and poorly drawn (I couldn't even care about the murder victim' "eh, one less drama queen") There are more loose ends than a season finale. Clues that seem very important lead nowhere. The end is very unsatisfying.
Where the writer shines is in her descriptions. The food - do these people ever stop eating? - the clothes, the parks and buildings, the superstitions are all given in loving detail. After finishing the book, I looked the author up and found she had written a couple of books on fashion history. I suspect these are very well written as they are about objects; sadly, her grasp of character and plot is not very strong.
22. The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant
A slim volume (barely 100 pages), it distills what the Durants feel are the important things inhistory- not the facts and acts, but the trends and repititions, what did and didn't have lasting effects. Writtne in 1968, it seems to have been ahead of it's time, at least as I remember that time. They disdain the long held theory that there were separate human races, and they express fear at the fact that there was more difference in the amount of wealth held by the richest & the poorest than at any time since pre-Imperial Rome (and it's so very much worse now, 38 years later!). I find it dismaying that they feel the majority of people need religion to keep them moral- apparently, without the fear of hell, a lot of people will run over the top of each other. Equally saddening to me is that without greed, and the possibility of the fullfillment of that greed, most people will not work. Now, I've suspected this for a very long time (ever since my college Chinese history teacher kept pushing Communism as the only way to paradise) but I didn't enjoy seeing it proved by historical anecdote.
This little book is, I think, an important one. I think it makes the world a lot more understandable.
23. Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
I really enjoyed this book. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction lately, and so much of it (realistically) is depressing. If you're born to low status in the past, you stayed at low status. End of story. Good things did not happen to you. So the novels generally went along the lines of "Person is born to be a maid or some such. Shitty things happen to them. Then really shitty things happen to them. Then spectacularly shitty things happen to them. The end." Yes, I've been influenced by Slammerkin and The Quincunx.
While this girl's life generally sucks- poverty, back-breakingly hard work, blinded parent, a couple of nasty people where she lives/works- she never starves or has no place to go. There are some light spots in her life- her suitor, the beauty of the paintings Vermeer does. It's balanced, like most people's lives are.
I loved the descriptions of how the paints were maide, of how Vermeer worked, how he looked at color. Life in Delft is given in sparkling detail. A luminous little book.
24. The Blue Flower/ The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald- a two in one volume.
Blue Flower is based on fact; a tale set in Goethe's Germany. A young philosopher, destined by poverty to be an inspector of salt mines, falls in love with a 12 year old girl, calling her his heart's heart and his philosophy. He feels her youthful innocence represents all that is good. I found the book a pleasant diversion, but maybe not the masterpiece that A.S. Byatt declared it.
The Bookshop, about a widow who decides to open a bookstore in a small town, I found witty and all too familiar. Even though this small town setting is in coastal East Anglia, and the time is 1959, I swear I know all these people. All small towns must have the same cast of characters. She runs afoal of the town's rich woman and arbiter of all things cultural, who wants the building for her own purposes. The building is haunted by a poltergeist. When she stocks Lolita when it's first published, and crowds gather, the other merchants become angry. All these things together make success in a small town impossible.
The book has one of my all time favorite lines in it. The widow has employed an 11 year old girl as her assistant. The rich woman sics the government on her for employing a minor. They investigate, and find that, while the employment has not hurt the girl's school work at all, "her health and safety and welfare are at risk in your premises which are haunted in an objectionable manner.... I am advised that under the provisions of the Act the supernatural would be classed with bacon-slicers and other machinery through which young persons must not be exposed to the risk of injury" I just love that a bureaucracy has a rating for the supernatural.
25. "Final Gifts- Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs and Communications of the Dying" by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley.
This is an interesting book written by two long time hospice nurses. They tell about the things that many dying people go through- not just the standard denail/bargaining/acceptance thing, but things like seeing and talking with people already dead, seeing someplace beyond our world, and needing closure and sometimes permission to go from their loved ones. I think it's a very useful book for those dealing with the dying- it gives, for instance, hints on how to get they dying person to talk about what they see, and how to draw them out so that what they need for closure and peace can be found out and provided. But it's a little too pretty, perhaps. All the people in the book dye painlessly and peacefully. If this is the only death and dying book one were to read, they would be woefully unprepared for what can be the reality of caring for a dying loved one. Not all die wreathed in beatific smiles; some go puking blood, in agony and shitting themselves. Not all doctors will provide adequate pain control. Not all have a large and loving family to pitch in and provide hands to care for the dying, rather than leaving one or two people to do it all. But despite this shortcoming, I think it's a good book to have.
26. lost boy lost girl by Peter Straub.
Straub is a writer I usually have mixed feelings about. I like his work, but it always leaves me a little unsatisfied. This book had that effect on me. He takes the threads of the supernatural and two different serial killers and tries to braid them together. The serial killers go together well, but the supernatural is a bit forced. It works, but not terribly well. Character is never Straub's strong suite, and this is apparent again. One of the main characters (the father of the lost boy, who should be a very vivid character) is pure caricature. The two teens are well done, though, and the sometime narrator, the lost boy's uncle, has promise. The shifting POV is a little annoying.
My feeling was that the book was a first draft and would have greatly benefited from some rewriting.
27. Maybe the Moon, by Armistead Maupin
Written in diary style. this is the tale of Cady Roth, a dwarf who was the operator inside an 'elf' in a wildly popular movie that sounds suspiciously like 'ET'. Since her success in this movie (for which she receives no credits), success has eluded her because society will not take a little person, no matter how talented, seriously. Love is also a problem for her. Finally, she is reduced to working kid's parties.
At last things start to look up when she finds a sensitive lover and also plots a perfect way to show the world her singing talent *and* get back at the producer of the movie who turned his back on her.
The characters are so full and well drawn in the book I felt I knew them. Even the one who starts out seeming like a caricature (her room mate) ends up a well rounded, real, personality. All together an excellent book.
28. Waiting by Ha Jin.
Set in post-Revolutionary China, this book chronicles the 18 year long affair- an affair with no sex- of a doctor and a nurse. The doctor is stuck in an arranged marriage with an uneducated, plain woman, who he leaves as an embarrassment in his poor country village while he lives and works in a city. Once a year, he tries to divorce her. ?She always refuses. Finally, after living apart those 18 years, he can legally divorce her without her approval. And that's when his real misery starts. He discovers that the time of waiting was peaceful and required nothing, really, from him. Now he can marry, and his new wife wears him out sexually, she gets pregnant, her health fails, he must take care of babies and her both. This was not what he thought he was getting!
The rules that govern life in this novel are inflexible and all encompassing, telling them how every single aspect of their lives will be lived. Some of the rules are from the pre-Revolutionary era, such as the arranged marriage, but most are Maoist government inventions. It's really frightening how so many people submitted to such tyranny that micromanaged their lives.
29. The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley
I picked this up ages ago because it was written by Bradley, and I had loved The Mists of Avalon. This book is totally unlike that other.
Catch Trap is about two things- the circus, and trapeze work in particular, and gay love back in the 40s-50s, when it was SERIOUSLY not okay to be gay. Apparently, Bradley had quite an interest in the history of the flying trapeze and she proves this over almost 700 pages.
This book seemed to go on forever, and a few times I thought about putting it down. But I had come to care about the characters and wanted to see where Bradley took them. The book covers 9 years, from the main characters early teens to his maturity, both physically and emotionally. He loves Mario, a member of a great 'flying' family, and Mario loves him, but their love seems doomed in that time and place. Even though Mario is the older of the two, he is the one who needs constant babying and emotional propping up by the younger Tommy, being both emotionally and physically abusive to him at times. To make matters worse, some of Mario's large, close family are seriously homophobic.
The characters are great and the setting perfectly realized, but the book really could have been a bit shorter.
30. Crossing to Avalon- A Woman's Midlife Passage by Jean Shinoda Bolen.
I have loved Bolen's other books and was rather disappointed by this one. Her other books were a type of Jungian analysis and archetype; this one is her personal experiences, both physical and spiritual, on a pilgramage to European (mostly British Isles) spiritual centers with a couple of other women. I ended up putting the book down halfway through, and picking it back up after I read Catch Trap, because I just couldn't get into it. It was pretty fluffy, although not without value. She uses her own discoveries and old myths to illuminate the stages we can get stuck in at mid-life. Not her best work, but useful.
31. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Dr. Barbara Mertz
Dr. Mertz is a real Egyptian scholar, so it surprised me to find that the book was written in a sort of National Geographic Special style, very folksy and talky. ("let's get on a boat and take a tour of the realm now..") I foudn that bit annoying, but it was concentrated at the beginning of the book, so it's tolerable. There are sections on houses, temples, jewelry, the arts, etc that are thinner than I would have liked, but I understand that archaeologists can only learn small amounts about daily life from the imperishable things that have survived the millennia. A larger amount of space is devoted to religion and the dead- logical since that is where the Egyptians put a great deal of money into things that would survive a long time. I found it ironic that the more complicated the mortuary practices got, the less time the mummies survived. Nothing, apparently, is better than just letting the body sit out in the dry desert air.
I found parts of the section on clothing rather humorous. It's obvious from the paintings and carvings that the ancient Egyptians had no problem with showing their bodies. Dr. Mertz is well aware of this. Twice she mentions how awful it must have been for heavier women to have to wear the thin, tight, body revealing fashions of that era. Why assume that the people back then shared our cultures feeling that if a body carrying a few extra pounds was bared, people would run screaming into the night, fearing blindness? Admittedly, virtually all surviving pictures show slim people, but that doesn't mean they found heavier ones abhorrant.
A rather fun book, but not what I was hoping for.
32. Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
Loosely translated, "Seize the Throat"! Vampires vs. witches. Great fun as always! A nice big bon-bon for the brain.
33. Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet
Gazelle is a gem of a novel, a tale of a young girl's sexual awakening and of her family falling apart in 1950s Egypt. This takes place amidst fabulous fragrances (one of the main characters is a perfumer) beautiful people, wonderful foods. Ducornet has the ability to describe every thing in detail without bogging the story down with excess words, and this, combined with a way of making all the characters sympathetic, warts and all (and there are some pretty big warts) make for an I can't put it down read. I had the feeling I was enveloped in her world, moving through a fog of drugs, while I was reading it. Highly recommended.
34. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott
This slim volume is a book of geometry made simple, in a sort of Sophie's World style, but it's a lot more than that. While the story is about an inhabitant of a 2 dimensional world (A Square is what he goes by) who is shown how a one dimensional and a zero dimensional world would work, and then shown the 3-D world of solids, it's also a social satire. Written during the Victorian era, he mocks the class system & government through a description of the 2-D Flatland. The author has been called a misogynist, but I'm not sure if he really was, or if he was satirizing the view, common in his time, of women as emotional, brainless idiots. Given that he also describes military men as stupid and violent, and has the Square hold the upper classes (the more oblique your angles, the higher class you are- circles are the top caste) in unwonted awe, I'm going to guess that misogyny was part of the satire.
The actual purpose of the book seems to be to get people's heads around the idea of a 4th dimension. I'm not sure he accomplished that, but it was a good read and not dated by being over 100 years old.
35. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I loved this book. The world is distopian, but not Neuromancer type distopian. The characters are well done and you can care about them, unlike those in Neuromancer. Stephenson has a sense of humor in this book, and he took 1992s trends and extrapolated them into a world that I see evolving around us today. He didnt' get everything right- people aren't gathering in cyberspace while wearing goggles and gloves to get the benefit of realisitic setttings (thank gawd the trend for endless animations on websites died a few years ago) and no one is using skateboarders for high speed couriers (yet), but the burbclaves (gated communites) are very real, as is the replacement of independant business by franchises.
The novel weaves Sumerian myth, neuro-linguistic programming, cyberpunk, virtual reality and a lot of other things together and the action never stops. Well, it does slow a few times while conversations explain about Sumerian myth and why it has anything to do with computer hackers and virus from outer space, but he doesn't over do the stop and talk routine.
Oh, and the main character's name is Hiro Protagonist- how Dickensian can you get?
36. Plant Life by Valerie Easton
This is a collection of the author's columns written for Pacific Northwest magazine. These short articles are arranged by season, giving a year's worth of her observations and recommendations. She has several on colors; it was interesting to compare what she wrote with what I have written on the same things (my article on blue was better; hers on yellow started out totally different but we came to the same conclusions). Although written for the much-warmer-than-us Seattle area, I found the book useful and entertaining. She mentions a lot of interesting plants that I have now looked up; some are even hardy in my area. I'm not sure if this is good or bad; new plants, more money spent!
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