Vacation Reading
Thanks to Fred Sampson’s recommendation, I had some time in Hawaii to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
…and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.
I gave the book away, but I wrote that quote down because it just really struck me as beautiful and also commenting on some similar stuff to what I tend to write about (just not as eloquently…elided!)
I also read Market Forces by Richard Morgan; also discovered via a blog entry, in this case from a student in my class last semester. It wasn’t as cool as the Takeshi Kovacs books (action/noir/hardboiled/tech-sci-fi) and in some ways was rather silly and heavy-handed (in the future, investment bankers drive armored vehicles and have sanctioned duels to kill each other and win deals to subsize global events like small wars), but fun anyway. Most amazing was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer which blew me away. I liked his first book, but this was awesome. Read it in one long day of airport lounges and airplane rides. Highly recommended.
And I made it through about 70% of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge; the kind of sci-fi I would have liked in my younger days; but now really dated. The speculative concepts he’s exploring seem less exciting or relevant than what Sterling et. al are doing.