• Books

    Neuromancer

    My experience with cyberpunk has not been large. I have read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and liked them well enough. This Canadian novel is the archetypal cyberpunk novel and won the triple crown of sci-fi literary awards: the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. For most of the novel, I was not too enticed. I kept waiting for myself to care, and to feel really invested into the plot. It did not happen, at least not the extent that I wanted it to. As a a result, I have feeling I’ll forget the plot of this book fairly soon. I think the blunt and straightforward prose are an advantage, but I was not wholly interested in the story. There are interesting concepts about AI, genetic engineering, cyberspace, and the concepts of the power of the free market to over rule the current world structure. Gibson wrote about all these before it was popular in the mainstream. If only I did not feel I have already read it all before because this fifteen years on. This would probably be a good introduction to cyberpunk as it has all the elements.

  • Books

    TBR Challenge 2008

    A chance to read all the books I own/borrowed, but have not read. 12 books in 12 months. I own most of these books, but a few are borrowed from friends.

    • The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
    • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Doysovesky
    • Beloved by Toni Morrison
    • Plays by Anton Chekhov
    • Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
    • Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
    • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
    • Little, Big by John Crowley
    • The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
    • Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
    • The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien
    • William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton

    Alternates

    The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien
    Summer by Edith Wharton
    Year of Wonders by Gerladine Brooks
    The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
    The Warden and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
    The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
    The Known World by Thomas P. Jones
    Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens
    Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
    Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
    Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand