Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
What books are you reading?
40hz:
I'm currently reading reamde. As other stuff by Neal Stephenson, it's pretty great, and even at page 380/1044 I'm not entirely sure exactly what the story is about, or how it's going to unfold - and that in a positive sense. It also features at least one shootout scene, which I'm not usually too big a fan of in books... but it's great in this one.
***
Richard Forthrast, a multi-millionaire marijuana smuggler, has parlayed his wealth into an empire by developing T'Rain, a billion-dollar online role-playing game with legions of fans around the world.
But T'Rain's success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold, unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player's electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game's virtual universe - and Richard is caught in the crossfire. Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho, Reamde traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which computer hackers and mobsters, entrepreneurs and religious fundamentalists face off in a battle for survival, Reamde is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century.
--- End quote ---
-f0dder (August 12, 2015, 03:51 PM)
--- End quote ---
Give his book Cryptonomicon a try after you finish readme. Excellent read. His The Diamond Age is also pretty good. :Thmbsup:
40hz:
Just finished The Islanders by Christopher Priest.
Odd meta-novel. Part gazette, part almanac, part semi-linked short story/essay collection that hangs together particularly well, although in a very peculiar way. Another one of those books I personally like that you'll either love or hate. Hard to classify as to subject or style. For lack of a better word, I'd call it "experimental."
On the surface it's a guidebook to the Dream Archipelago, a vast collection of islands located in the Midway Sea, on an unnamed earth-like world. This archipelago has some unusual features such as being generally impossible to map or catalog. It also displays temporal and spatial contractions and discontinuities in seemingly random fashion.
To the north is an unnamed super-continent which is home to approximately 60 nations, several of which are constantly in a state of war with each other. To the south is another mostly arctic super-continent named Sudmaieure. Sudmaieure is uninhabited. It's only use is to serve as a battleground for various warring northern nations who would prefer to conduct their hostilities with each other outside their geographic borders in order to avoid civilian casualties and damage to their infrastructure and cities. One feature of the Dream Archipelago is the constant coming and goings of warships and troop transports shuttling young military forces and frightening warmaking technologies to the hot wars being conducted in the southern continent. It is generally believed that the troops who are sent there seldom return - although even that, like everything else in this book, is not an established fact.
The Archipelago is officially neutral by covenant, and remains out of the northern conflicts. Although that doesn't stop various northern nations from occupying, annexing, or establishing bases at will wherever they feel the need - something the island nations protest vehemently but basically have no power to prevent - any more than they can the mysterious drone flights (ostensibly for mapping purposes) that are seen everywhere in the archipelago - although nobody really knows what they're up there for.
Inside this framework, anything and everything goes. Some sections read like a tour guide for a particular island. Several are disjointed pieces of larger tales that straddle various islands or characters the reader meets along the way. All in all, a crazy jigsaw puzzle of impressions, narrative, and character development.
I don't know whether this book is an allegory, simply brilliant, or just Christopher Priest using up his collection of snippets and story pieces which he never expanded into full novels. But whatever it is, I found it a really enjoyable albeit different sort of book. And I was actually disappointed when I reached the end. First, because I really enjoyed the journey the book took me on. And second, because I still had so many intriguing questions left unanswered.
If you're the sort who demands closure and a general 'tidying up' by the end of a book you'll really be annoyed by this one.
Publisher's Weekly had this to say:
British novelist Priest (The Prestige) creates a mind-bending, head-scratching book (already much lauded in the U.K.) that pretends to be a gazetteer of the Dream Archipelago, uncountable islands spread around a world whose temporal and spatial anomalies make such a project futile. The dispassionate descriptions of separate islands include odd references out of which it's possible to begin assembling a cast of characters: maniac artists, social reformers, murderers, scientific researchers, and passionate lovers. Some of these categories overlap, and all the actors are maddeningly fragmented, apt to fade away or flash intensely to life. Interpolated bits of directly personal narratives sometimes clarify and sometimes muddy the story (or stories), while uncanny events struggle to escape the gazetteers' avowedly objective control and Priest's elegant, cool prose. The result is wonderfully fascinating, if occasionally frustrating, and entirely unforgettable.[
--- End quote ---
Not for everyone. But highly recommended. 8)
panzer:
MilesAhead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five
mouser:
Just read "The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible", by Lance Fortnow 2013
http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Ticket-NP-Search-Impossible/dp/0691156492
It's a book that discusses the P vs NP problem -- a very important problem in computer science and mathematics, having to do with how easy or hard it is to solve certain algorithmic problems (see wikipedia page here)..
I disliked the book thoroughly -- felt very lazy and unserious to me. Early on the author blithely says he chooses not to define the problem of P vs NP and then spends 20 or 30 pages making up fiction about how cool it would be in a world where P = NP. Just a lot of silly and very little substance. I expected more and better historical background.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version