Bookses

Well it's a shitty cold rainy day and I should have nothing better to do than to write blog posts, but somehow I can't really summon any enthusiasm for this. Anyway, here are some shortish reviews of books I've read recently. (I don't read that much nowadays, so when I say 'recently', I mean 'this year'.)

The Confusion - Neal Stephenson: This guy's a fantastic author, but this is the third book in a series and his style seems to be getting a little stale. Maybe it has something to do with the environment I read it in, which was mostly during long tedious uncomfortable flights to and around Europe, which made me somewhat cranky.

Anyway, this book is set in the late 1600s, and follows the two stories of a French noblewoman dealing with the emergence of banking and international economics, and a pirate vagabond traveling around the world, staying one step ahead of the people who are out to get him, and having all sorts of crazy adventures along the way. The twist is that this author's older books are all firmly in the SF/cyberpunk genre, so this is historical fiction written from a geek point of view. This means there are lots of wry technical descriptions about the way things were done back in the old days, and a focus on obscure historical details that would be overlooked in most books in this genre.

Anyway, the first book in the series is called Cryptonomicon, and it's very very good, so read that one first.