Prospective Reads

I was originally planning to do a fairly academic, drawn out post here about how Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is not actually cyberpunk, but my smarter-than-me boyfriend has informed me that, in fact, it's categorized as "post-cyberpunk" and not actually the former at all. So. That happened.

(My reasoning was going to be an elegant deconstruction about how the focus of Snow Crash is actually the relationships between people, rather than mankind's relationship to technology and machines, which is what I think the point of pure cyberpunk is. Snow Crash is much more involved in tracing the connecting lines between people, following threads of religion, language, and conformity to show the web that's netting all of us into one big mass of humanity. And then that humanity breeds viruses and programs, I don't know. I stopped outlining what was essentially a college essay when I discovered that this is not a new theory.)

I could ALSO give my excuses for not reading One Hundred Years of Solitude yet, but that one boils down easy: the guy in my office who told me I have to read it, said I need to watch some bizarre film called Gummo first. I haven't watched the film yet, so I haven't read the book yet. I'm going to begin it tentatively, I can tell you that much - I'm no longer intimidated by not finishing books, so if it drags too hard I'm putting it down. But I'm probably being unfair to it; Lord knows that since finishing school I've gotten HELLA lazy in my reading habits.

What I will do is cheerfully tell you to go read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Wonderful character-driven mysteries, and Larsson the author is a master of story-telling. The fact that they are both translations (Swedish to English) didn't actually impact the prose for me, either (I tend to think translations come out a little stiff, but Tattoo and Fire are both fluid and charming).

Chapter One

No review yet, but I thought I'd get the momentum going by providing you with some book/reader-friendly newslinks.

Why Twilight will never be the next Harry Potter. Stephanie Meyer would actually have to get over her hissy fit to produce another book.

Books sent to your cell phone?

Not even publishing is safe from the recession... And let me say right now, that I will ALWAYS be in the market for real, solid, physical books. But this does explain the iPhone thing.

These will be the books off my shelves that I'll be reading for your viewing pleasure.

Nighttime reads when you're not ready to turn the light off yet and sleep. And you can bet I'll be reading all three, and giving you the breakdown on the first two (admit it, you've either read Midnight's Children or been told to by someone else) so keep your eyes open.

Does religion trying to be trendy invalidate it?

Neil Gaiman does Batman?

Book as art: and damn, is it expensive

Top Ten novels of 2008 Agree with the list? What changes would you make? (Do we really need more slave/feminist novels from Toni Morrison?)