Reading List: 2005

The Fool’s Run – John Sandford (September)
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer – John Markoff (September)
The Hot Kid – Elmore Leonard (August)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling (August)
The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova (July)
The System of the World – Neal Stephenson (June)
The Twelfth Card – Jeffery Deaver (May)
All the Flowers Are Dying – Lawrence Block (February)
The Broker – John Grisham (February)
State of Fear – Michael Crichton (February)

The Baroque Cycle

Just finished reading the third (and final) volume of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World). I don’t know what to say about almost 3,000 pages except it was a journey. Perhaps one for fans only. I didn’t care much for The Diamond Age but loved Cryptonomicon (1,168 pages) and Snow Crash. Some day I’ll be at a boring party and meet someone that read and enjoyed the story of Dr. Waterhouse, Eliza and Jack Shaftoe as much as I. And we’ll have a nice, long chat.

Death by Hollywood

As a long-time fan of NYPD Blue, I had to give Steven Bochco’s first novel a read. The publisher had to do the usual margin and leading tricks to get this up to hard-back page count (what would have been wrong with a 150 page novel?). But Death by Hollywood is a tasty little snack.

By and large, we’re nothing more than well-paid pimps who represent our poched-out clients as if they’re beautiful young virgins, offereing them up to a bunch of jaded johns who know better, but these are the only whores in town. As the saying goes, denial is not a river in Egypt. It’s a river in Hollywood, and it runs deep, and brown.

On deck: Deception Point by Dan Brown; and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Volume one of three. Each in the 1,000 page range.