Current book recursion nest state

[prog]

I think this is everything but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that I'm leaving something out.

I am a Strange Loop: Borrowed from Zarf. Quite thought-provoking. I find myself reflecting often on the metaphors of mind that Hofstadter presents (and then tells nigh-innumerable parables about). That said, I stopped reading it after I bought...

Spook

Comments

[dougo]

I just realized that I have another shelf full of recreational-math type books, so you could borrow another Gardner collection or two when you're done with the others. (Also Dewdney, Pickover, et al.)

[jazzfish]

like all of Gibson's recent stuff it's not very grabby

I'm glad it's not just me. I realised a few weeks ago that I have basically no recollection of what happened in _Pattern Recognition_ at all, despite having read it within the last three years.

Jhereg . . . started this today. Seven pages in. Hooked.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Me, I was hooked from the first line, but I'm a sucker for good openings.

Enjoy. You've got quite the ride coming up.

[radtea]

A philosopher reviewed I Am a Strange Loop as, more or less: naive computer scientist deals with death of a loved one through misunderstanding of the nature of identity. Didn't inspire me to read the book.

Having read Neuromancer back when it was a pulp novel, I still have trouble taking Gibson seriously, and even then found the cyber-punk style precious and affected. And there were a lot more accurate anticipations of a networked world--if memory serves Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise describes a "network search contest" that one of the characters won as a child, where the final question was something like "find the number of home runs scored by the winning team in the Little League championship of the country with the largest rubber exports in the year that Iowa had the least rainfall in July." I think the answer was "Brazil". Although we don't quite have a gameshow based on Google yet that sounds a lot more like the world we live in than anything in Gibson's supposedly prophetic novel

[prog]

I read the first Neuromancer sequel, Count Zero, last year and found it a really engaging adventure story and never mind all the cyber-whatzis. His very recent books, set in the present, feel more like meditations on the information-saturated culture as it actually came to be. They're very well informed and even interesting, but their narrative voice is... sleepy, somehow. It's odd.