Oh, and like everything of Jack’s, it’s a damn terrific book.

If you haven’t read this book, you shouldn’t get to call yourself a true fan of cyberpunk.

From the description of a narrator changing, I’m reminded of _A Prayer for Owen Meany_ by John Irving.

Cloud Atlas

Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely get it requested at my library.

@29, You won’t regret ordering it. I can see why someone would take it out from the library and not want to part with it.

Mostly based on how much I liked your “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” I followed-up on your recommendation.

$84.93 CDN later, I have all 6 books in the Dryco series coming from Amazon.ca.

Just don’t do an Oprah and make the Cory Book Club a regular thing, eh?

(in order)
Random Acts of Senseless Violence
Heathern
Ambient
Terraplane (A Very Mighty Book)
Elvissey
Going Going Gone

I have been evangelizing this series for over ten years. Glad to see Cory is hyping it on Boing Boing.

☺

And I haven’t read it yet, cause I don’t have time? Is that an excuse… and I’d not heard of it till now…

Mindy

(Actually, “Algernon” is a very nice counterpart to “Random Acts”, almost exactly the converse. It’s still a coming-of-age story, it’s an ascent rather than a descent, and the ending is downbeat without being bleak or depressing. And it’s another book which everyone should go read immediately, if they haven’t already!)

Nicola

take for instance, Z for Zacharia. Its written by Robert O’Brien and not dissimilar to Random Acts except there is a clear choice by the protagonist to cross lines that are debateably not be crossed and equally to restrain from taking other actions that equally could be justified.

I found the latter a much better treatment of a very similar concept – coming of age for young girl in a apocolyptic/post apocolypse USA

Which is not a bad thing….

In an oddly paranoid schizophrenic way, this post seems tailored specifically to my predicament. I won’t fight the synchronicity, I’ll pick up a copy of the book tonight.

I’ve never liked it.

I can admire the technical skill of the writing; as Cory says, Lola’s linguistic shift carries you with her smoothly, in contrast to far too many near-future novels with jarring and artificial slang. But I disagree that “even though it’s bleak and downbeat it’s never depressing”. I found the relentless bleakness extremely depressing, perhaps because it seemed artificial to me – I didn’t quite feel that the world around Lola actually was collapsing of it’s own accord so much as because the hand of the Author was visible forcing it.

*** Arguably mild spoilers follow; skip if bothered ***

The problem that, for me, makes it depressing and not just downbeat is that I never feel Lola makes any kind of choice. What passes for decision-making on her part is ultimately superficial and irrelevant; her final descent is not a decision,
just one last reaction to the environment.

You can read the first few chapters, then skip ahead extrapolating in a straight line… the ending will be exactly what it looked like.
Technically skilled writing? Yes. Diary of Anne Frank? No.

(YMMV as always. My sister loves this book. I’ve no idea why; usually I’m the one who likes my fiction dark. There must be a pattern there somewhere; we have the same argument over Atwood.)

Anyway, read Going, Going, Gone for the best coda to a sequence, especially the dig about someone having read Neuromancer too many times.

And check out his non-sf, russian novel ‘Lets Put The Future Behind Us’.

In Fact, why has he not written any more, more please Jack!!!

I’m in the position that there’s about a dozen authors I wish would WRITE THEIR DAMN BOOKS FASTER! But Womack has kept me waiting the longest!

I was absolutely wonder-struck to stumble upon the novelization in a Union Mission store.

I read and love it. In fact, I love it so much I gave it to a Russian exchange student whom I worked with at McDonald’s. He was nonplussed at the spelling mistakes. It was the foreign exchange McDonald’s, at least at the time. Sorry Dmitri. Hello Sergei, Ivan, and Vitaly.

I don’t think they liked Charleston, WV, too much.