Double Blind – 2/5
Sometimes I read a book and I wish I listened to the audiobook. Not that I always feel this way, but throughout this book I kept feeling I might give it a better shrift if I had listened to it. Reading it though, I felt my experience of it to be quite anemic and my reaction to the book was lukewarm at the best and slightly antagonistic at worse when it came to to ways in which St Aubyn handled some subjects I just didn’t get the sense he knew much about or did a lot of research into.
In a way, this book is like a mashup of an Iris Murdoch Novel and a Richard Powers novels. Richard Powers is not very funny as a writer, but he tends to know his science; Iris Murdoch is not known as an expert in science, more so art, history, and philosophy, and of course is known to be dreadfully funny. Here’s a book that mashes them up and strips the humor, the incisivieness, and the scientific understanding from both writers.
Spook Country – 3/5 Stars
I wonder if William Gibson is working on his NFT novel yet. Like Pattern Recognition, this book takes on the confluence of digital and analog worlds. We have real-world terror campaigns meeting up with alternative reality art projects. The analog rawness of punk music, with the connectedness of tech journalism and digital art.
What I find interesting about these middle years Gibson novels is how in looking at technology of the moment, instead of of the future Gibson ties himself down to contemporaneity, and the book is interesting for what it gets right and what it gets wrong.
What do you remember about 2006 internet? It’s hard to imagine really for me. I had maybe just gotten a facebook account, had a gmail, still worked heavily with non-streaming digital media, played all video games on disk and was moving into the direction of online play but was not there. I texted, but otherwise my phone was purely a communication device.
