Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Double Blind and Spook Country

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn

Spook Country by William Gibson

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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 […]

Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

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I have read this novel four or five times now, and even taught it a few times. Each time I read it the scope of it dramatically shrinks for me. It happened this time as well. I first learned about this novel right when it came out and it was nominated for the Virginia Book Prize. And one of my professors, who is otherwise really buttoned-down and prim, knowing that Edward P Jones’s The Known World was going to win, decided she would champion this […]

A somehow really boring corporate espionage technology thriller

Agency by William Gibson

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I have attempted William Gibson before; I did not enjoy Neuromancer at all. But Agency is considerably more recent and the premise made more sense to me. Basically, Verity is an app developer/tester who is brought on to field test “Eunice” an AI assistant of sorts, but Verity realizes there’s a good bit more to Eunice than anyone seems to have guessed, and soon mysterious corporate shenanigans are afoot, and there is some involvement from parallel universes, one of which has the technology to keep […]

Very recent hiredness was its own liminal state, Verity reminded herself, on the Montgomery BART platform, waiting for a train to Sixteenth and Mission.

Agency by William Gibson

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So apparently this is a sequel or a prequel or both to the previous William Gibson novel The Peripheral, something I definitely did not know going in. I just put this on hold on Overdrive and starting listening. For the most part this wasn’t the most difficult challenge to follow the story because this series involves a lot of familiar science fiction tropes, and William Gibson tropes as well. So the novel begins with the “app whisperer” being assigned to a new AI app as part […]

This book confused my brain in ways it did not intend

Neuromancer by William Gibson

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**Expository wordiness up top. Feel free to skip to the actual book-related stuff if you like. A few things right up top: A few years ago, I flirted with playing a card game called Android: Netrunner. My partner was way more into it than I was, but occasionally I’d build a deck or two and spar with him, just to give him something to play against. I included a link to the Wikipedia article on the game there, because it’s a lot to explain if […]

But I think it’s better to let the deal stand.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

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THE BOOK THAT STARTED IT ALL! Kind of. William Gibson would never claim credit for starting a genre, especially given how much of his writing borrows from those who came before him, both in the reading of his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s and through the writing of his most recent forebears investigating anti-capital and anti-heteronormative ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. This novel has a lot to owe to writers like Alfred Bester and Samuel Delaney, among many others. So this is the […]



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