What I'm Reading

Finished this up right at the end of the year. It is interesting how wildly different each book in the series continues to be. This one was honestly a little confusing with the two timelines, one going seemingly backwards, that had me guessing at when and where events were taking place. I think it all resolves pretty well in the end. Not my favorite so far, but still worth a read, and it adds plenty to the developing picture of the Culture and this whole setting, which I love.

Whether or not you have kids, this is an excellent guide to navigating the developing brains of children. I think this will be worth a re-read in the future, but I wish I had read it much earlier. It gives me a little more confidence in being able to communicate with children, my own if I choose to have one in the future, but also my sister's kids or all of my extended family.

I read Neuromancer in high school and bought most of William Gibson's books as they came out, but for some reason never got to the rest of the Sprawl trilogy. I think the thing I love most about these is trying to understand the divergence in technology, picturing how things were meant to work as projected into the future way back in the 80s. So many things make huge assumptions about how things would continue to develop, like any retro-futurism tends to do. Stuff like the physicality of cyberspace and how you have to travel through it like any city. I've been looking at a lot of pictures of old computers from NEC, Hitachi, Sony, etc. like the MSX2 series. That's a form factor that is ripe for a comeback with all the new mini-pc hardware flooding the market these days.