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Showing posts from July, 2019

Now Starting: Good As You

By Paul Flynn Another birthday present from Kim. 

Now Starting: The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind

By Jackson Ford A birthday present from my parents.

Finished: The Female Man

Absolutely fantastic - impossible to put down. This book is packed with righteous anger and pulls no punches. The book was published in 1975 and ends with a meta-reference to the book within the book. The characters predict that their children will not understand what this book is talking about - but that's OK - that would mean they've won. Sadly, we are their children, and the book is all too relevant today.

Finished: Cryptonomicon

This book is quite the journey. The story is interesting for the first couple of hundred pages, but clearly that is where the editor gave up, as most of the remainder plods around taking a long time to get anywhere. It is certainly cool that it essentially predicts crypto currencies (though as David points out, slightly absurd to back it with gold - something most major currencies have long since abandoned!). However, the books politics - essentially "if only nerds ran the world we'd all be OK" - are past their best. We now live in that world, and Bitcoin, FB and the rest have not saved us from authoritarian government, they practically ushered it in. The book also betrays it's pre-gamer gate origins with its unapologetic gendered nonsense: nerds are men, women are for fucking, women can't get laser focused on subjects, men lack social grace. All of the women in this book serve as targets for men's affection. Despite one of the characters, America, being d