Slashdot Mirror
A Good Summer Read?
binaryhead asks: "Well, the semester has just ended, and I have graduated from school! :-) I start my full-time job in a month and want to read a good book in the mean time. Having read Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and most of the hacker biographies, I am trying to find a scifi-geek-hacker book that people like. I might try the new Kevin Mitnick book, but I wanted to see what Slashdot preferred. Thanks."
I don't know where his great literary reputation came from. Every book and short story of his I have read has been boring and tedious. I would rather read Shakespeare than Twain. I would rather read what a million monkeys wrote than read another Twain story. As for that Connecticut Yankee story, I read the first 200 pages and stopped, that's all we needed to do a book report when I was in ninth grade. I had to force myself to just get that far, and I love reading. Now almost two decades later, I still won't touch it. I don't even like the movies that are styled after it, that's how much I hated it. Dickens and the Bronte sisters wrote more interesting and entertaining novels.
Now excuse me while I gargle with salt water to wash the bitter taste out of my mouth from just typing this out.
"Cryptonomicon" is crap. Neal forgot how to do effective exposition since "Diamond Age" and got all caught up in the high tech gee gaws of today's tech crowd. He also failed to bring together a potentially interesting set of character arcs by writing supremely uninteresting characters based on idiosyncracies of a bunch of his geek friends.
He's written better and he'll write better again. Forget about "Cryptonomicon", it isn't worth your time.
Regards,
Ross
I would definitely recommend Ender's Game as well as its sequels. The later books change character a bit from the first one, but they are enjoyable and they not only tell a good story they also talk about philosophy, morality, and the nature of being. Pretty heavy stuff but written in a very accessible and fun fashion.
You can hardly go wrong with any of Orson Scott Cards's books, although the latest ones aren't as good as his older stuff, with the exception of the new books in the Ender's Game series. Card has a set of awesome books of short stories, get them if you can. Some of the stories are just brutal in what occurs in them, but totally great reads.
Another great author is Stephen R. Donaldson. His series, "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" are extremely well-written and powerful. There are 2 trilogies in the series and although the middle books in each series drag a bit all 6 books are well worth reading. He also has another great series called "Mordant's Need" which consists of two books - "The Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through".
Right now I'm reading George R. R. Martin's "A Clash of Kings", sequel to "A Game of Thrones". Great novels, lots of political backstabbing and battles, the series is well-worth a look at.
Sapere aude!