[books 2012] Alan Garner

2. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

This month's book club book.  It's an early children's fantasy novel.

I first read this when I was about 8 or 9 and loved it.  I re-read it when I was stuck at home and heavily medicated when I was living in Manchester, at which point I learned that the locations in the book are all real places, although that's real places that today bear no resemblance whatsoever to what they were like in the 50s, when this book is set.

I have to say it hasn't aged well.  It has good points, and I love the use of real geography (the fact that it's all millionaires, WAGs, Ferrari dealerships etc. nowadays makes me giggle), but the pacing is weird, and the ending just - well, ends.  

If I had kids I'd probably recommend that they read it; for adults I say go read The Owl Service, which is much better and has more ideas to think about in it.

[books 2012] Neal Stephenson

3. Reamde by Neal Stephenson

He's set a new record - this one is 100 pages longer than Anathem.  Having said that, it took me significantly less time to read this than Anathem or the Quicksilver series.  There's some ideas in it, but it's just a big espionage adventure book really.

My book club recently read one of Stephenson's earlier efforts, The Diamond Age, which I liked a lot less the second time round than I did the first, on reading Reamde I was really struck by how clunky in every way The Diamond Age is in comparison.

The book revolves around a massive multi-player online game and the family of its creator.  A bunch of hackers have created a virus that encrypts the victim's hard drive - in order to get the decryption key, the victim has to deposit a bunch of "gold" in a remote region of the video game as ransom.  When the victim is the Russian mob, they take a more direct approach to tracking down the hackers.  Things are made much more lively when it transpires that in the apartment above the Chinese hackers is a Al-Quaeda cell.  The chief terrorist kidnaps the niece of the creator of the game, and much adventure is had in getting her back (and her, escaping).

I loved this, especially the bits set in the mountains on the BC/Idaho/Washington State border.