BOOK REPORT: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Title: Neuromancer
Author:  William Gibson
Copyright Date:  1986

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars ( ok )

Back-Cover Description
The edition I have doesn't have a back-cover description so I borrowed on from Amazon:

Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same. 

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price.... 

My Thoughts
When Neuromancer was released, it was something unique and different.  At least that's what I've been told.  Unfortunately, it is twenty-five years later and the genre has grown and matured since then.  

It was difficult for me to get engaged in Neuromancer.  I simply couldn't get my reading momentum going, and as a result, it took me a long time to finish.  I can trace this back to one simple reason.  I found William Gibson's writing style very difficult to deal with.  There wasn't a rhythm to the prose at all.  There were rambling sentences describing an action scene loaded with ambiguous pronouns. Cryptic incomplete sentences littered the pages.  I often found myself confused with what was going on in a scene and constantly having to go back to reread a few pages in an attempt to make some sense of what was going on. Most of the time I just gave up and pushed ahead hoping the loose strings would miraculously join together.  More often than not, the strings would finally come together later in the chapter, but I was usually annoyed by that point.

Once I got a bit more than halfway, I wised up to the fact that there was a comprehension phase-shift and I resigned myself to just be confused most of the time.  I just read the words as they were printed and gave up on trying to comprehend the story as it went and my reading pace and enjoyment picked up.

Looking back on Neuromancer, the basic story line wasn't bad at all, I just wish it was written better. Maybe if I read it when it was released, I would have received it with an open-mind and been wowed by cyberspace enough to ignore the writing. Or maybe it's just hard to go back to a classic in this genre, especially if you didn't catch it the first time around; I was ten so I missed that spaceship.  

BOOK REPORT: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Title:                           The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Author:                        L. Frank Baum

Original Copyright : 1900

My Rating:     3 out of 5 stars  ( simple, but fun )

Back-Cover Description

Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion—they’re now as beloved a part of American folklore as Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan. Since its first publication in 1900, L. Frank Baum’s story of a little girl carried away by a tornado to the strange and beautiful Land of Oz has had an extraordinary emotional impact on wide-eyed readers young and old.

As Dorothy journeys down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, hoping the Great and Terrible Wizard who lives there will help her return home, she shares adventures with the famous trio of characters, defeats a wicked witch, and learns about the power of friendship, loyalty, and self-confidence. While scholars have debated for decades over possible political meanings hidden within the tale, Baum himself claimed he simply wanted to write a “modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” As it has done for generations past, this classic of fantasy adventure speaks movingly about what every child needs: the Woodman’s compassion, the Lion’s courage, and the Scarecrow’s wisdom.

My Thoughts

Its funny to me that I am had trouble writing this book report when there was a thirty-page introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of OZ in the edition I was reading. If someone could write thirty pages justifying how and why L Fran Baum wrote a children's story, comparing it thoroughly to Alice in Wonderland, and discussing the differences between the iconic movie and the book, I should have no trouble, right?

What it comes down to is this: L. Frank Baum wrote a story of a young girl on a fantastic adventure in the mystical land of oz for children.  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a simple and fun children's story.  There is not much more to say about it other than I enjoyed it and will read it to Sims sometime in the future.  If you are interested in reading the introduction I mentioned above to learn more than what I've said here, just pick up the Barnes and Noble Classic Series edition and don't forget the popcorn!

BOOK REPORT: Animal Farm by George Orwell

Title:                                           Animal Farm   

Author:                                       George Orwell

Original Copyright Date:          1946

My Rating:     3 out of 5 stars  ( interesting )

Backcover Description

This remarkable book has been described in many ways -- as a masterpiece...a fairy story.... a brilliant satire...a frightening view of the future. A devastating attack on the pig-headed, gluttonous and avaricious rulers in an imaginary totalitarian state, it illuminates the range of human experience from love to hate, from comedy to tragedy.  "A wise, compassionate and illuminating fable of our times...The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell's wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift. 

My Thoughts

Animal farm is what it is:  a short political cautionary fairy tale of power, greed and corruption.  It is laid bare just like any other fairy tale from your childhood, down to the anthropomorphic farm animals who talk, each having a distinct role in a black and white world of innocence and corruption.   It is meant to scare you, in this case, into not trusting those in power.

But that's all it was to me, which is why I only gave it 3 stars.  Animal Farm didn't have any depth beyond the words on the page.  There were no lines to read between.  Just the one line, and it was the moral, and the moral is clear.  Don't trust those in power. Don't believe their propaganda.  

I'm glad I read Animal Farm, but it left me wanting more substance, more subtlety. 

In the end, this is a simple book report for a simple, but interesting book.

BOOK REPORT: The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

Title:         The Professor and the Madman

Author:      Simon Winchester

Original Copyright Date:          2005

My Rating:          3 out of 5 stars  ( good )


Backcover Description:
Part homage to the greatest reference work of all time, the Oxford English Dictionary, part mystery, part intellectual history of Victorian England, The Professor and the Madman tells the parallel stories of the dictionary's genius editor and one of his most prolific contributors, an insane American doctor committed to an asylum for murder.

My Thoughts:
The Professor and the Madman was an interesting look into a subject with which I was completely ignorant.  I always took dictionaries for granted and never really thought about how they were created.  I also thought that the Oxford English Dictionary was just another version of a dictionary similar to Webster's.  The OED as they call it across the pond is much more than a dictionary, it is an homage to every single word in the English language, its roots, it nuances of usage illustrated with sentences pulled from literature.  

Being non-fiction, there isn't much to say about symbolism or literary merit; although the author does a good job of developing the two main characters, James Murray the lexical geek editor of the OED and W.C. Minor, an Union army doctor in the Civil war; the madman who thought he was constantly being tormented in the night by little demons who would take him off to far off lands and make him do horrible things.

I did find sections of the book a bit dry as I don't seem to have a knack for philology or English lexicography.  While I did find the history of how the use of certain words outlined in the book interesting, the detailed discussions on roots and origin, etc  was lost on me. 

As a side note, fairly late in the book, another major contributer to the OED was mentioned who, by his own right was a kook.  Dr. Fitzedwald Hall, another American who ended up in India, falls in love with Sanskrit, moves to England, becomes a renowned professor of Sanskrit, and after a heated linguist argument with another Sanskrit scholar,  left in a huff to become a hermit.  It seems that, to be a major volunteer contributer to the OED, it seemed that you needed to be a little off and it would have been interesting to for this book to explore that further.

Overall, it was a fun read, full of sesquipedalian words (including sesquipedalian) that I had to look up in the dictionary... I guess James Murray would be proud!