Neuromancer (William Gibson)
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Spring 2004 Wow, I’d never read anything like this before. The language and slang is heavy going but once I got to grips with it I began to love it. I like tech stuff and this kind of literature is just what I’ve been looking for. A great amount of imagination is […]
Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
War time Fiction, 8/10 – Jan-Feb 2004 The book starts before the war in Amiens, in 1910, when Stephen Wraysford has an intense love affair with a married woman that comes to an unsatisfactory end. The novel then shifts in time to 1916, when we encounter Stephen enduring the nightmare world of the trenches. The […]
Use Of Weapons (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 4/10 – September 2003 A culture novel with a few good bits but otherwise a weird story cut into incoherent ribbons that kept skipping here and there just as the boring part of the latest skip was coming to an end. The main character is a depressing guy called Cheradenine Zakalwe, with many dark […]
The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 9/10 – July 2003 This book is the second in the series of Banks’ Culture novels, set in a futuristic human/machine symbiotic society. Player of Games submerges itself in the society of the Game Players, those whose soul occupation is to play games to the best of their abilities, formulating new strategies, quite akin […]
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J. K. Rowling)
Fantasy, 8/10 – June 2003 Voldemort is gaining strength and building an army but no one believes Harry about it except Dumbledore. The Ministry of Magic has made it their job to discredit them both, using the wizarding newspaper The Daily Prophet for slander. Dumbledore is avoiding Harry because Harry’s mind is linked in some […]
