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Mar. 7th, 2003 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishInstead of being a Good Boy and reading up on Werewolf and the Silent Striders splatbooktribebook, I read Jennifer Government. This started because I had a food headache and the lasagna was still an hour and a half from being cooked, so I couldn't concentrate on game rules. It finished because, well, I didn't want to put the book down (sorry, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nixve :).
It's pretty good. Characters: believeable, pleasant, sometimes deep. Check. Prose: wry, sad, deadpan, informative. Check. Plot: eh, this is where it starts to break down a bit. It's an attack on a capitalism straw man (hmm, I guess that really makes it a "satire of capitalism") and relies a bit much on Extraordinarily Improbably Coincidences for my taste. Although unlike The Golden Compass it doesn't start the book off with one; it works them in slowly, then ramps them up, so that when Billy NRA meets Bill NRA you're shaking your head in wonderment and not screaming "What a stupid plot device!" Also, the bit where John Nike is reading an old sci-fi novel and not only Not Getting It but Not Realising There Is Something To Be Gotten was, barely, over the top in terms of metaliterary references. I'm happy to have read it, and happy to have it on my Employee Recommendations shelf at work (where three copies now reside because we got in eight yesterday and only five would fit on the shelf in Fiction).
So. Today is Cull The Shelves day, in which I find stuff to take to the Tcon White Elephant Auction to subsidize my trip to Tcon. Then probably more cello and reading, and then work and then maybe dessert. Unsure yet. Life goes on.
Update
That's Jennifer Government by Max Barry. Available in hardcover from Doubleday.
nixve :).It's pretty good. Characters: believeable, pleasant, sometimes deep. Check. Prose: wry, sad, deadpan, informative. Check. Plot: eh, this is where it starts to break down a bit. It's an attack on a capitalism straw man (hmm, I guess that really makes it a "satire of capitalism") and relies a bit much on Extraordinarily Improbably Coincidences for my taste. Although unlike The Golden Compass it doesn't start the book off with one; it works them in slowly, then ramps them up, so that when Billy NRA meets Bill NRA you're shaking your head in wonderment and not screaming "What a stupid plot device!" Also, the bit where John Nike is reading an old sci-fi novel and not only Not Getting It but Not Realising There Is Something To Be Gotten was, barely, over the top in terms of metaliterary references. I'm happy to have read it, and happy to have it on my Employee Recommendations shelf at work (where three copies now reside because we got in eight yesterday and only five would fit on the shelf in Fiction).
So. Today is Cull The Shelves day, in which I find stuff to take to the Tcon White Elephant Auction to subsidize my trip to Tcon. Then probably more cello and reading, and then work and then maybe dessert. Unsure yet. Life goes on.
Update
That's Jennifer Government by Max Barry. Available in hardcover from Doubleday.
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Date: 2003-03-08 07:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-10 10:45 pm (UTC)