Books, February 2012

** John Sandford – Rules of Prey. These books are supposed to be good, but I ended up deciding I didn’t really want to read another book about a guy who stalks and murders women. Or at least, not this one.
*** Richard K. Morgan – Broken Angels. Good future science fiction space adventure war thriller stuff.
*** Philip K. Dick – The Man in the High Castle. Kind of random and dated-feeling alternate history WWII stuff. The end, I think, is meant to be some kind of holy-shit moment, but it just read as half trite and half confused. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it as entertainment, but the things the characters cared about weren’t very compelling and the layers of self-reference kind of made it abstract and hard to connect with.
*** Charles Stross – Rule 34. Pretty cool exploration of what our near future might look like, extending a lot of current trends in terms of internet, connectivity, data, and identity. But it all feels a little too in-the-moment — in 10-20 years it could feel wildly prophetic or incredibly dated.