Reamde, Neal Stephenson (4)
I have to
say that I’ve had some good luck with books recently. I can’t remember the last
time I have read so many ‘4’s’ in a row! Neal Stephenson always tells an
interesting story, but ‘Reamde’ is one of my favorites. It is long, but so fast
paced that I was always anxious to get back to it. In the spirit of
‘Cryptonomicon’, he has woven multiple stories together with many characters.
It all circulates around Richard, the developer and owner of a Worlds of
Warcraft type on-line game (sounds like ‘Ready Player One’, and it is a bit).
In chasing down a virus (‘Readme’) into the game, characters are introduced that
vary from Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, British MI6 spies to
jihadists. While some of the connections
of these disparate characters are pretty loose, the story is so entertaining,
that I was able to forgive some of the coincidences in timing and
location. Stephenson also has put these
characters in many places I have visited – from Xiamen, China to British
Columbia. All through this book, I was thinking of what a great movie it would
make – an action packed thriller slightly bent towards the nerd crowd.
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