Cryptonomicon was awesome, as your post reminded me. I should read it again.

Right now, I've retreated again into silly fantasy. Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn, to be precise.

I really like Sharon Shinn. Her works are basically innocent romance novels with interesting characters (especially interesting females), set in fantastic locations. The Samaria novels are her most famous, beginning with Archangel, and actually become much more science fiction than fantasy, later in the series. They remind me of Orson Scott Card's Earth series a lot.

Recommended, if you enjoy fantasy.

I like Sharon Shinn too. I look forward to her latest novel, especially because it revisits the Samaria of Archangel.

Mary Sue, Mary Sue, Mary Sue. Mary Russell learns Arabic in six weeks, shoots like a sniper, understands the complex local politics, convinces their misogynistic guides that a woman can be as cool and tough as they are, flirts and captivates diplomats at the embassy soiree.... Mary Russell is perfect and everyone lurves her! Gah. Even her "flaws" are the approved ones: stubborn, decisive, too intelligent and independent for her time. Bleah.

I agree with you somewhat... I just think it's nice to have a strong female character... also one thing I didn't like about the book was the way the twists were revealed and not explained, like "okay, so who we thought was the bad guy was not the ultimate bad guy... oh yeah it's the guy you met for, like 5 seconds, and then we caught him and then we left... the end?" But I like the cheesier aspects of King's books... not too intellectually fulfilling, but sometimes that's what I want.

Today's NYT (reg req) has an editorial about teenagers/students, freedom of speech, imagination and creative writing by Michael Chabon.

It made me all allergic. And pretty angry as well (at censor-loving asshats, not Chabon - of course).

Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth

I'm reading A Door into Ocean, by Joan Slonczewski, for my book group. It's making me wonder if I've lost my ability to read SF. I cut my teeth on Heinlein and Asimov, devoured Ursula K. LeGuin's stuff, adored Zelazny's books. But I'm a couple of chapters into ADiO and I'm not sure I want to finish it. Everything is so selfconciously, "Oooooooh, we're an alien culture!" And there are a bunch of characters with names like Tithina the Indecipherable. I keep waiting for the punchline, but I have a growing dread that the author is serious. And there's over 300 pages to go.

Has anyone else read this book? Is there something I'm just not getting?

Anyone read Jodi Picoult? I've never read any of her other books, but I stayed up until 2 a.m. reading her new one, My Sister's Keeper. I'm half-asleep at my desk now, but so worth it!

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had recs for her others.

tina, thank you. I have mailed that link to most of the teenagers I know (and that's a surprisingly large number). Kenny's sitting here muttering "He gets it. He gets it," over and over.

Calli, I haven't read it, but it sounds as if I'd be laughing unkindly by this point in the book. Not much help, I know.

I just read speak last night. really powerful book. YA books are so very different than what i grew up on.

Great stuff by Chabon:

It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.

Damn, Mike rocks. I'm having one of my occasional "green with jealousy of Ayelet" moments. He's just so damned cool, in every way.

I'm rereading Kavalier and Klay at the moment. It's just as brilliant the second time around.