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| First Written | 2011 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | William Morrow |
| ISBN-10 | 0061977969 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0061977961 |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | May 03, 2012 |
Reamde
It's not scifi, and that's OK. Stephenson (like William Gibson) has a great ability to write about modern day technology in a way that makes it feel futuristic, like his throwaway line about GPS, where he posits a sort of invisible watershed between possible routes. We're living in this technologically-divided world already.
He also is great when applying those same talents to describing people and places in the American Midwest. The first 50 pages include descriptions set in Iowa that make a WalMart feel like a foreign country.
Noted on May 16, 2012
REAMDE is a sprawling action novel with a weird mix of elements that got me excited: the midwest, guns, dwarves & elves (those in a super-detailed but fictional MMORPG), Canadian drug smuggling, Xiamen (a huge metropolis in China that most Americans have never heard of), the Russian mafia, money laundering and global financial markets, Chinese gold farmers, British spies, hackers, viruses, and a lot of guns. It's worth reading just to see how these elements come together.
There might not be any fancy literary qualities here, but writing a THOUSAND PAGE PAGE-TURNER is no mean feat. It's a fun read, all the way through, and includes one really remarkable prolonged action sequence on the streets of Xiamen. You'll know it when you get to it.
Noted on May 16, 2012
People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk.
Quoted on May 16, 2012
The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over RichardÕs unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.
Quoted on May 16, 2012
It was then that she cut him off in midsentence and said that it was over. She said it with a certainty and a conviction in her voice and her face that left him fascinated and awed. Because guys, at least of his age, didn't have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn't have to decide. She just had to pass on the news.
Quoted on May 16, 2012
"It's a selective retirement," Richard explained, "a retirement from boring shit."
"I think that's called a promotion."
Quoted on May 16, 2012
Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov's habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.
Quoted on May 16, 2012
Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else's eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds' exposure to a Chinese street, since that internal sense would be setting off alarms continuously - and by no means false alarms.
Quoted on May 16, 2012
[The Islamic Jihadists] had a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always employed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway.
Quoted on May 16, 2012