I know what you mean about "reading stamina" and I really think you are 100% right about this! ;) The more one reads, the more momentum it fuels. Makes perfect sense. ;) I guess I just need to "break the ice" with my relationship to books! Like you said, it's a process: it's more that just picking up a book and reading off its pages; it becomes a ritual, it becomes an intimate connection, it's almost an out-of-body experience. I remember how "addicted" I was to reading when I was a teen! I wonder what happened to me along the way? I'll figure it out. Thanks for saying that you believe in me... It was an encouraging comment, but it also made me burst with laughter at the same time, I don't know why. LOL!

You've touched upon several factors/hurdles that I've also thought about. I completely agree with you: maybe I'm not pushing myself hard enough? Maybe my motivation is weak? Maybe I'm not reading a book whose story is fueling my desire to carry on? I used to be such an avid reader when I was a teenager. But, maybe it was because I had close to no friends back then and reading was my only "escape", so I was very motivated under those circumstances? And, like you said, living in an age of Youtube and the internet, maybe I am too easily distracted and need to learn how to set time aside for reading.

I mean, I went full-on Hallmark card there I'm embarrassed to say :D

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Hacker extraordinaire and sword expert Hiro Protagonist and 15-year-old female courier skater sidekick Y.T. deal with clashing interests of the Mafia (running a very serious Pizza-delivery operation), one bizarre religious movement, and several franchised nation states. Furthermore, cyberspace is offering its own unique opportunities and perils.

Snow Crash is an influential 1992 science fiction novel that - even if you accept to read it as post-cyberpunk satire - remains a bland exercise in cookie-cutter narrative structure. While the slick futurespeak used by some characters is often enjoyable and coherent, a contrived nexus of an ancient language and brain/computer viruses I felt was silly. What finally soured me on this book was the few but unsavory sexual moments.

In the context of big tech corpos of our real world having been inspired by Stephenson who invented the term Metaverse and described a service like Google Earth (just called Earth in the novel), I found the following passage noteworthy:

"We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV — which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite — the people who go into the Metaverse, basically — who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages."

This is one awesome novel and one of the definitions of Cyberpunk.

I had a good time until the final 25% or so. What I liked was the clever nearfuture lingo, for example loglo describing the glow of ubiquitous ad logos in the Metaverse. I think Stephenson hits the right tone here most of the time, sometimes I felt he slipped and it got a bit show-offy. Close to the end, the way he ties the narrative together seemed labored to me, in the sense that it appeared as merely a train of convenient solutions.

Have you read William Gibson's Neuromancer novels? I really am fond of those.

Yes. I read the Neuromance novels first (great books!), then Snow Crash, then Diamond Age

Do you have any other Cyberpunk book recommendations? Love the genre.

Well, there is "Do androids dream of electric sheep" by Philip K Dick, the blueprint of the Bladerunner movie. The movie deviated from the book significantly, but it is a good read. But it didn't grip me as much as the Neuromancer novels.

Then there is Altered Carbon, the book is very much superior to the Netflix series.

And of course 'Burning Chrome', a collection of short stories by Gibson set in the Neuromancer universe

Not exactly Cyberpunk, but set in a dystopian world, a bit more advanced: Ender's Game.

Or Cyberpunk with the odd addition of magic: there are some good Shadowrun novels, especially 2XS

And if you like movies too and not only books: watch Jonny Mnemonic!

I've read Dick's excellent Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and watched Johnny Mnemonic (might be time for seeing it again). The Shadowrun RPGs are great, I played the whole series. Thanks much for the recommendations, I'll check all of those out.

If you do enjoy Ghost in the Shell, I can recommend the novel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence — After the Long Goodbye by Masaki Yamada. I was pleasantly surprised by how good of a read that was. The story takes place between the first and the second film and focuses on Batou. Seems to be out of print though, here's the AbeBooks entry, if you wanna take a look.

Thank you for the recommendation. I have seen the Ghost in the Shell movies and enjoyed them very much. But I haven't read the book. Time to correct that!

Cyberpunk

That might give you some ideas or starting points.

I haven't read any Cyberpunk in recent times, that I can recall.
The last one perhaps, is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) science fiction book, the first novel by Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow.

It is still free at Project Gutenberg

It is pretty enjoyable, and always good to support an author advocate of DRM-Free.

I've of course read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Philip K. Dick, and a good number of works by Michael Moorcock, etc.

Doctorow sure appears worth checking out; a deep dive into the bibliography of Moorcock seems promising as well. Although fantasy, this reminded me of the latter's Elric of Melniboné series which I always wanted to take a closer look at. Thanks for mentioning those.

"Pride and Prejudice" (1813), by Jane Austen.

After having watched "Pride & Prejudice" (2005) and "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" (2016) years ago, I thought, it's long overdue, to read the novel behind the movie(s).

The old English, with its overly long, interlaced sentences (written in disaccustomed grammar), is sometimes halting to read and some of its mannerisms are kinda funny to behold from a modern standing point.

One example: when Lizzy and Jane meet each other after Lydia's elopement:
Lizzy: "And my mother? How is she?"
Jane: "My mother is tolerably well."

Thing is: Lizzy and Jane are biological sisters.

So - the mother, which they both refer to as "my", is the mother of them both.
Why they don't just say: "how is (our) mother?" - "(our) mother is tolerably well", is beyond the modern reader.

I also found it quite interesting, that the Brits at that time (early 1800s) were apparently writing their numbers in the same way, we Germans still use today:
So, "three-and-twenty" (dreiundzwanzig) and "five-and-thirty" (fünfunddreißig), opposed to today's "twenty-three" and "thirty-five".

All in all an entertaining book and well worth a read - once one gets accustomed to the old English.

The final chapter seemed a little rushed, being basically just a brief summary of what happened to the protagonists afterwards.

Though, that may be a blessing in disguise, since Ms Austen - if she had wished to - would definitely have been able to fill another hundred pages with no real substance.

In the end, though, I think I prefer the screen adaptations to the novel.
I'm pretty sure, I will definitely rewatch the movies - but I will most probably never read the novel again.
Once was enough.

Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg

Thrust into a realm underground by a faceless commanding authority with little explanation as to why, BER-66 is left to uncover whether he is human or robot, and make sense of the world and people around him. The terse narration of the protagonist complements the make of the microcosmic locations and his analytic approach to solving the mystery he finds himself being part of. There seems almost a brief entry to physics here, which might inspire some readers to dive deeper into the subject. Robot provides a critical, philosophical look at the inner workings of society, social control, and the limits of knowing where to place yourself inside of a natural hierarchy of creation.

I do recommend this work of Polish classic science fiction, enjoyed it. May require a second reading for me to fully grasp different parts of the story. Incredible cover artwork by Pavel Tchelitchew (Penguin paperback).

The Lost Metal

It's clear from the prologue that The Lost Metal is Wayne's book, but even so it may be hard to believe just how much, the impact and the extent of his development, or more exactly of what is revealed about his character. And that's far from the only aspect, the other characters also developing, revealing further complexity and allowing the reader to understand more, about them, about people and society in general, maybe even about themselves. And that's because Sanderson yet again proves and imparts at least some of his deep understanding of people and society, the hows and the whys, in particular when it comes to being broken, pushing through and sometimes, with the right conditions and support, maybe even recovering, at least to some extent. There are some memorable action scenes as well, at least one making me emotional in the way that epic battles with the fate of the world on the table tend to do despite the lack of an army, at least on one side, plus revelations that expand on Scadrial and the Cosmere as a whole, but it was the characters that made the profound impact.
So this isn't "light" Sanderson anymore... Yet plenty of times it's held back by still trying all too hard to be. And I'm not just referring to the fact that it remains far from The Stormlight Archive in terms of worldbuilding and depth, that new information mostly being in the form snippets and hints of what's to come, but mainly to all the attempts at humor and shallowness, once again from Wayne in particular, which do make sense up to a point, but eventually feel increasingly forced and out of place. And then there's this advancement to a modern setting that so far made me say that I don't intend to read the next cycle of the series... But at this point I'm thinking that, despite fearing that I'll regret changing my mind, considering how much I can't stand modern settings, it'll be rather hard to stick to that decision.

Rating: 4/5