Happy 11-cubed day!
Everybody has been reviewing and posting excerpts from the Steve Jobs biography recently. So I’m going to talk about a different book.
If you’re already a fan of Neal Stephenson, you can stop reading now and just go and get the book. You won’t be disappointed.
Stephenson has written several classic Sci-Fi/Cyper-Punk/computer-related novels. Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are two of my favorites. He made a detour, in my opinion, with the Baroque Cycle which I never managed to get through.
With Reamde he’s back in a contemporary setting and the story revolves around a fictional MMO called T’Rain. If you’re into playing World of Warcraft, then you’ll find the similarities and story plots very interesting.
Throw in a gang of international terrorists, rouge Russian mobsters, and a group of Chinese hackers, and you get a very intense and fast-paced thriller that moves between the virtual and real world.
This was the longest book I’ve read with iBooks (print length 1056 pages). With such an engrossing story, the chrome of the app and the iPad itself disappear. As I suspected the very realistic page turn animation in iBooks doesn’t matter when you’re actually reading a long book. However, one iBooks feature I found myself using frequently, and one that’s sorely missing in the Kindle app, is the number of pages remaining in the chapter. With Stephenson’s prolific writing don’t be surprised to see that you have 384 pages remaining in the current chapter…