Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon

Copyright 2013, by Thomas Pynchon.

It took me until about page 77 before I decided that I could read this book. I almost gave it up. It's a mess of hip conversations, and it's set in 2001. But once I began to recognize the character Maxine as someone that I could actually care about, I wanted to keep reading, and find out what's going on. So I almost feel as if I skipped the first 77 pages.

This is from page 140:

"Madoff Securities. Hmm, maybe some industry scuttlebutt. Bernie Madoff, a legend on the street. Said to do quite well, I recall."
"One to two percent a month."
"Nice average return, so what's the problem?"
"Not average. Same every month."
"Uh-oh." She flips pages, has a look at the graph. "What the fuck. It's a perfect straight line, slanting up forever?'
"Seem a little abnormal to you?"
"...it's got to be a Ponzi scheme..."

And this from 143:

"Future of film, if you want to know--someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody'll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that."

From page 432:

"Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage -- ... [this ellipsis is mine, as is the next. The ones in the following passage are from the text]
"...hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about 'Internet freedom,' while they go on handing more of it over to the bad guys ... They get us, all right, we're all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us... We're being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won't end till the Internet--the real one, the dream, the promise--is destroyed."

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland.

Excellent, just excellent. Try to put this book down. Just try.

Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative financial journalist. At the beginning of the novel he has been convicted of libel, and will be paying a large fine as well as doing prison time.

He is hired by Henrik Vanger, an elderly, retired industrialist, to investigate the unsolved disappearance of his granddaughter Harriet in 1966. (The novel takes place circa 2003.)

As this story unfolds, we are treated to glimpses into the life of Lisbeth Salander, an unusual young woman with a great deal of difficulty in her life, as well as a great deal of talent and skill.

Salander and Blomkvist come together to solve one of the best mysteries I've ever read.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Read maybe 1/3, couldn't finish it. It's too vague, the opposite of the book by Greg Egan that I recently tried to read, which had too much exposition. This one doesn't have enough, there's too much assumption that the reader will just figure out what's going on, and I fail to live up to this assumption. I was disappointed,  having recently very much enjoyed 3 other novels by Gibson.