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Books for
Stross, Charles

Glasshouse

Stross, Charles
A complicated future cybernistic world with replicators and all kinds of stuff. Robin is some sort of undercover espionage soldier. Took about 80 pages to get going. Good story. Some Prisoner references, some library stuff.

Words I Had To Look Up:

Verminous (pg. 21) -- Having to do with vermin. Obvious!

Auto-da-fe' (pg. 90) -- Act of faith.

Osmotically (pg.115) -- by means of osmosis . Another doh!

Apoptosis (pg. 115) -- A form of cell death.

Panopticon (pg. 131) -- A prison constucted so all prisoners can be seen at one time. I think I've looked this up before.

Sic transit gloria panopticon (pg. 168) --Thus passes the glory of the, well, panopticon!

Louche (pg. 240) -- Of questionable taste or morality; decadent.

Quote:

Be seeing you. (pg. 275)

Quote:

Neither Janis--nor I--is remotely qualified to be a real dark age librarian, with their esoteric mastery of catalogue systems and controlled information classification vocabularies, but we can run a small municipal lending library and reference section with a bit of scurrying around and a lot of patience. (pg. 127)

Read:

7/2008

Halting State

Stross, Charles
Crime in near-future Edinburgh. Lots of cybertalk, very Neal Stephensonish, but about two hundred pages shorter. On Amazon a commenter says the book is told in second person. I don't know if that is correct, but it certainly is written in a different-than-usual style.

Words I Had To Look Up:

Pre-prandial (pg. 271) -- Before meals.

Haptic (pg. 315) -- Tactile, sense of touch.

Read:

6/2008

Missile Gap

Stross, Charles
Earth is taken up and stuck on a big, flat disk. A really BIG, flat disk!

On page 86, if Lenin is one head, Stalin is another, and the big is third, who is the fourth head mentioned in the text. And I quote, "Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth head." Not to mention that the illustration on the facing page shows three heads...

The book jackets says this is the "Signed, Lettered Edition" priced at 150 bucks. But I don't see any signing, nor lettering. Did the library get ripped off? Is this some scam edition?

Words I Had To Look Up:


Dirigiste (pg. 44) -- Directed by a central authority.
S Doradus (pg. 62) -- The brightest star in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Gnomically (pg. 78) -- In a gnomic, didactic, or sententious manner. Yeah, cleared THAT up!
Fraught (pg.84) -- . "...boring and fraught." 1. Filled with a specified element or elements; charged: an incident fraught with danger; an evening fraught with high drama. 2. Marked by or causing distress; emotional. I think, it's #2.
Instantiations (pg. 96) -- A representation of an idea in the form of an instance of it

Read:

5/2008

Rule 34

Stross, Charles
I was afraid I had already read this, but it turned out I read a previous book. Edinburgh Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh runs a unit that specializes in finding criminals using the internet. I'm not quite sure how the book ended. I was not always able to decipher the author's mixture of computer jargon and Scottish accent.

Read:

3/2012

The Atrocity Archives

Stross, Charles
Bob Howard, UK investigator of the occult, goes to a lot of meetings in between saving the world incidents. Really hate the typeface used on chapter and sectional headings!

Read:

7/2020

The Clan Corporate

Stross, Charles
Book three in the The Merchant Princes series. Miriam gets in serious trouble, gets engaged for a few minutes, and is either a prisoner or on the run most of the book. Mike the DEA agent and former date of Miriam shows.

Read:

6/2009

Read:

6/2010

The Family Trade

Stross, Charles
A sort of parallel world corporate science fiction import-export story. Pretty good stuff.

Words I Had To Look Up:


Aeron chairs (pg. 13) -- Never heard of them until my son mentioned the other day, and here they are in this book!
Demesne (pg. 95) -- manorial land actually possessed by the lord and not held by tenants.
Plaited (pg. 153) -- A braid, especially of hair. Or in this case, complicated family relationships.
Orangery (pg. 203) -- A sheltered place, especially a greenhouse, used for the cultivation of orange trees in cool climates.

Quotes:


...discreetly holstered M-16s... (pg. 177) -- Big holster! But these were on horses, so maybe they are in scabbards.
...patented dumb-schoolgirl simper... (pg. 177) -- I just like that image.
...the locket from the chair around her neck...(pg. 202) -- I've heard of millstones around the neck, but a CHAIR?
...that a prince's wife wll not die of childbed fever... (pg. 127) -- semi-dup.
...some countess doesn't succumb to childbed fever... (pg. 247) -- semi-dup.

Read:

5/2008

The Hidden Family

Stross, Charles
Miriam finds out stuff about her mother. Miriam starts up her business. Lots of people die, bloodily. More confusing Wu/Lee stuff.

Words I Had To Look Up:

hunting hide (pg.102 ) -- A camoflaged tent, used in hunting game.
electric shower (pg. 89) -- A mini water heater, located in the shower!
Ames rooms (pg. 123) -- A distorted room that is used to create an optical illusion.
nevergreen tree (pg. 178) -- "Deadly Nevergreen, that bears fruit all the year round". The gallows.
coves and queans (pg. 199) -- Men and desruptable women, i.e., prostitutes..

Quote:

... a Dahon mountain bike, built out of chromed aluminium tubes. (pg. 32) -- I see a red aluminium Dahon, and a Reynolds 631 steel Dahon, but I doon't see no chromed aluminium Dahon.

Quote:

Patricia Thorold-Hjorth and Alfredo Wu (pg. 248) -- So Miriam is a Wu? Where is this plotline going?

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7/2009

The Merchants' War

Stross, Charles
Book four of the The Merchant Princes. Things just get more and more complicated. I'm losing track of the Wus and the Lees.

Quote:

It was like standing in that baseball court at the University Of Chicago i942, when they finished adding graphite blocks to the heap in the middle of the court... (pg. 115) Baseball? I thought it was a squash court.

Read:

6/2009

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6/2010

The Revolution Business

Stross, Charles
Book Five in the Merchant Princes series. Those backpack nuclear weapons were clearly a bad idea. And who knew the v.p. was such a bad guy?

Words I Had To Look Up:

perotation (pg. 196) -- 1 : the concluding part of a discourse and especially an oration. 2 : a highly rhetorical speech.
solecism (pg. 196) -- A violation of etiquette.
inchoate (pg. 198) -- 1. In an initial or early stage; incipient. 2. Imperfectly formed or developed.
toiles (pg. 274) -- A mock-up model of a garment.

Read:

6/2010

The Trade Of Queens

Stross, Charles
The sixth and final book of the Merchant Princes series. Things are finally wound up in the last thirty pages, with a boom. And I was wondering how he was gonna end it up. Awesome description of nuclear carpet bombing.

Read:

6/2010
11 books displayed
[Stross - Stross] 

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