I’m a day late to the party, and it wasn’t because I was busy reading.  I only wish.
I told you last week that I was reading this for book club:

I started this the night before our meeting, and it’s almost 500 pages, so I couldn’t pay as close attention as I should have, but that’s okay because that’s four hours of my life I will never get back.
Maybe I’m not being fair because the one member of our group who picked the book and is into tech stuff really liked it, and it’s won awards, but I was turned off in the first chapter when the main character was called a “roll model.”  This would be the main character whose name is, I kid you not, Hiro Protagonist.  Anyway, this book is about a futuristic society in which everything is a franchise, even countries, and there are lots of those.  There are no laws anymore, and people live in their own sovereign nations called burbclaves where peace is enforced by private security.  Those who can spend most of their time in the virtual reality Metaverse.  No doubt the Metaverse was cool and cutting edge in 1992 when this was published, but the author’s minute descriptions of it are boring to a modern reader.  To give the guy credit, he coined the word avatar, but we all know what that means at this point.  In my opinion, this book peaked in the first chapter, which was actually pretty cool.
Other than that, I am still on my Patricia Cornwell kick, and am about to finish this:

Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books grow increasingly long and convoluted over the years, and I like her earlier ones, like this one, the best.  I’m not sure why I enjoy this kind of thing so much–I think it might have started with Quincy, which I watched religiously and which inspired in me the brief ambition to be a forensic pathologist.  My first Cornwell book was Body Farm, which I read because of the local connection (Knoxville is the home of the REAL Body Farm).  I found that I liked her writing and the mysteries, but really the key to these books is the characterization.  And now after so many years of reading these books, Scarpetta and co. seem like old friends to me.
And now back to work.  If you’d like more book reviews/recommendations, check out the rest of the linkup at HousewifeSpice!