A young Japanese man has to find a new home for his cat, and travels to several friends to ask them whether they can offer one. That’s the plot. Along the way the reader is treated to the journey as seen through the eyes of the cat, a tough former stray; and to descriptions of …
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
This is the impression I have of Neal Stephenson: after publishing Snow Crash in 1992, he very quickly became Saint Neal of Technodom, revered for the breadth of his knowledge and vastitude of his imagination. What didn’t the dude know? What couldn’t he dream up? Reading some of the reviews of his books, you’d think …
The Meaning of Everything
In 1998, Simon Winchester published The Surgeon of Crowthorne (or The Professor and the Madman as it's known in the US). It was an account of how a former US military surgeon (who’d seen service in the Civil War and been broken by his experiences) moved to England and was sentenced to life imprisonment for …
Set in Stone
Mourning his wife, a man goes to stay with her sister (and husband) in a strange moated house, a house with a history of murder and treason. What follows is more than readable, but increasingly impenetrable. I could never decide whether it was a story of wartime treachery and betrayal, a murder mystery, or a …
