Originally posted on my short-lived reading journal on Tumblr, moved here on 04/13/2024

I went on a long-ish (long for staying inside NYC bounds) bike ride with my friend A today. We were going up through North Brooklyn over the Pulaski to get to the Queensboro, and we weren’t in any rush, so we stopped at one of my favorite bookstores in town WORD.

They, like a lot of stores in this town, have an entire section devoted to New York. I was eyeing it, looking for a copy of Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities that I need to be reading for an ad-hoc reading group with some other friends.

The shelf, and the books on it, reminded me that in some senses, I moved to NYC because of a book. I was reading Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge at the time I was job hunting in Oakland. I still think this is one of the best works of literature I’ve ever read, and it’s set in the NYC tech scene in the year after the first dot-com crash and before 9/11 occurs. A tense time, a time in between scenes, very fruitful for a novel like this. The novel was just so powerful to me, that I could really imagine myself living in New York, at least for a while. Crazy, huh?

A friend, RG, started reading Altered Carbon on my gushing 140 char twitter review. That’s another novel with a strong sense of place. You really feel the geography of San Francisco, even though you’re pulled wayyyyy far into the future there. I think that’s partially why I liked it more than I liked the two sequels, but there’s also an element of repetitiveness. The protagonist gets a little too super-powered, in their charisma, etc. not just the technical parts of why they he’s actually superpowered, heh. Honestly it started to feel a little like a Mary Sue, about halfway through the last book. Still, totally worth reading, and totally enjoyable. Also, I think I might’ve liked the first one the best because one of my favorite sub-genres of mystery novels is the locked-house mystery (“cozy English house mystery”). Probably also why I liked Jo Walton’s Farthing so much. Would love to read more of that sub-genre. Any recs?