I'm loving Neuromancer so far. Awesome feel and setting about the book. Can't believe I haven't read it sooner. You can see how much influence it has given modern movies and such!
As for Rand, I think The Fountainhead is her best.
Neuromancer is probably my hands-down favorite book. I muddled through it once in the eighth grade (and only understood about half of it) and then revisited it in the later part of high school, and that was all she wrote. It's one of the handful that I revisit on a yearly basis.
I wish I could say the same for
The Fountainhead. It's the only Rand book I've read, and definitely the last. The Objectivist philosophy she gave birth to is pretty monstrous at its core, and practically impossible for those not living in some sort of intellectual ivory tower, i.e. real people. But I've had disagreements with authors before over their politics and whatnot and still come out enjoying the book, and that's what would have happened if Rand hadn't made Howard Roark into a preachy author surrogate. My head hurt halfway through the book due to the number of times Rand (via Roark) beat me over the head with the theme that the mediocre will constantly keep the great enslaved etc. etc. I also just couldn't take to the characters of either Roark or Dominique--it's like they were both so far removed from real people that I just stopped viewing them as anything other than empty vessels for the philosophies they lived, rather than real characters. I suppose the one blessing was that Rand is a fairly competent writer from a technical perspective, and that the book was relatively brief.
If you enjoyed
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and
Kafka on the Shore, I suggest giving Murakami's
Sputnik Sweetheart a shot. Actually, I'd recommend any other Murakami except for
South of the Border, West of the Sun, which is really just a bad rehash of
Norwegian Wood with some of the ideas that would be later put to better use in
Sputnik Sweetheart. If you can find his first two novels in English, the so-called 'Rat tetralogy' is really great as well.
So I'm currently getting back into reading after a couple of years at a job which left me little time to do so at work (following a gig as an evening hotel desk clerk, where I had large amounts of time to tear through books and put off homework, etc.) and little energy for anything more than a vegetative state when I got home. It's amazing how difficult it is to pick the hobby back up when you've been out of it for a while. Anyways, I'm venturing through the first book--
Software--in Rudy Rucker's collected
Ware Tetralogy, and I'm really puzzled that he managed to fly under my radar for so long. I've been a big fan of Gibson and Stephenson for a long time, and have even dabbled in Bruce Sterling when he can behave himself, so I'm not really sure how I missed this for so long. Rucker's writing is great--it's got the 'damn the torpedoes' approach to SF that the cyberpunk movement kicked off, with a good amount of PKD/Robert Anton Wilson weirdness/paranoia to boot. Good stuff.
