Neuromancer, like Snow Crash, was a major disappointment. Published in 1984, it features a protagonist named Case, a computer hacker whose former employers have stripped him of his biological ability to tap into computer networks. He is reduced to being a street hustler until another employer offers to restore his talents in exchange for his participation in a complicated plot to do—something or other.
Complicated plots seldom pair with interesting characters, and Neuromancer is no different. The characters here are superficially complex, but they don't say interesting things; they're simply there in service of the plot, which is the opposite of the way it's supposed to be.
The other great disadvantage is the dated technology, which severely detracts from the cachet that undoubtedly attached to the book when it was written.
I can't understand why sci-fi classics Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are not on this list, and I'm hoping for better from Philip K. Dick's Ubik.
5 stars
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Deliverance - James Dickey
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
4 stars
Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
3.5 stars
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
3 stars
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
2 stars
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret- Judy Blume
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
Neuromancer - William Gibson
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
1 star
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
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