From left to right:

1. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
2. Anathem – Neal Stephenson
3. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
6. The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss
7. American Gods – Neil Gaiman
8. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
9. Virtual Light – William Gibson
10. A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
11. The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch
12. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
13. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
14. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
15. The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
16. Singularity 7 – Ben Templesmith
17. The Mortal Instruments Trilogy – Cassandra Clare
    • City of Bones
    • City of Ashes
    • City of Glass
18. The Wheel of Time, first three books – Robert Jordan
    • The Eye of the World
    • The Great Hunt
    • The Dragon Reborn

I’m going to be reading these for the next few years…

I’d like to thank The Sword and Laser, Mark Miltenburg and a few other people for these fine suggestions.

But more importantly, thanks to spending over an hour on the train every day, I recently finished Neuromancer which is a much harder book to follow than any of those. It started because Gibson throws a ton of details at you all at once at the beginning in a quick rush to explain everything. A few chapters in it is apparent that this first stuff doesn’t mean all that much except to serve as a nice back story. It does come up again later though.

The hardest part of reading it was the fact that he rarely states who is speaking which becomes incredibly confusing when there are three characters talking at once. It is just assumed who is talking by what they are saying as if I know the characters well enough already. Daemon and Diablo are very explicit in who is speaking and as a graphic novel V for Vendetta can’t help but be explicit.

Apart from that I found the overall plot fairly simple, except near the end where he throws in some weird loops and I’m not quite sure what has happened. I’ve heard this is a book that grows on you with re-reading so I may just do that in the coming months.

Next up: Ender’s Game then Dune and I’m considering buying Cryptonomicon after that.