Reading Diary (1101-1113 21) (Patreon)

A popular tradition returns.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) - Loving the hell out of this one. Gibson finds himself living in the world he created and commits to its unreality. A masterpiece of corporate espionage that treats the corporate world as an uncanny horror to rival any intelligence agency. Probably my favorite Gibson (though I've only read this, Neuromancer, and Count Zero).

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Tim Weiner) - Never actually finished this, so I've returned to it and am reading it slowly for research (notice a theme with this reading log?). Weiner captures the CIA's horrific track record of human rights abuse, organizational dysfunction, and embarrassing incompetence so briskly you begin to question his account. Then you read the CIA case files and find they're much worse. Essential reading.

Queen & Country: Definition Edition Vol. 3 (Greg Rucka, Steve Rolston, Mike Norton & Chris Samnee) - It's Queen & Country, the American indie comic that dared to challenge The Sandbaggers' reign as the king of cynical, politically intelligent spy fiction. It slaps.

A Gentleman's Game (Greg Rucka) - It's a little annoying to read 7/8ths of Queen & Country as comics and then have to duck out and read a novel to follow the last 1/8th. But this is as taut, meticulously plotted, and exhilarating as Queen & Country usually is, with a devastating ending that rivals The Sandbaggers. Reading a War on Terror novel in 2021 is depressing as hell, but this handles it deftly, and depicts Wahabbist terrorists w/o Orientalism or Islamophobia. Quite readable even if Rucka's shortcomings become clearer in prose.

I should write something about spies.