The Known World

The Known World is a fascinating book. It follows the lives of a black family, whose father has bought his freedom, then his wife's, then his son's. As a grownup the son turns around and buys slaves. "Follows" is hardly the right term here but I'm not sure what else to use. The book does a marvelous job of moving back and forth between past and present and getting into the heads of different characters. It's not an uplifing book, by any means, but it's utterly engaging. While I knew that slavery has existed throughout the world in different times, I had no idea that there were ever black slave owners in the southern U.S.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

I don't often post mid-book about somthing but I couldn't wait. I followed this link from Kottke about a Neal Stephenson interview (kottke.org) and after reading the interview, rushed on down to the bookstore since Amazon helpfully told me one was on the shelves there. I also wasn't quite up for the big trilogy investment for a new author so went back a few years to Snow Crash.

What a great book! I haven't read science fiction in a long while, with probably William Gibson's Pattern Recognition being the most recent. This has all that I like in a book: great action, interesting characters, and moral/philosophical questions and issues that can start quite the discussion.