Day 512: Book completed

Fall, or Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson. It's quite a long book (883 pages), and I've learned retrospectively that the reading would have been enhanced by having already read Reamde, which I haven't. I did recognize some characters from Cryptonomicon, though. So, let's see. The first few chapters are very dull, the excruciating details of Dodge's thoughts as he goes about his morning. Then he inadvertently dies, and the book becomes fascinating. I think what hooked me was that one of the main characters was named Corvallis Kawasaki (Corvallis being the small city 40 miles north of us where Oregon State University is). All of the speculation about what happens to humanity in the next ~20 years is fantastic. The whole premise is that Dodge, a billionaire, has arranged to have his brain uploaded into cyberspace immortality as soon as the technology becomes available, and we see the nitty gritty of all that happening. At that point, there are two parallel stories in action - what's happening in the real world, and what's happening in the cyberspace world as more and more people become uploaded. Generations pass in cyberspace, and that part of the story essentially becomes a fantasy novel, which is okay, but the real-world stuff had so much more life to it.

Other stuff about today - I learned that the price for these tall bookcases I'm going to buy from my employer is only $5 each, whee! I didn't get much work done, but I did go downtown for dinner at the Taphouse with J. for our first time in 18 months. We ate outside, and then he played Magic at the downtown game store for the first time in about as long. (He's been playing at a Springfield store for a few months; that store requires vaccination, whereas this story is more libertarian-friendly, but there were only 9 players, of whom 7 were masked and one of the others is known to be vaccinated. We don't know about the other guy.)