My reading rate has dropped dramatically since I moved to Tokyo, and that is only partly to blame on me having much less free time than I did in Finland. A big factor is also that I simply do not have the selection of books available for reading that I did in Finland, and thus having the choice of trying to read some book I know I will probably not enjoy or spending that time doing something else, well, the end result has been 9 books read in the 9 months since the move...

It's not that I couldn't buy the books I wanted from Amazon or wherever, it's the fact that I have no space to store them and the fact that I do not want to pay the enormous shipping costs involved when in a couple years' time I'll move out of here.

So it's with that mindset that I eventually landed on Doctorow's site and found his books, freely available for download in various formats. I've read some of his short stories before and liked them, so it wasn't a complete dive into the unknown.

Enough preliminaries, about the book itself: It was a fast and enjoyable read, but it's a very short book, not much happens, the characters are painted with the broadest of brushes, and sometimes Doctorow seems to be using his knowledge of technology to try to distract the reader from the fact that the plot makes no sense.

I'll still check out the rest of his stuff, given that it costs nothing, but I hope they turn out to be better.