"The Raw Shark Texts"
by Steven Hall
Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Raw-Shark-Texts-Steven-Hall/dp/1847670245/
Reading history and reviews
Finished in 2007
I read this on a flight at the end of October to New Jersey, and in spite of its shortcomings I really enjoyed it. It reminded me a little of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. It's a glorious mess of a book that imagines a world in which abstract information can manifest itself in physical reality, often in a way that is also physically dangerous, and where books and tape recorders and filing cabinets can also be weapons, defence systems or prisons. It's also the first book I've seen with an endorsement printed on the spine. Although it felt like it had too many great ideas packed in together, so that frustratingly many of them weren't really explored or developed, a long time after reading it I'm still occasionally reflecting on it. I guess I'd call it an intelligent airport novel.