an abundance of katherines, Green. Yes. Differently annoying from looking for alaska, particularly in having to wait most of the book to find out why presented-as-smart kids are misusing a perfectly fine word. Green (or his editor) is docked points for “anyone except whom he’d already been.” Also, the misuse of “theorem” and the misspelling “discreet particle.”

looking for alaska, Green. Yes. I’m made suspicious when a character in a book is presented as a smart kid but doesn’t behave the way smart kids in my experience have behaved. Even if a person’s particular talent seems very limited in scope, part of being smart is to be curious about the things one runs across, so it strikes me as unrealistic when someone who is presented as knowing a specific thing about a vast array of people is simultaneously presented as being completely ignorant of geography. People come from places, and many people have references to those places in their names. A smart kid will have wondered “where is that?” The only conclusion I can reach, having finished the book after writing the rest of this paragraph, is that the character in question is not intended to be a smart kid. That and a couple other bits make me suspect that the author was not a smart kid, but it is at best perilous to infer much about the author from his work.
That nagging bit aside, the book did not make me wish I hadn’t read it. It’s very much a YA novel, with Consequences and Lessons, and Green does a reasonable job of it.

Spook Country, Gibson. Yes. It’s a little disappointing that Gibson has gone from being the prophet of cyberspace to being Tom Clancy, but his writing is still enjoyable enough. He has the mechanical good grace to use “whoever” when it’s called for (and when people who don’t understand the rules of the language would use “whomever”), and if his plots are adolescent fantasies (and therefore a bit masturbatory), the books themselves at least lack the technoporn quality of the actual Clancy.