Do you offer language skills courses for some of the odd and unusual languages spoken in foreign countries? Some screenfulls I encounter are made of words with too few vowels, crazy things things like bff, l8r, dk, and ttfn. Can you recommend a good LOLcats to English dictionary from the library? It might also help if you had a punctuation course. I learned a little in school, but we never went over college level punctuation like putting a parenthesis after a colon or semicolon. I guess what I'm asking for is a "learn to speak internet like someone who does speak internet" course.

I bought and read this book, based on the glowing reviews it's gotten. I really didn't like it at all and those reviews left a bad taste in my mouth. I should have waited for these pages to be released before plunking my money down. Sure reading in the third person is distracting but I was OK with it because I got the feeling he wanted it to read like an interactive fiction adventure. What killed the book for me were those crazy long sentences of techno babble. It isn't that they're not grammatically correct (I can't tell), but on pages 204-205 when you read a 107 word sentence followed by a 73 words sentence, the 37 word sentence that comes next feels short. I also didn't like the whale size red herrings and minor characters you can't tell apart from one another.

Not a horrible book, but Stross has written much better books than this. It's been way over hyped. There were some interesting thoughts in it, some great lines, and I do like Stross as an author. I would recommend waiting for the paperback or the creative commons version to be sure first.

This sounds a lot like Comac McCarthys On The Road. There was an apocalypse and there were cannibals. The father and son even ate peaches from a can.

NOTE: apostrophes and quotation marks removed from this post because McCarthy didn't see fit to use them either (whats up with that?).