Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.

Guess I couldn’t have chosen a better book to pick up after Pullman. Interestingly, it also has daemons (although of the geeky kind) and a knife that can all but cut atoms in half. It’s also the exact opposite of The Golden Compass, in that the writing is awesomely clever and funny (for the first half of the book, at least) and the story is mostly forgettable.

The real problem is that, while the depiction of a future bankrupt America is both creepy and hilarious, and the virtual reality — imagined in 1992! — is eerily reminiscent of Second Life (which is as much an achievement of the novel as it is a pathetic indictment of Lindenland, as it is more primitive and less interesting, fifteen years later), the second half of the story is mostly conveyed by long theological or technical monologues, or dialogues involving a virtual librarian; i.e., pages and pages of esoteric explanations, interesting for sure, but devoid of the humor that made the first chapters so fantastic.

Still recommended — and it’s a cornerstone of geek culture anyway.