Jennifer Government (Max Barry)

This is an over-the-top cautionary tale of capitalizm (yes, that's how it's spelled here) gone mad. With few exceptions, most of the world has chosen to do away with practically every function of government, privatizing education, police, and so on. People are so identified with their corporate lives they take it as their last name: John Nike, for instance. Nothing is more important than corporate profits, and if a few teenagers need to be killed in order to increase sneaker sales, well, teenagers die every day for much worse reasons, so it's not a big deal. but Jennifer Government, one of the small number of people representing law and order, takes exception to that, and tries to fight against the worst corporate offenses. The characters are fairly two-dimensional, the plot at times unconvincing, but the story is entertaining enough to support its message, and I enjoyed finding out what would happen next.

The Dante Club (Matthew Pearl)

This is a creepy, atmospheric murder mystery set in Cambridge in 1865, as a body of famous poets led by Longfellow worked on the first American translation of Dante's Divine Commedy. A wave of particularly grotesque murders (described in vivid detail) begins, and it gradually becomes clear that the murders are someone's attempt to make the tortures of hell Dante described into reality. The novel is generally well-written, though it necessarily suffers from the overwrought language its characters use; while no doubt an accurate reflection of how men of letters talked at the time, it becomes tedious to read. The other issue I have with it is that there was not enough information for the reader to have discovered the killer before it is revealed. In general, though, the mystery held my interest.

For the Win (Cory Doctorow)

I didn't hate this book, but I gave up halfway through. It is about the gold farmers in online games - people, generally poor people in developing countries, who work long hours inside the games gathering treasure or leveling-up characters so that their bosses can sell them to rich, lazy players who don't want to work for their status. In the entire book (so far anyway) there is nobody we meet who is actually playing any of these games for fun. They are all either downtrodden, oppressed workers or cruel, tyrannical bosses. I know the book was written for a young-adult market, but even so this level of oversimplification was too much for me. That's not even to mention the frequent lengthy passages lecturing on economics, in the world and in the games. It is all one big sermon on the importance of unions, which is appropriate for Labor Day Weekend, I guess, but I've had enough now.