The guys in the lab and I started a book club together and the first book we read was Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

Summary

The story follows Takeshi Kovacs, an ex-private military, now-turned-investigator hired to solve the mystery behind someone’s suicide (or murder?). It takes place in the future, where humans have the ability to upload our consciousness to chips called stacks. Since the mind can be separated from the body, bodies are referred to as sleeves. This system of switching sleeves and putting your stack in storage are key parts of this world, used in the criminal system, for fashion and as backup plans. As the story unfolds, we learn more about the world, about Takeshi and about the mysteries of the crime.

We are using a 2 part rating system to rate the books. We rate them based on enjoyment and quality. Enjoyment is how much we liked reading the book, quality refers to the objective characteristics of the book such as world-building, characters, pacing, etc. I gave this book a (7, 5).

Likes

I liked the world-building of the book. Our lab had many discussions about the implications of the stacks and sleeves. I liked the humour and the writing style. The fighting scenes were well described as well. I didn’t enjoy the pacing of the first half of the book, the second half flowed much better. Overall I enjoyed the book! I may give the rest of the series a shot one day.

Dislikes

Although the world was deep and led to many discussions, I found the characters hollow. It was hard to see what drove the characters and connect with them deeper. The author would share little bits of Kovacs’ past but not enough to get a meaningful understanding of his motivations. There were characters like Jimmy who made constant appearances but with no knowledge of who he was to Kovacs. I felt like this was the same with most of the characters. Because I couldn’t connect with the characters very much, it was hard to buy into the hook of the story until about Part 3. There were also a lot of sex scenes in the book. Not just a like “they had sex” and moved on, but a raunchy description of the act which would span half a chapter. Most of the time, those felt overwhelming and I felt like detracted from the book. I think they were included to play in the noir style of the book as the main character is the typical womanizer. I wasn’t a fan of it though.