Agent Palmer

Melanie McGrath’s Hard, Soft and Wet: Digital Generation Comes of Age is a memoir of sorts where she is hunting “down the future, starting with the everyday intimations of tomorrow — the games, gadgets, and consumer fads — that were already an invisible part of so many young lives and I would work my way up to the networks, which will, in their turn, become a mundane part of the lives of those children’s children, and perhaps also of my own children.”

From the dry desert of the African Sahara to the wet fields of Ireland, the crisp winters of New York City and Washington D.C. to the humidity of Miami, Len Deighton’s Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy is a global jaunt following the implications and repercussions of a defected Russian scientist named Bekuv, his wife, Major Mann, Red Bancroft, and our lead Frederick L. Antony.

I have a confession to make. When I took my first crack at Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, I didn’t get very far.

It was a suggested read from a friend, so I bought it. I read 35 pages and then, for some reason, never finished the book. Fast forward to this year: I read Microserfs, also by Douglas Coupland, and ended up falling in love with his writing style.