I raved a bit about a book called Popco [a] recently; calling it things like "a cross between Neal Stevenson (Cryptonomicon-era) and ChickLit" but about halfway through the book, the protagonist retreated to her bed, got ill, and the book never really recovered.

I like this style of writing; where you get information about interesting things you might not know about (toy research, homeopathy, cryptography) while characters grapple with similar problems to your own (motivation at work, inconclusive relationships, guilt). But the reveal was deeply disappointing; fight-club-lite politics and a bunch of ill-informed smoking vegan refuseniks eerily reminiscent of sixth form. And if there'e one thing I don't want to reminisce about, it's sixth form.

Still, it had diagrams and tables (yay!) and the homeopathy stuff was actually very interesting; I'd somehow missed the fact (while various people have been attempting to slather me with arnica or ram nux vomica down my throat) that it's a magical system with a whole bunch of bizarre and rather interesting systems, symptoms and rules. [b]

But, on the whole, it was essentially a book that wanted to move back to the country, wear peasant skirts and raise chickens. And, well, no.