Lexicon by Max Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I didn’t realize the “thriller about words” could be a genre, but I’m definitely on board. While most people recommend and remember Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” because of the cyber-punk and cyberspace elements, that book was really more about words and the idea of words as being able to have this viral programming effect on humans. For the nerd in your life who got into THAT aspect of “Snow Crash,” you’ll definitely want to recommend “Lexicon.”
It’s not a perfect book, but there’s a lot to love here. The author does a very clever bit of work with a dual narrative that moves around in time, but never actually states the time/date or any sort of “Then/Now” chapter notation. It’s up to you to figure out how the narrative pieces together, which you can do from context and feels incredibly rewarding as a result. I like it when books and authors treat their readers as very clever and able to figure things out; this is something else that author Max Barry and Neal Stephenson have in common and I approve.
The book is at its absolute best as it explores its ideas; what is a word, really? How much power do they have, in the literal sense of being able to reprogram human cognition. You’ll find yourself thinking about it long after you put the book down, which for me is always a plus; see the previous paragraph about authors and reader cleverness.
Where this book wanders away from being perfect is when it decides to be a thriller. Simply put, there are a few thriller tropes that really grate. We never really find out WHY the poets (the main organization) are amassing all of this power or why the main antagonist makes any of the choices that he/she (keeping it ambiguous to avoid spoilers) makes. We’re left to assume and thus the overarching plot has a bit of an “evil for the sake of evil” mastermind bit going on that’s at odds with how clever the rest of the storytelling is.
Regardless, this is a book that I can highly recommend, especially for people who like their fiction to feel as smart as they are.
Cynical Idealism 
“For the nerd in your life who got into THAT aspect of ‘Snow Crash,’ you’ll definitely want to recommend ‘Lexicon.'”
Hey! That’s me!
HOW HAVE WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT THIS PEOPLE ONLY EVER WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE SWORD FIGHTING OR THE MOTORCYCLE NUKE BUT ITS THE WORDS MAN ITS ALL ABOUT THE WORDS.
Ahem. I’m not sure what came over me just now.
I LITERALLY FORGOT ABOUT THAT OTHER NONSENSE! ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT SNOW CRASH WASN’T JUST ABOUT ANCIENT SUMERIAN WORD VIRUSES?!
Seriously, though, I’ll add this to my beer-list for you.