"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies"

My younger son gave me this book to read. It irritated me with lazy grammatical faults and sloppy writing - repeated words in sentences and short-hand sentence construction that often had me reading a sentence several times to make sense of it. 
Written in alternating sections dates 2006, 2032 and 1732 it took a long time before I remembered which characters were from 2006 and which from 2032. I preferred the slower style and descriptive passages in the 1732 chapters, and found the 2032 parts the most annoying, having many things have already proved out of date when we are only six years past the publication date of the book. 
Ian McDonald can construct plot and there were parts of the action which were exciting and encouraged one to read on, but on the whole I think I shall not go looking for more of his books, there being ones I far prefer to spend my time on, out there.