MY PLEASURE-READING has been somewhat constrained lately, as I’m reading a lot more for work. But I enjoyed Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon — a sort of cyber-noir story — very much, so I ordered the sequel, Broken Angel, though so far (I’m only about 50 pages in) it’s not quite as good. It’s also dedicated to John Pilger, though the bad guys are the U.N. — depicted as an institution run by greedy moneyed interests who foment violence for their own nefarious purposes. Not entirely implausible, actually. . . .