‘My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or – let’s face it – Anno Domini) in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite fucking desperate to get out of here.’ Having never read anything by Nicole Galland before, I may be speculating, but her influence on Neal Stephenson’s infodump tendencies seems to be a positive […]
That time Neal Stephenson murdered the planet.
No matter what you end up thinking of this book after you’re done, I think anyone who’s read it can agree that doing so is a capital ‘E’ Experience. I’ve only read one Neal Stephenson book before (Snow Crash) and I did NOT like it. So that, combined with the fact that this book both features the end of the world (which I try to avoid because it makes me a-scared) and an 800 plus page count. Surprisingly . . . I didn’t hate it. But there […]
I didn’t like it, and I feel really bad about that
I tried really, really hard to like this book — after all, I sunk 48 hours of my life listening to it. And I’ve loved every other book I’ve read/listened to by Neal Stephenson. But in the end — I just couldn’t get into it. I finished it, but by the end it felt like a chore. “If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics — it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what […]
“Gold is the corpse of value…”
This book is a marathon, not a sprint. I listened to the audio version, which was something like 48 hours long. It did take about eight or nine hours to really grab my attention, but once it did, I was hooked! “Unfortunately, this category of secret is itself so secret that it’s very existence is secret, and he can’t actually reveal it to anyone.” Cryptonomicon takes place in two different eras, with a collection of kind of related people occupying each. In the 1940s, we […]