I had high expectations from a bunch of friends recommending Snowcrash, but when I read it I found it to be so awful I couldn't even finish it. It was just so childish and stupid. I don't get why people like it.
Snow Crash is either an accidental or deliberate parody of cyberpunk. The main character is Hiro Protagonist. When he goes into a VR world and is "fighting" with a sword he's swinging a sword around wildly in the real world too, while around other people. And then in Diamond Age Stephenson [rot13]xvyyf gur zbfg plorechax punenpgre va gur svefg be frpbaq puncgre[/rot13].
When I read Snow Crash the first time it was back when cyberpunk was still a pretty hot style, and I was also reading a lot of Gibson and others. It fit well within that context. Then later I reread it and realized what I wrote above, it was parodying elements of the genre while creating almost a quintessentially action-adventure cyberpunk story with a programmer/pizza delivery driver hero. And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say
Thank you for commenting on Stephenson’s plot resolutions. I love his writing and his stories, but the end of his books are just so unfulfilling. Especially Anathem!
Of his books that I read, it is definitely the one that comes across as the most childish and stupid (with a few good ideas). His other books aren't like that.
I had trouble getting through them as well, but for other reasons. For Cryptonomicon it was his "let me prove how smart I am" diversions off the main story for dozens of pages at a time, and for Anathem it was an interesting idea told in a boring yet difficult-to-parse way, at least as far as I got.
The quality of the prose in those other two books seemed better, at least.
Big fan of PKD books, btw, although I think his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own (but they are quick to read as a result, I could knock one out in about 4-6 hours, usually). The ideas, dialogue, and often the endings make them all worth reading, though.
"his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own"
Dick is a champion of the underdog everyman. His protagonists tend to be humble repairmen and other "losers" in the lower stratum of society... I find those characters very human and relatable.
The other type of Dick protagonists are those who think they're on top of the world, until their world turns upside-down and so they get to experience being dragged through the mud.... usually finding out that what they thought was a perfect world was broken, hostile, and sometimes even evil.
His writing style is direct and economical. I really don't have a problem with it.
When I read Snow Crash the first time it was back when cyberpunk was still a pretty hot style, and I was also reading a lot of Gibson and others. It fit well within that context. Then later I reread it and realized what I wrote above, it was parodying elements of the genre while creating almost a quintessentially action-adventure cyberpunk story with a programmer/pizza delivery driver hero. And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say