| > Are you looking to be delighted by words rather than ideas? Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit here, Possibly! Prose style is pretty important to me. On the other hand, that's not something I generally complain about with Stephenson. Even when he misfires, the result is usually entertaining. Being bland is a bigger sin, IMO, and not one he commits often. I think the two go hand-in-hand for me. Having both is best, but I'll take either. > but you seem you like your complex language constructs, so to speak? Hah, my writing style owes to more to me not taking the time to edit that I should. Also ADHD. Probably both. > English is a second language to me. I wonder if isn't also a factor. Hm. I don't know! I could see some of the sections being a real slog, though. > The ideas in Snow Crash where really the most important things.. next to brilliant writing style (the deliverator...). I love the collection of ideas, it was a fun bit of sci-fi! I just felt like it was missing something to really make it fit together better. I agree that the writing is a ton of fun in it too, I love the opening bit describing how the Uncle Enzo's Pizza company runs a whole battery of experiments to try and understand why people are so aggressive about late pizza. I think about this stretch and laugh very hard every once in a while: "... [Uncle Enzo's Pizza's researchers] studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn’t respond without committing a venial sin." |