News of the Day

[offbalance]

I am SO proud of Phil Hughes. So, so very proud. I knew you could do it!! I had faith in you!! All those scoreless innings!!! And, you had lots of nice offensive support, too. That's what I'm talking about. I'm hoping that "Firewater" Chamberlain will get his act together tonight and we can show the world that home grown Yankee talent is the best there is.

In other news, I got an annoying work problem out of the way nice and early. This is, of course, after I got ELBOWED IN THE FACE on my way off the train this morning. It was an accident, not on purpose, and the woman looked genuinely horrified, but still, ow. My browbone is still sore.

I'm reading the new Dresden Files book Turn Coat (a birthday gift from teany & selftoken - THANK YOUU!!!). That's been really holding my interest better than Neal "Off the Rails" Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I don't get it. Snow Crash was SO brilliant, and it just feels like he's so busy playing with his proto-steampunk tropes that he has no concept of plot pacing. And don't get me wrong, the steampunk stuff is fun, but I'm still not drawn in. J claims there's a payoff, I may try to get through it after Dresden.

HIMYM and Gossip Girl were made of win this week, too.

Comments

[lulu-girl.livejournal.com]

I too loved Snow Crash. I have The Diamond Age somewhere in a pile at home, never got around to it. I'm kinda afraid...I don't want it to be icky.

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I was surprised. Snow Crash got down to business righ away, and Diamond is taking its sweet time to get anywhere.

[warmage.livejournal.com]

I just finished Grave Peril by virtue of having the good fortune to have come across the Wizard for Hire three-fer in my local dusty secondhand bookshop.

Talk about post-librum depression... I've got to go scare up the fourth one, stat.

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

They are marvelously addictive, and they get better with each book.
(and FWIW, Book #4 is awesome. Summer Knight is one of my favorites.)

[warmage.livejournal.com]

So I never caught (read: purposely avoided) the SciFi (I refuse to use that other name they have recently adopted) adaptation. Is it worth the effort?

[firynze.livejournal.com]

Stephenson is...well, schizophrenic, as far as I'm concerned. Snow Crash feels nothing like Diamond Age, which feels nothing like Cryptonomicon, which segued into the Baroque Trilogy which I totally couldn't read, and I haven't tried Anathem yet but I suspect it's going to be striking in another direction entirely.

I loved Diamond Age, but for its own crazy, disjointed, 18,000-narrative-threads self, rather than for being anything like Snow Crash. Of course, it might help that I read Diamond Age first...

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

The narrative threads are not the problem - Snow Crash had many as well, but they had plot. They were interesting. The stuff with the primer and all that is cute, but he's squandering too many opportunities for plot advancement or action in favor of going off on tangents. I shudder to think how bad this habit is in Cryptonomicon.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

You'll be surprised by how many of those tangents end up being less than tangential. It's not handled as deftly as in Snow Crash, but it's there.

[lemurtanis.livejournal.com]

I could make my normal Stephenson rant, in which I lament his inability to finish a damn book, his tendency to write multi-thousand page works that are incredibly boring for the first several hundred pages, etc etc.

But that wouldn't be helpful. :)

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

No, but it doesn't make it any less true.