More Opinions on Quicksilver
7 June 2004, terribly early in the morning
I loiter all day, every day. You may have noticed as much if you follow this blog closely, as all I post now are my not-quite-reviews of movies. Some people get frustrated with the lack of something to do—i.e Steph. I am quite the opposite, I enjoy having absolutely nothing to do, it is very relaxing.
I don’t do absolutely nothing of course. Besides all my movie watching, I have been reading Quicksilver, Neal Stephensons new book. I can’t say I like Quicksilver as much as Cryptonomicon, which I highly recommend, but I can say that Quicksilver is still quite good. The novel itself is split into three books. The second of the books has been quite funny so far, and a lot more enjoyable to read then the first book, though it features a lot less of the geekary Stephenson is famous for.
One thing that pisses me off is the vocabulary of the book. I won’t pretend to have a stellar vocabulary, but I can honestly say Stephenson is pulling words out of his ass. I’ve never had to look up words in a dictionary so often in all my life. I feel like he is just showing off his command of a thesaurus. The other problem I have with the book is that it is quite hard to keep track of the characters in the story, and what they have done so far. The story in Cryptonomicom jumped around a lot as well, but it was quite easy to keep track of who was who. In Quicksilver, characters may go by many different names, and several characters go by the same name. It makes for a lot of Confusion. Quicksilver is definitely a very challenging book to read.
I’m typing this up at 3:30 in the morning, because I feel like I need to insert a post that isn’t a movie review in between what will probably be another string of movie review posts.
Are you still reading Book 1 or are you onto the Confusion now?
by Dave on June 13 2004, 11:54 pm #
I’m still on Quicksilver. I’m reading it very slowly. Like a chapter before I go to bed every so often.
by ramanan on June 14 2004, 12:33 am #