Herbert is great at setting up worlds with extreme climates and how humans will adapt to them but after the first book the stories start falling down.
My mom loves Eco but says he needs to be read in small doses so have some other thing to read when reading one of his books.
The bit about the chain is from Cryptonomicon. If I recall correctly, there’s also a three-page essay about how to eat breakfast cereal in it. But don’t let that dissuade you.
You could almost chalk this up as just a list of best sellers. The more widespread a book, the more people will abandon it.
This is what I was thinking. Plus a lot of them have been turned into movies so people might know how they end before they read the book. I don’t see how you put down Gone Girl or The Martian without knowing what happens.
Fall is on my library hold list. I’m hoping it’s as good as the synopses. It will be my first Stephenson.
OK, here is my excuse… if you believe in his premise then why read through his proof.
I’ve only got 14 on this list, I will say that I can’t imagine not finishing the ones I did read, nor can I imagine reading the ones that I didn’t.
Any of y’all Moby Dick doubters out there… it’s hilarious, you’re seriously missing out on one of the
funniest books ever.
Yeah, started off good enough. Who is John Galt? I dunno, who is it? 10 years to write, its starts to loose its hold around page 580… never finished it unlike The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, which took a year to read all 4 stories but never got bored as a young reader.
Stephenson’s The Baroque Saga was good, but would have been improved by losing several hundred pages, at least 100 per volume. sigh he has gotten “too big and important” to be edited, which means that his novels have gotten too big and important to edit.
DNF (did not finish) is a more popular shelf than Abanadoned on goodreads. fyi
I was referring to the fact that at some point, the text dissolves into illegible footnote gibberish, requiring the reader to distort themselves into a parallel dimension to read it. At least, that’s what I remember.
The Martian being on that list surprised me. It was such a page turner for me. Maybe people got turned off by the math? Or maybe it was the lack of a romance subplot? I don’t know.
The Casual Vacancy however is absolutely not a surprise. People were voracious for more Harry Potter and the author puts out a book about the people around small town politics in England? I actually thought it was a plea from J.K. Rowling for the fans to forget about her and let her live out the rest of her life without the constant weird fandom orbiting her every day.
I do not recommend it as your first foray into Stephenson. Better to try Snow Crash, or maybe Zodiac as your first try. I especially like The Diamond Age, but it’s a bit of a slog, which kind of describes everything the guy has ever written.
Catch-22 nearly the top of the list? Seriously, people?
“It was love at first sight.”
Finally got around to that recently. Did no one else notice that it’s pretty much the same thing as Ready Player One, except that the author is really smug about his knowledge of ancient Sumer rather than being obnoxiously smug about his knowledge of 80’s pop culture? The parallels are striking.
Not surprising at all, I’d say. It’s readable, and amusing enough at times, but someone hoping for something resembling a straightforward plot is in for a surprise.
No kidding. I think I devoured that book in one night. “Syndicate” is still the name of our high school gang/group and I’ve used the name Milo Minderbinder more than once as an online pseudonym.
I really liked Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Anathem, but I’ve tried three times to get through Quicksilver, and failed. Still on the fence about Reamde and Seveneves.
Stephenson may be a science fiction writer, but he can’t see the future.
Ready Player One, published August 16, 2011.
Snow Crash, published June, 1992.
Later in the works the data in as a narrative component a lot better. It stays pretty data dense, but stops being such massive table dumps.
I dragged my way through it convinced that there had to be a redeeming characteristic for a book that so many people claimed inspired them. There wasn’t, but I gave them a chance. Admittedly I was giving a lot of terrible ideas a chance at the time out of some badly warped marketplace of ideas sentiment.
I have read ten of these, not read six more, and the other 34 I have never even heard of.
Did you mean Capital in the Twenty-First Century? If so, do what I did and borrow or buy Pocket Piketty: A Handy Guide to Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Jesper Roine instead.
