Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone’s half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you’re sunk.

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson loves boats, that’s for sure. In my least generous mood I would call this novel the dry-run (har har because it all takes place in water and on boats) a kind of dry-run for both Cryptonomicon and a lot of Snow Crash. That’s not to say it’s a whole lot like either one of those per se. But the boats here remind me a lot of the ways in which boats play into both of those novels, and the narrator here reminds me […]

I’m Sure There Was a Plot, But I Couldn’t Find It

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

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I’ve had this book for ages, heard it was good and that it basically put Stephenson on the map, but I could not make it through to the end. I got to page 186 and stopped. It’s not that there was anything wrong with page 186; that was just where I’d finally had enough. Why? Because I cannot tell you what this book is about. I know what it’s supposed to be about, from reading the blurb on the back and other people’s reviews, but Stephenson […]

Flying

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

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I picked up Seveneves purely on the basis of seeing its opening line quoted on a blog: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” I mean…right?? Knowing nothing else about the book and never having read a Stephenson book before, I went into it expecting a disaster movie of a novel, some sort of alien encounter, or something equally odd and action-packed. I was not expecting a sprawling, meticulously researched saga spanning millennia. In fact, it’s a bit of an effort […]

The DODO Doorstopper

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‘My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or – let’s face it – Anno Domini) in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite fucking desperate to get out of here.’ Having never read anything by Nicole Galland before, I may be speculating, but her influence on Neal Stephenson’s infodump tendencies seems to be a positive […]

That time Neal Stephenson murdered the planet.

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No matter what you end up thinking of this book after you’re done, I think anyone who’s read it can agree that doing so is a capital ‘E’ Experience. I’ve only read one Neal Stephenson book before (Snow Crash) and I did NOT like it. So that, combined with the fact that this book both features the end of the world (which I try to avoid because it makes me a-scared) and an 800 plus page count. Surprisingly . . . I didn’t hate it. But there […]

I didn’t like it, and I feel really bad about that

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I tried really, really hard to like this book — after all, I sunk 48 hours of my life listening to it. And I’ve loved every other book I’ve read/listened to by Neal Stephenson. But in the end — I just couldn’t get into it. I finished it, but by the end it felt like a chore. “If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics — it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what […]



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