Rhetoric and Treason

I made the fatal mistake of picking up Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver to take to Algebra with me last night to read. I'd forgotten how absolutely addicting he can be, in his own particular tangential long-winded pedantic pretentious sort of way.

(all of the above was a compliment, for some reason)

So now, of course, I'm 250 pages in and will probably have to read the entire trilogy over again.

Neal Stephenson, for anyone who doesn't know and cares to find out, was one of the begetters of the "cyberpunk" genre: aka lit for hardcore computer geeks. I bought his big breakthrough book, Cryptonomicon, after seeing it had circuit readouts in it. It's a beast of a book, full of math (delightful!) and WWII history (fun!) and in the middle of all of it, some crap about online banking security. I'm not kidding. This book spans three generations (it skips the middle one) of Waterhouses and Shaftoes and examines them in extremely intimate detail. And lots of computer stuff too.

The Baroque cycle deals with the same families, plus the Comstocks, at the time of the scientific revolution (1750sish). Plus a character who tends not to die, and thus is in both books at the exact same age. And then it's all wrapped up in Charles II era political intrigue, and the foundation of calculus, economics, piracy, slavery in all sorts of exotic places, alchemy, and of course there's a love story, the male part of which lacks half his penis due to an operation for syphilis which failed. It, too, is a beast of a trilogy.

I'd really like to lend my support to Neal Stephenson and say that if you'd like to keep dropping overly intellectual Waterhouses and overly dumbassed Shaftoes into any period in history you'd like to write about, I will always buy your books.

Of course he's written some complete shit too, but what's really nice is he admits it. His first book, called Big U, I believe, went out of print because it was so terrible. When he found out his fans were paying enormous sums of money to get their hands on copies, he had it rereleased. He said the only thing worse than people paying money for the book was people paying lots of money for the book. I read it. It was awful.

Speaking of pedantic and pretentious and possibly awful, does anyone want to tell me whether I should buy Mark Danielewski's new book? I read about 32 pages of it and can't decide if it's worth the narrative gimmicks.