This is pretty much how I feel
Sep. 27th, 2011 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrellJesse the K sent me this review from the NY Times (warning: it has many spoilers, so don't read the rest of the review until after you read the book), and it perfectly describes how I've been wandering about trying to find a book which will be as satisfying as _Reamde_. I tried A. S. Byatt's _Ragnorok_, but that was a mistake: reading Byatt right after Stephenson feels like trying to share a space with a neat freak who keeps looking at your dinner and asking are you really going to eat that?
Reamde - By Neal Stephenson - Book Review - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/books/review/reamde-by-neal-stephenson-book-review.html?ref=review
Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk.
Reamde - By Neal Stephenson - Book Review - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/books/review/reamde-by-neal-stephenson-book-review.html?ref=review
Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk.
