17th century boy
I’m jealous of Jessica.
She’s currently reading through Neal Stephenson’s superb Baroque Cycle series of books. When she finishes one book, she can start straight into the next one.
When I finished reading Quicksilver, I had to endure an agonising wait until The Confusion came out. When I finished that, I had to suffer through another interlibrum until The System Of The World was released.
Now that I’ve finished all three books, I don’t know quite what to do with myself. They are such superb exemplars of imagination and language that they make other books seem pedestrian and amateurish by comparison.
Right now, based on some favourable reports, I’m reading a new science fiction novel. It’s just not doing it for me.
I read through the popular Eats, Shoots and Leaves which should have been the perfect book for an anally-retentive stickler such as I. I even found myself mentally correcting the book, altering sentences that ended with prepositions. It was an entertaining read until the last chapter when the author makes the fatal error of stating, "the internet is…" followed by ludicrous generalisations about all writing on the web.
Some people clearly haven’t quite got their heads around the sheer scale of the internet. Imagine reading a handful of books and using that as a basis to claim, "all books are like this". If only that were true. If only all books were on par with the Baroque Cycle.
In lieu of more books, I’ll have to content myself for now with reading interviews with Neal Stephenson.
Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 1:47pm
Illustrations
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