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I greatly dislike Snow Crash: it feels like slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief. However. There is no doubt in

I greatly dislike Snow Crash: it feels like slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief. However. There is no doubt in my mind that Snow Crash has the finest first chapter I have ever had the pleasure of reading. You should buy the book just for the first chapter.

pengaru 6y ago
> it feels like slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief You sure you're not confusing it with Anathem? SnowCrash was a quick read for me, but Anathem made me hate reading and I don't think I even finished it.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  I loved Anathem, one of the few books I can say I absolutely devoured. Reamde on the other hand...
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    Anathem was the last passable novel before Neal Stephenson started writing "stories" around a sci-fi concept, rather than writing stories. A throwback to Zodiac, perhaps. Snow Crash and Diamond Age were his best works.
    - AlisdairO 6y ago
      Diamond age was glorious (although I think possibly Stephenson's worst ratio of beginning:ending quality), but I adore Cryptonomicon.
      - dariusj18 6y ago
        I enjoyed the whole of the Baroque Cycle as well.
      - kadoban 6y ago
        Diamond Age has my favorite concepts of any of his books, but the plot is pretty forgettable to me. Like I can't even remember most of it and I've probably read that book 5 times. The characters are fairly weak as well.
    - Icathian 6y ago
      I tried several times but could never get through Diamond Age. Snow Crash is one of my all time favorites and Zodiac was stellar, but that one just never clicked for me.
  - LargeWu 6y ago
    I liked Reamde, but it's an atypical Stephenson book. Full of action, fast paced, pretty short on exposition, although there are some diversions about handguns and intercontinental aviation navigation.
- wcarey 6y ago
  How far into Anathem did you make it? Anathem has a glacial beginning - the introduction is perhaps 200 pages long. But once you've survived that and the plot starts, it's quite compelling and pays off the glacial introduction. That said, it took me three tries to make it through the introduction. World building a society of mathematician-monks on another planet is tough going indeed.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    It's funny, I had the opposite reaction. The first part was really a great coming-of-age story and was strangely comforting. The world is crazy, but there is a place for people who want to pursue knowledge. The second part felt like an interruption. I'm usually completely unable to and disinterested in guessing where a plot is going, but I could have summarized the second part without reading it and that made it drag (still decent, still fun at times, but I wish either the twists had been better or that the author had relied on them less).
    - wcarey 6y ago
      An interesting take for sure. I too read it as a coming of age story - also strangely comforting - but see the part after the plot proper begins as an allegorical coming of age story as well, recapitulating (and I think I can say this without spoiling the back half) the development of our understanding of mathematics and the natural world post-Newton. It's a bit like he transitions from a personal coming-of-age story to a societal coming of age story: what happens when you grow up and realize that the world is incomprehensibly weird?
      - jrumbut 6y ago
        That really reframed my whole understanding of the story, great!
      - aporetics 6y ago
        At the phrase “societal coming of age” I balked, but I guess the second half is putting the question “which society”, or rather which kind of society can inherit (that is, accept responsibility for) such knowledge? The grossest contrast is between the secular and mathic societies; but the remarkably well recreated dialectic between the Platonists and Sophists in the dinner conversation between the Incanters and Rhetors in the last Lucub... converging on Husserl and phenomenology...! that was golden (one of a few nuggets). Still I think the question of which society can “come of age” and inherit the world in its full, weird, complexity, is drawn back to the relationship between Orolo and Raz, because that is where the real spark of inspiration (and sacrifice, and fraternity) flies, and, improbably, catches fire.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  For what it's worth, when I first started Anathem, it was a slog and I put it down a little ways in. A few years later I tried it again and absolutely loved it. If you're a Stephenson fan, don't cross it off the list just yet.
- peteretep 6y ago
  Anathem I hated the first reading. I’ve now read it seven times, enjoying it more each time, taking time to try and understand it more and more each times. My most recent read of it was incredible, and it’s easily my favourite of his novels.
anigbrowl 6y ago
I'll see your Snow Crash opening chapter and raise you an Excession.
- brmgb 6y ago
  You can't compare Stephenson and Banks. Banks is actually a good writer. I don't really enjoy Stephenson's prose. It's often plodding, rarely beautiful. Thankfuly, apart from its lacklustre ending, Snow Crash largely compensates through sheer entertainability. It's unapologetically fun in a genre which tends to take itself far to seriously. In good hands, I really think it can make a very good show.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    Heh, sort of agree. It might well be enjoyable if played for laughs. The problem with Stephenson is I think a lot of people (not necessarily including Stephenson) take him far too seriously...
sideshowb 6y ago
It fits a pattern of great books that overdo some sort of theoretical exposition. I think I skimmed or skipped a good chunk of The language stuff in snow crash (actually I may have read it all I can't remember, but I thought it went on a bit) The conspiracy stuff in Foucault's pendulum The Talmud stuff in Unsong I enjoyed all of these a lot though, especially snow crash and unsong
- prepend 6y ago
  Brothers Karamazov spends a lot of time on serfs and Russian clergy.
slg 6y ago
> it feels like slogging through Leviticus I genuinely laughed out loud when the article called the book "accessible". I enjoyed the book much more than you did, but it is nearly 500 pages long and full of long, in depth, and dry discussions about a variety of obscure topics like linguistics and ancient Sumerian mythology. That isn't for everyone.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Compared to anything post-Cryptonomicon, it's incredibly accessible. The digressions into ancient sumerian mythology are broken up fairly well with action scenes. It's not like it spends 3 pages describing a technique for eating breakfast cereal...
  - Balgair 6y ago
    I literally bought 5 boxes of Capt'n'Crunch to try to figure out what the hell he was talking about. He spent so long trying to get us to grok the process and experience the joy too. I tried, Neil, I really did. But I came up with bupkiss. It just cuts the roof of your mouth, Neil. There is no magic in them. No joy, just oral soreness. Also, the card deck cypher is really cool, but when your little cousin comes over and then ruins the cypher to play solitaire, yeah, that sucks.
    - aporetics 6y ago
      That he got you to try it is perhaps the best praise you could give.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      Mostly nostalgia bait, they're little sugar bombs for kids... who go apeshit for anything sugar. Turns into a comfort food -- my dad still occasionally splurges on sugary breakfast cereal.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    Cryptonomicon’s the only one of his four books I’ve read that I thought held up for the whole length. Anathem was interesting but spent too much time treading water, then fizzled out. The Diamond Age was one of my favorite first thirds of a sci-fi book that ended up being one of the most frustrating books I’ve finished. I’ve rarely been angry at a book but that one did it, so, that’s something I guess. I’ve read an actual book of Sumerian texts in translation so my Can Tolerate Boring cred is legit, but the mythology sections of Snow Crash—which are a lot of the book—were a real slog. Cryptonomicon? Consistent and fine throughout, and even has a real ending that might have been thought out from near the beginning.
derekp7 6y ago
My biggest problem with Snow Crash was at the end of the book. The author has done this in other books too, where you have a very detailed story but then it feels like the end gets rushed. Kind of like another 200 pages of novel get squeezed down to 12 pages.
- sneak 6y ago
  This is absolutely par for the course for Stephenson. He's written at least 4 books like this, as far as I can tell. Seveneves in particular is 700 pages of incredible, next-level worldbuilding, then the potential for 3 more 300+ page volumes compressed into 180 pages. It's like at the 700 page mark the "wrap it up" light comes on, and he hastily bookends it.
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    Stephenson is great at starting stories. Arguably he does this several times in each book. He can't write endings for shit, though. (Every book of his that I've read - Anathem, Seveneves, Reamde, Cryptonomicon/Snow Crash/The Diamond Age, and more - all fail to come to a satisfactory ending. But I keep reading, because the rest of the books are good...)
    - jsolson 6y ago
      Cryptonomicon and Anathem get endings of a sort... later :)
      - heypete 6y ago
        Would you mind expanding on this? I've read both books and am curious what you mean.
        skilesare 6y ago
        I haven’t read anthem, but his latest is in the cryptonomicon universe....ties up a couple loose ends...or at least shows some repercussions.
ISL 6y ago
It is the very finest first chapter I've ever read. Any tv/film adaptation is playing with the highest possible difficulty score for its opening minutes. In fact, I'm not sure they could do better than acting out the entire first chapter with a voiceover to tie the transitions together.
jelling 6y ago
Iirc the first chapter was a short story that he later expanded. I enjoyed the rest Of Snow Crash (way back when) but found everything else he writes to be incredibly boring.
frosted-flakes 6y ago
I have similar feelings about the book. "an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief" is a good way of putting it. There's too much detail and too little explanation, and so I felt like I couldn't see the forest because the trees were in the way. Here's a HN comment I wrote shortly after reading it last year: > Snow Crash is so bizarre. It launches you straight into the story with no explanation, starting off with some crazy pizza delivery man in a rocket car with swords and an electric zapper thing for people who don't pay the bill. The whole book is like that--it never explains how, why, or when, leaving you to piece it all together yourself. The entire time I was reading it, I was waiting for a 30000 feet view of the world. But then it ended, never having fully explained itself. > I've never read anything else quite like it, and honestly don't know what I think of it. Are all of Neal Stephenson's books like that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704665
- ian-g 6y ago
  In case you haven't read anything else, and for other people here, yes his books are projects. I really liked Seveneves though. And The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. has been good so far!
  - jsolson 6y ago
    Interesting. I've loved most of Stephenson's books and Cryptonomicon easily holds the title of most re-read book in my collection. Seveneves, on the other hand, I absolutely loathed in basically every regard. My loathing for it makes it memorable enough to be my most hated book (there are plenty of books out there that are 'worse', but are also unmemorable -- Seveneves is viscerally memorable)
    - celticninja 6y ago
      the end of seveneves is what fucks it, it's a great book until the last third/quarter.
      - arethuza 6y ago
smcameron 6y ago
> slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief. Plus?
- SeanLuke 6y ago
  touche.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
The audiobook version of Chapter 1 is simply sublime. I can listen to it repeatedly and always laugh out loud and marvel at its mastery of language, emotion, and satire. It's as if Mark Twain took a time machine to the future and called you after lunch to tell you about it.

pengaru 6y ago

> it feels like slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief You sure you're not confusing it with Anathem? SnowCrash was a quick read for me, but Anathem made me hate reading and I don't think I even finished it.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
I loved Anathem, one of the few books I can say I absolutely devoured. Reamde on the other hand...
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  Anathem was the last passable novel before Neal Stephenson started writing "stories" around a sci-fi concept, rather than writing stories. A throwback to Zodiac, perhaps. Snow Crash and Diamond Age were his best works.
  - AlisdairO 6y ago
    Diamond age was glorious (although I think possibly Stephenson's worst ratio of beginning:ending quality), but I adore Cryptonomicon.
    - dariusj18 6y ago
      I enjoyed the whole of the Baroque Cycle as well.
    - kadoban 6y ago
      Diamond Age has my favorite concepts of any of his books, but the plot is pretty forgettable to me. Like I can't even remember most of it and I've probably read that book 5 times. The characters are fairly weak as well.
  - Icathian 6y ago
    I tried several times but could never get through Diamond Age. Snow Crash is one of my all time favorites and Zodiac was stellar, but that one just never clicked for me.
- LargeWu 6y ago
  I liked Reamde, but it's an atypical Stephenson book. Full of action, fast paced, pretty short on exposition, although there are some diversions about handguns and intercontinental aviation navigation.
wcarey 6y ago
How far into Anathem did you make it? Anathem has a glacial beginning - the introduction is perhaps 200 pages long. But once you've survived that and the plot starts, it's quite compelling and pays off the glacial introduction. That said, it took me three tries to make it through the introduction. World building a society of mathematician-monks on another planet is tough going indeed.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  It's funny, I had the opposite reaction. The first part was really a great coming-of-age story and was strangely comforting. The world is crazy, but there is a place for people who want to pursue knowledge. The second part felt like an interruption. I'm usually completely unable to and disinterested in guessing where a plot is going, but I could have summarized the second part without reading it and that made it drag (still decent, still fun at times, but I wish either the twists had been better or that the author had relied on them less).
  - wcarey 6y ago
    An interesting take for sure. I too read it as a coming of age story - also strangely comforting - but see the part after the plot proper begins as an allegorical coming of age story as well, recapitulating (and I think I can say this without spoiling the back half) the development of our understanding of mathematics and the natural world post-Newton. It's a bit like he transitions from a personal coming-of-age story to a societal coming of age story: what happens when you grow up and realize that the world is incomprehensibly weird?
    - jrumbut 6y ago
      That really reframed my whole understanding of the story, great!
    - aporetics 6y ago
      At the phrase “societal coming of age” I balked, but I guess the second half is putting the question “which society”, or rather which kind of society can inherit (that is, accept responsibility for) such knowledge? The grossest contrast is between the secular and mathic societies; but the remarkably well recreated dialectic between the Platonists and Sophists in the dinner conversation between the Incanters and Rhetors in the last Lucub... converging on Husserl and phenomenology...! that was golden (one of a few nuggets). Still I think the question of which society can “come of age” and inherit the world in its full, weird, complexity, is drawn back to the relationship between Orolo and Raz, because that is where the real spark of inspiration (and sacrifice, and fraternity) flies, and, improbably, catches fire.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
For what it's worth, when I first started Anathem, it was a slog and I put it down a little ways in. A few years later I tried it again and absolutely loved it. If you're a Stephenson fan, don't cross it off the list just yet.
peteretep 6y ago
Anathem I hated the first reading. I’ve now read it seven times, enjoying it more each time, taking time to try and understand it more and more each times. My most recent read of it was incredible, and it’s easily my favourite of his novels.

anigbrowl 6y ago

I'll see your Snow Crash opening chapter and raise you an Excession.

brmgb 6y ago
You can't compare Stephenson and Banks. Banks is actually a good writer. I don't really enjoy Stephenson's prose. It's often plodding, rarely beautiful. Thankfuly, apart from its lacklustre ending, Snow Crash largely compensates through sheer entertainability. It's unapologetically fun in a genre which tends to take itself far to seriously. In good hands, I really think it can make a very good show.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Heh, sort of agree. It might well be enjoyable if played for laughs. The problem with Stephenson is I think a lot of people (not necessarily including Stephenson) take him far too seriously...

sideshowb 6y ago

It fits a pattern of great books that overdo some sort of theoretical exposition. I think I skimmed or skipped a good chunk of The language stuff in snow crash (actually I may have read it all I can't remember, but I thought it went on a bit) The conspiracy stuff in Foucault's pendulum The Talmud stuff in Unsong I enjoyed all of these a lot though, especially snow crash and unsong

prepend 6y ago
Brothers Karamazov spends a lot of time on serfs and Russian clergy.

slg 6y ago

> it feels like slogging through Leviticus I genuinely laughed out loud when the article called the book "accessible". I enjoyed the book much more than you did, but it is nearly 500 pages long and full of long, in depth, and dry discussions about a variety of obscure topics like linguistics and ancient Sumerian mythology. That isn't for everyone.

aidenn0 6y ago
Compared to anything post-Cryptonomicon, it's incredibly accessible. The digressions into ancient sumerian mythology are broken up fairly well with action scenes. It's not like it spends 3 pages describing a technique for eating breakfast cereal...
- Balgair 6y ago
  I literally bought 5 boxes of Capt'n'Crunch to try to figure out what the hell he was talking about. He spent so long trying to get us to grok the process and experience the joy too. I tried, Neil, I really did. But I came up with bupkiss. It just cuts the roof of your mouth, Neil. There is no magic in them. No joy, just oral soreness. Also, the card deck cypher is really cool, but when your little cousin comes over and then ruins the cypher to play solitaire, yeah, that sucks.
  - aporetics 6y ago
    That he got you to try it is perhaps the best praise you could give.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Mostly nostalgia bait, they're little sugar bombs for kids... who go apeshit for anything sugar. Turns into a comfort food -- my dad still occasionally splurges on sugary breakfast cereal.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  Cryptonomicon’s the only one of his four books I’ve read that I thought held up for the whole length. Anathem was interesting but spent too much time treading water, then fizzled out. The Diamond Age was one of my favorite first thirds of a sci-fi book that ended up being one of the most frustrating books I’ve finished. I’ve rarely been angry at a book but that one did it, so, that’s something I guess. I’ve read an actual book of Sumerian texts in translation so my Can Tolerate Boring cred is legit, but the mythology sections of Snow Crash—which are a lot of the book—were a real slog. Cryptonomicon? Consistent and fine throughout, and even has a real ending that might have been thought out from near the beginning.

derekp7 6y ago

My biggest problem with Snow Crash was at the end of the book. The author has done this in other books too, where you have a very detailed story but then it feels like the end gets rushed. Kind of like another 200 pages of novel get squeezed down to 12 pages.

sneak 6y ago
This is absolutely par for the course for Stephenson. He's written at least 4 books like this, as far as I can tell. Seveneves in particular is 700 pages of incredible, next-level worldbuilding, then the potential for 3 more 300+ page volumes compressed into 180 pages. It's like at the 700 page mark the "wrap it up" light comes on, and he hastily bookends it.
- DuskStar 6y ago
  Stephenson is great at starting stories. Arguably he does this several times in each book. He can't write endings for shit, though. (Every book of his that I've read - Anathem, Seveneves, Reamde, Cryptonomicon/Snow Crash/The Diamond Age, and more - all fail to come to a satisfactory ending. But I keep reading, because the rest of the books are good...)
  - jsolson 6y ago
    Cryptonomicon and Anathem get endings of a sort... later :)
    - heypete 6y ago
      Would you mind expanding on this? I've read both books and am curious what you mean.
      - skilesare 6y ago
        I haven’t read anthem, but his latest is in the cryptonomicon universe....ties up a couple loose ends...or at least shows some repercussions.

ISL 6y ago

It is the very finest first chapter I've ever read. Any tv/film adaptation is playing with the highest possible difficulty score for its opening minutes. In fact, I'm not sure they could do better than acting out the entire first chapter with a voiceover to tie the transitions together.

jelling 6y ago

Iirc the first chapter was a short story that he later expanded. I enjoyed the rest Of Snow Crash (way back when) but found everything else he writes to be incredibly boring.

frosted-flakes 6y ago

I have similar feelings about the book. "an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief" is a good way of putting it. There's too much detail and too little explanation, and so I felt like I couldn't see the forest because the trees were in the way. Here's a HN comment I wrote shortly after reading it last year: > Snow Crash is so bizarre. It launches you straight into the story with no explanation, starting off with some crazy pizza delivery man in a rocket car with swords and an electric zapper thing for people who don't pay the bill. The whole book is like that--it never explains how, why, or when, leaving you to piece it all together yourself. The entire time I was reading it, I was waiting for a 30000 feet view of the world. But then it ended, never having fully explained itself. > I've never read anything else quite like it, and honestly don't know what I think of it. Are all of Neal Stephenson's books like that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704665

ian-g 6y ago
In case you haven't read anything else, and for other people here, yes his books are projects. I really liked Seveneves though. And The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. has been good so far!
- jsolson 6y ago
  Interesting. I've loved most of Stephenson's books and Cryptonomicon easily holds the title of most re-read book in my collection. Seveneves, on the other hand, I absolutely loathed in basically every regard. My loathing for it makes it memorable enough to be my most hated book (there are plenty of books out there that are 'worse', but are also unmemorable -- Seveneves is viscerally memorable)
  - celticninja 6y ago
    the end of seveneves is what fucks it, it's a great book until the last third/quarter.
    - arethuza 6y ago

smcameron 6y ago

> slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief. Plus?

SeanLuke 6y ago
touche.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

The audiobook version of Chapter 1 is simply sublime. I can listen to it repeatedly and always laugh out loud and marvel at its mastery of language, emotion, and satire. It's as if Mark Twain took a time machine to the future and called you after lunch to tell you about it.