Plowing through Snow Crash

I work in a place where the males outnumber the females, probably 4 to 1. Because of that, I get a lot of recommendations for things that aren’t exactly up my alley.

One recent rec is a book called Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. Total guy book. I should’ve known! Every single person who told me it was the best book ever was a guy. Never heard such a glowing rec from a girl (except maybe H.C. but I think she just said she’d read it). In fact, one of my female officemates noted how I was reading it. Her comment was, “It’s a little hard to get into.” It’s not, really, not if you like that sort of thing. Anything you’re not such a fan of can be hard to get into.

Snow Crash isn’t the usual type of book I like to read so it took me several weeks before I even cracked it open. (I’d gotten my copy from a co-worker who was very into it.) Several hours on an airplane proved a good incentive to get started. The style looked easy enough to read, yet I found myself going through the pages at an unusually slow pace. There was a lot going on - action, reflection, history, philosophy - all mashed up and thrown at me in somewhat manageable chunks. I say somewhat because I still had to go back and reread, to actually think as opposed to consume.

As always, the book got good about midway - good in the sense that I wanted to keep reading even though I’d just been on the plane for 5 hours, even if it was past midnight, even if I had to wake up to go to work in the next couple of hours. That kind of good.

I should be able to plow through the rest in two or three more BART rides. There’s something to be said about reading outside your usual books. For one, there’s the exposure to different ideas. For another, it’s cool to see how a different style of writing works. I know it’s good when it kind of infects me for a little while, casting an undertone to whatever I write. Cool stuff.

Random observation: I feel like these type of books tend to think of skateboarders as ultra-cool. That’s how they’re always portrayed: from K.T. the Kourier to even Tally of the young adult Uglies trilogy.