9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

Joker: “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

In an effort to conserve some cash, and also because I don’t really feel like trawling the used book stores (they all smell like cabbage and patchouli), I have been rereading my veritable warehouse of books.

This weekend I pulled out Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Diamond Age , along with, Snow Crash are two of the very best cyberpunk books that I have read in my life. But as I reading it again last night, and in a state of total retrospection of the books I have read as of late, I noticed that Neal Stephenson is one of those authors.

One of those. The ones that like to write to not only show that they have a good tale to tell, but also to show that their standard vocabulary is much broader than any of us mere mortals, and we better realize it soon because the next passage is going to leave you clueless. Personally I don’t mind it… but in comparison to many of the other authors I have read of late, Neal Stephenson is pretty much whacking a raging grammatical hard-on to his porn of thorough, and sometimes anachronistic, diction.

I swear I can almost visualize it. Which is sick. And kind of disturbing. But really explains the nightmare that is The Baroque Cycle, a series of his recent books that I can’t get into just because the language interferes.

I read once that the mark of great author is an author that becomes completely invisible to the reader. As the reader dives into the story, the story itself wraps around the reader’s consciousness, and the reader is no longer aware that they are reading a book, but taking part instead. The author has been abstracted completely from the mind of the audience and in turn, the story transcends the medium it is printed on. Stephenson’s narration at times becomes nothing but a string of verbiage. A good mind exercise, tell you the truth, but it has the negative effect of pulling you out of the story a bit.

Yeah, one of those.