Straight up, I did not like this book.
It’s not quite worthy of the one star treatment, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because the actual construction of his sentences, the literal writing, is not bad. Second, because the underlying story remains one I think interesting to explore in book form. And third, because I truly believe that one star ratings should be reserved for books that really go beyond the pale in their awfulness, not just slapping that on there because I didn’t happen to like them.
I know Snow Crash belongs in this latter category, even though I do believe my criticisms of it are legitimate, because many, many of my friends (who are intelligent people with good taste) love this book. Sometimes books and readers just do not go together, for no explainable reason. The chemistry isn’t there*, and you can’t force it.
*What’s interesting about this is that sometimes you go back to a book you either loved or hated at one time, and the chemistry has changed, and so does your reaction to the book. Pride and Prejudice remains the single best example of this phenomenon for me. I hated that book the first three times I tried to read it. Found it utterly incomprehensible. Then I picked it back up years later for a class and fell instantly in love.
It also may be helpful to note that I read this book in audio form, and rather quickly came to the conclusion that the problems I had with it were aggravated by the process of listening. The story, which was coming across as disjointed and confusing, and which featured characters I did not connect with at all, felt even more distant and hard to connect to because I was listening to it rather than digesting the words with my eyeballs. (The narrator isn’t great, either, and the direction/sound production is super weird, with all these chimes and random vocalizations separating chapters and sections. The quality of the audio is pretty poor; it’s muddy and full of white noise. But the recording was made rather a long time ago, so I suppose that’s not really its fault.)
For me, though, this book lost me entirely in its execution. After the first three chapters, Stephenson had me hooked with interesting concepts and a world I felt he never fleshed out enough. I never cared about any of the characters or what was going on. Most of the book was dense in a not fun way, and confusing in a way that made me not care very much at all to try to unravel the webs it was spinning. Character relationships are weak and built on the thinnest of threads. Scenes end abruptly and there are almost no transitions. A large portion of the book relies on some super weird connections that Stephenson makes between ancient Sumerian languages, mythology, religion, computers, and viruses, and he doesn’t do a good enough job explaining it so that it becomes something plausible that might happen in the world he created. Believing the explanation of the main plot in this book as a reader felt to me like being asked to jump from street level to the top of a thirty story building. No fire escapes, no cars to jump from, no ladders or levers or those weird platforms painters and window cleaners use in the movies. And it was too much for me.
About twenty percent in to the book, I realized I wasn’t going to connect with it and just wanted it to be over already, but I pushed through, hoping things would change. And even if they didn’t, I don’t like not finishing books. So I sped up the speed of the audio to 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, until the narrator was speaking chipmunk gibberish. Even doing this*, it still took me almost two months to finish.
*The human brain is amazing. I can’t believe I could listen to that book at 2.5x speed and still understand every word.
I have been told that other Neal Stephenson books are much better and more accessible than this one. I do eventually plan on picking up more of his stuff, and I hope it’s just a case of wrong book, wrong reader and not wrong author, wrong reader. That would be sad. I hate missing out on a party, especially if it’s one full of nerds.
