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The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2), by Neal Stephenson

I have this weird relationship with Neal Stephenson. I mean, apart from getting our shirts made at the same tailor. I like some parts of his work. I really like a lot of the first 80% of Zodiac and Snow Crash. I like Cryptonomicon & friends less (about 30%), and Diamond Age least.

The thing is, Stephenson really likes to write, and that's cool. However, a lot of what he writes just isn't interesting. Thomas Pynchon, the author I'd probably say Stephenson is most trying to be, does this a bit, but his digressions are so much more enjoyable, because they tend to be so insane. I've gotten the feeling in the past that Stephenson doesn't have an editor. I remember Cryptonomicon especially had huge quantities of typographical errors, at a probability of about Num_page/2000. I.e., over about page 500, you had a 1/4 chance of seeing an error on any given page. It was as if he petered out and just sprinted to the end of the book.

The content of the end of his books lends support to this accusation. They tend to veer off into an unusual place like most pomo books tend to. I rant about this, so I'll spare you the usual babbling on this subject.

All that said, this was easily the best-edited book Stephenson has produced, from a typographical standpoint. There were a few errors, but I could deal with them without feeling as if I were reading a pre-release copy.

However, the content is still undisciplined and, honestly, uninvolving. The characters are flat and not developed well, and it feels very much like the middle book of a trilogy. This book is just a way of pushing the characters along until Interesting Things happen in the third act.

All of us have the idea that we're good at various things. Some of these things are accurate. I'm awesome at juggling flaming chainsaws.

Others are less accurate. For example, you probably think you're great in bed. You're not. She told me .

At some point, Neal Stephenson got the idea that he was good at written explanations of semi-complicated subjects. Whether it's cryptosystems or bills-of-exchange, he likes to drop a big turd of an explanation into each of his books. They are usually not long, perhaps 10-20 pages, but they're insipid. They overcomplicate, rather than elucidate, the issue, and there is very little color that improves the description above an encyclopedia entry.

If I were his editor, that's the first thing I'd cut. I could easily reduce The Confusion from 832 pages to about 400 by cutting out these little appendices (in the biological sense) and likewise removing useless description. In that case, it'd be a decent book.

As it is, wait for the paperback version, and read it over a boring weekend. Maybe even wait until book three is out, and read 1-3 in a long weekend. Then, perhaps, it won't feel like wasted time.