The Diamond Age

Since I've been slogging through the Baroque Cycle for a few months, I thought I'd take a break and try out something a bit lighter. I started The Diamond Age a few weekends ago and somehow had finished it by the following weekend.

Woah. It's Stephenson Distilled. As I was reading I could pick out the various idiosyncrasies of his style. And it goes by quickly, since it's less than 1200 pages. After reading Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver in rapid succession, along with several of his other shorts, this was a facile read.

But the content is as deep as the book itself is simple. And it's one of the few times I really self-identified with one of the characters. I'm talking about actually seeing my life unfolded in the pages of a book. And since it's Stephenson, it's also my life unfolded in the pages of a book about my life unfolded in the pages of a book.
I was immobilized in bed for hours shredding through the story. It brought me back through most of my childhood and adulthood, and even to the point where my life diverged finally from the story in the book.

Stephenson writes amazing shit. The Diamond Age is not an exception. Cue jokes about me being an eight-year-old girl with a 200,000-strong army of mice at heart.