Book club: A bit of Neal Stephenson

I just started reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which will probably take me most of the summer. He's been one of my favorite authors for a few years, since I started reading Quicksilver, the first book in his historical fiction series The Baroque Cycle. That probably wasn't the best place to start, being that it is somewhere around 1000 pages long.

I think either of his earlier works Snow Crash or Zodiac would be a better place to dive in, because they have his trademark clever ideas and humor in a much more straight-forward narrative. All his books have technical elements, and these are no exception. For example, Zodiac has a lot of bioengineering, which makes sense in its context of the main character trying to clean up/prevent illegal dumping in the Boston harbor. And Snow Crash has a ton of stuff on linguistics, information flow and ancient Sumerian texts.

Although at the local bookstore the other day I noticed that each volume The Baroque Cycle had been broken down into its separate parts (each novel has 3 parts, as I recall). So conceivably one could start with what got me hooked on Stephenson in the first place, that is the second part "King of the Vagabonds." It details one Jack Shaftoe, a kind of accidental hero of the underclass, as he rescues an astute prostitute from a Turkish harem during the fall of Constantinople and then travels back across Europe, all the while slowing going mad from syphilis. I don't want to spoil it, but his uninvited appearance at a royal ball in Paris is one of the funniest scenes I've ever read.

It's hard to classify Stephenson's books, being as that they are made up of so many disparate elements, and they have gotten progressively bigger and more ambitious. I think the number one thing that links them is the amazingly inventive ideas that they all contain. With that in mind, here's just some of the myraid from a few of his books that I have read. That I can remember off the top of my head.

Zodiac: The main character gets around primarily by the motorized inflatable boat that also constitutes the books title. He bikes around Boston at night wearing all black with a philosophy that all cars are trying to hit him. Also he is a big proponent of nitrous oxide, because it is a simple molecule and thus cannot do much damage.

Snow Crash: Set in a future where the US government has completely disintegrated as private industry has taken over and even living space has been franchised. Hyper-inflation has completely destroyed the value of the dollar so much so that the quadrillion-dollar-note (The Gipper) is the the standard small bill. Also the pizza delivery system is one of the most efficient organizations in the world, as it is run by the mafia.

Cryptonomicon: This is the first time Stephenson started writing historical figures into his narrative. For example, in an early chapter one of the main characters goes on a bike ride with a young Albert Einstein and Alan Turing through the pine barrens in New Jersey, and they see the Hindenburg explode. Later there is some hilarity involving a morphine-addicted Marine slapping "I shall return" bumper stickers on Japanese trucks at the behest of Douglass MacArthur.