Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #63

I finished reading Snow Crash last week. Really fun book. The book has a nice tempo, and doesn't really get boring at any point. Thinking about it, there's one slow point (the talk about the Sumerian language with the Librarian) and even that one goes by pretty fast. Which my impatient over-dopamined brain appreciates.

The world building is really fun, and keeps a nice balance between the overall humorous tone of the book, and much darker implications of how the world affects the people living in it. Like for example the dentata - it's used for a funny gag, but it's actually pretty dark that a teenager would have to use it, and they'd consider it fairly essential.

The dentata gag is also the only weird part of the book. You see it coming from a mile away, when Raven starts talking to her on the boat, and you realize they're going on a date - Chekov's gun and all that - but it's still fairly weird reading about a teenager fricking a much older guy. Although I think if I read the book as a teenager I'd have found it absolutely hilarious, because the gag is really fricking funny besides the age gap.

While the world building is stellar and the narrative style is good, I will say that I was kind of disappointed by the middle part of the plot - specifically the Sumerian part. The whole mind control thing didn't really do it for me. The rest of it was good though.

All in all: really good, I understand why Carmack said it inspired him (and a lot of other people).

I'm planning on finishing reading LotR now. I like it so far, but it's really really slow, and I dislike how The Two Towers is split up: I'd much prefer if the Frodo&Sam storyline was interweaved with the Rohan story, rather then them being sequential.