Is it worth dealing with it being a YA novel?

oh totally imo

I don't know if I replenished my patience for YA yet 🙂

another one by Neal Stephenson that like a lot was "Anathem".

@UK0810AQ2 I don't remember it really reading as YA, personally. @U02CV2P4J6S do you have a pastable quote handy? NBD if not, I'll dig through my copy -- I last read it prior to being a Lisper, so that bit didn't stand out 🙂

I can say it is at ca 14h/18.5h into the audio book. The chapter starts with "From the primer: Princess Nells activities as the duchess of Turring.."

Cryptonomicon was my favorite by Neal Stephenson. Pretty weird/cool book

it's not YA at all

it's about a young girl, but it's pure Neal Stephenson: lots of digressions about technology, lots of world building, lots of sharp dialogue

Sorry, can someone expand "YA" for me?

"Young Adult", target audience / publishing category.

Yeah definitely not YA!

I dunno… most recent Stephenson that I've read has people doing things with Python scripts all the time. It reads like an unnecessary and gratuitous detail that it was all done in Python. I find it a bit annoying, from the perspective of the story

Lol i can understand how that’s annoying but it’s part of his style/schtick. Every book is full of little details like that. Cryptonomicon has that whole passage about making and eating a bowl of captain crunch cereal and the character imagining inventing a spoon to inject the milk into the spoon as it enters your mouth so the cereal doesn’t get soggy.

I vaguely recall this. Of course, not being American I had no idea what kind of cereal Captain Crunch was, so it all seemed a bit abstract. I imagined it might appeal to people who had grown up with it

Yeah he’s an odd writer for sure. I tend to like it but I get why his style doesn’t work for some.

The Diamond Age is one of my favorite books so I feel I should mention to prospective readers that towards the end there is an instance of sexual assault.

I had pushed that thought away

Right now, I am VERY slowly reading Seveneves

I was reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. and it was initially charming, but it kinda wore on me. I put it down and forgot to continue. I should finish it though!

I just get distracted with kids, household stuff, and… development!

The problem with SciFi is it tends to either parochialism or kitsch

And it's a shame because I love it, but it's hard to get right

Anathem was one of the best things I read in years

Things like contemporary and local cultural references (like captain crunch) tend to just fall flat for anyone outside the writer's cohort

> Cryptonomicon has that whole passage about making and eating a bowl of captain crunch cereal My wife’s absolute favorite passage in all of Stephenson 🙂 > Right now, I am VERY slowly reading Seveneves > I was reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Two of his weakest IMHO, especially D.O.D.O.

> Parochialism: a limited or narrow outlook, especially focused on a local area; narrow-mindedness. hey that’s a cool word. I’m surprised i didn’t know it

It's a Rich word 🙃

I'll add Stephenson to the list, see how I like it

For me the ones that really shine, in no particular order, are Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Snow Crash, and REAMDE.

And I got to read Snow Crash, because that's just criminal I neglected that cultural landmark

Snow Crash was great, but had the worst ending of a story ever 🙂

No spoilers please!

His endings are notoriously blunt, which he has gotten better at over the years

"earth" from snow crash was the inspiration for google earth

I don't even recall the details. I was just confused. Reread the end, and was still unsatisfied. I asked several friends, and they all said, “oh yeah. Terrible ending, but the book was still great!”

Anathem had the best ending I’ve seen from him

Come back after finishing the book, @UK0810AQ2 , and we can discuss his endings in finer detail lol

And I'll see your Snow Crash and raise by Malazan Book Of The Fallen

He’s usually a fun read, and definitely hits some sweet spots for the technically inclined (those of of my daughter calls “nerds”. Meaning me). I’m guessing his “fun” factor and not serious fiction is what made him appear more YA.

Personally, I love reading YA. But I'm also into fantasy and romance…. Preferably fantasy WITH romance 🙃

I won't lie and say I didn't enjoy Mistborn, but I can only take so much of mope-y teenagers Although it's good practice for when the kids grow up 😆

I liked the ending of snow crash 😛

I’m not one to be a good critic in this space. The last book that captivated me until the very end was An Introduction to Description Logic, by Baader, Horrocks, Lutz, and Sattler

What's wrong with that?

Not very “story” driven. The motivations of the characters were unclear 🤪

The last book I read was The Optimal Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Asperti. and the drawings I ended up making made me doubt my sanity

What if in technical books you're the protagonist?

For the record, here's the quote that triggered the thread: > she moved on to a castle that functioned according to rules written in a great book, in a peculiar language. Some pages of the book had been ripped out by the mysterious dark knight, and Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence. > (one of a sequence of puzzles in which the young protagonist discovers that various systems are Turing-equivalent)

> Neal Stephenson has talked about emacs and lisp elsewhere, he really gets it In that context it’s worth mentioning his lengthy standalone essay, “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line”, published in 1999 (& readable in full https://chrisabraham.com/lit/in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line-by-neal-stephenson). Parts of it are pretty dated now — heck, he spends part of it talking about BeOS — but it’s interesting and in parts (eg see screenshot) it’s laugh-out-loud funny 😁

> Neal Stephenson has talked about emacs and lisp elsewhere, he really gets it ... > In that context it’s worth mentioning his lengthy standalone essay, “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line”, published in 1999 I doffed my hat to these references in the customary apology post I wrote when I restarted blogging... https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/ 🙃